Going Viral

I went viral on Twitter for the first time this week. Being a new experience for me, I thought I’d blog about it since some of the behind-the-scenes numbers surprised me. First of all, I’ll admit that I didn’t anticipate this particular post being any more popular than my typical tweets. I’d like to think most of my tweets are interesting and/or witty, but frankly, not a lot of others seem to think so. I only have a few hundred followers and most of my tweets don’t get more than one or two retweets or likes. This isn’t to say that I’m looking for pity on that front, just setting the stage for how unusual this viral experience was for me.

Unlike a lot of my indie author peers, I do not tweet advertisements for my book. I’ve always found that practice both annoying and counterproductive. Why would people buy my book if I felt I had to spam them with pleas to do so? I figure I’ll post stuff that I believe is entertaining and those of like minds will eventually find it and perhaps consider buying my book for its potential entertainment value as well. My low sales volume probably suggests this is a poor strategy, but nevertheless, I’ve now properly set the stage for what happened Sunday night.

Like many people, I’m a fan of Game of Thrones. And like most of the audience, I thought this weekend’s episode “The Door” was the best of the season so far. The fate of fan favorite character, Hodor, was both devastating and amazingly well plotted. After watching the show on DVR, I posted a quip about that fate at about 1 AM. Given my small audience and the late hour, I didn’t expect much attention. As usual, I was just posting my thoughts on something I enjoy.

The tweet blew up immediately. The second I posted it, retweets and likes started racking up. The numbers spun upward so quickly, it reminded me of watching the price meter on a gas pump. By the time I went to bed 90 minutes later, it had been seen over 25,000 times. As of this writing, it’s been viewed a whopping 44,997 times. For a guy with just 336 followers when I posted the viral tweet, that’s pretty impressive.

But that’s not the main gist of this blog post. What I wanted to illuminate is just what those 45K views means in terms of real impact. As you can see in the screen capture above, although 45K people saw the tweet, less than 4,000 clicked on it. So I “engaged” less than 10% of those that viewed it. Out of those 3,865 people, 520 “liked” it and 265 retweeted it. More importantly, only 72 of the engaged viewers clicked my profile. This means just 0.16% of the people that saw my viral tweet were actually interested in who posted it. Finally, there was no increase in my book sales or downloads, meaning none of those 72 people were intrigued enough by my profile and other tweets to decide they wanted to read any of my work. If there’s a silver lining in these numbers, it’s that I did gain six new followers since the tweet. That’s 1.75% follower growth.

All told this news is obviously disheartening, but I still found it insightful and thought some of you might too. Going viral definitely doesn’t mean immediate success. It’s just one more step toward finding your true audience.