I’ve been working with digital marketing for 9 years, and as I helped pretty successful content gain the light, I understood how hard it is to go viral. But sometimes I even made it happen, but never the same way it happened to me on Saturday.
After a few years living in Canada, I realized how people called this meme “math lady”. Most people outside of Brazil have no idea who she is and some even think she is Julia Roberts (!). Even Google brings Julia if you search for the meme.
Share new information
But in fact, she is a very successful Brazilian soap opera actor called Renata Sorrah. On May 29th she attended a Brazilian protest against president Bolsonaro and when I saw her picture, I decided it was time to tell that to the world and share some “meme knowledge” on Twitter.ย
The tweet was published at the end of the day to my 15 followers.
24 hours later, the tweet already had 2 million impressions and more than 350k engagements.
48 hours later and the numbers are impressive:
- 3.7 million impressions
- 636k engagements
- 96k likes
- 13.5 shares
- 2k clicks on the hashtag
- 1,800% followers growth
The tweet got so much attention that inspired an article on Buzzfeed Brazil.
Use results to gather insights
And here’s what I’ve learned from all those big numbers and interactions (yes, I’ve read them all):
- Most people who comment, come back at least once if you interact with them
- People will always find a way to fight
- But some will defend you just because they agree with what you said
- Fancams will take the world
- Spam is inevitable
- And so is a screenshot that will take your post to other social media, like Facebook and Instagram (and that’s when you start to lose track of your post’s reach)
- People who come back more than once are most likely to become followers
- Most interactions are with people just tagging each other
- Some people may get attached to your comment and interact with many, many comments
- If you keep replying and interacting with people, you will be helping the algorithm do its job
- If you pay close attention to what people are saying, you might find enough content for other viral tweets
Expand your content
And that’s what I did. I listened, and with the information I got from people’s comment on the original viral tweet, I was able to craf a second one,which also had pretty impressive numbers:
- 1.4 million impressions
- 350k engagements
- 27k likes
- 3.5k retweets
Could I map out the path for a viral tweet? Maybe.
- Memes
- New information
- A controversy of any sort
- Perfect timing
But how do you know what is the perfect timing? You really don’t.
And there you have it.
