How I wrote a tweet that got 60K retweets in 48 hours.
Two days ago, I sent out a tweet that has been retweeted more than 60,000 times. It received 170,000 likes and about 2,700 comments. And counting; while typing this post, I had to update the numbers.
So what happened? On Thursday, I walked in the beautiful dunes and forests on my island, and when I got home, I made a two-minute video of the stunning nature, ponies, deer, and Scottish Highlanders that I had seen. I made sure the video was no longer than 140 seconds so that I could post it on Twitter, and I also posted it on my YouTube channel, which is the best format to paste into my newsletter. This is the video:
Then I wrote a short article about the importance of spending time in nature and wrote about my 500-mile pilgrimage walk that I made this summer from France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
That train of thought brought me to Vincent van Gogh’s quote you have likely read before: “If one truly loves nature, one finds beauty everywhere.” So first, I checked if he really ever wrote this (he did), and then I wanted to end the article with a Van Gogh painting.
It was almost an afterthought, and I quickly searched and found an optical illusion where you have to stare at a moving pattern of black and white lines, and then you look at Van Gogh’s famous “Starry Night.” For most people, the spectacular result is that his painting seems to really come alive.
But I had some technical problems downloading the video, and therefore I found a quick fix by putting the image in a tweet and then putting the tweet in my article. It was an uncommon workaround, fast but not very pretty. It was close to midnight by that time, and I just wanted to get the article out.
To my surprise, just minutes later, when I pasted the tweet into the article, the tweet had already received more than 500 retweets. And that number was about 1,500 when I posted the article.
So what makes a tweet go viral? A few thoughts, based not only on this experience but on 12 years of being daily active on Twitter (@alex_verbeek) on an account that has grown to 300,000 followers.
- A lousy tweet will never go viral, but a good tweet may or may not go viral.
Last year, I tweeted a short video that received over 10,000 retweets. I posted the same tweet again a few months later, and it received only about a hundred retweets. You just have to be lucky that a few big accounts pick up your tweet soon after you post it.
But you can increase the chances of your tweet going viral:
2. Don’t use hashtags
As you can see on my account, I sometimes use a lot of hashtags. The advantage is that people who follow the issues I am mostly tweeting about can find my tweets and, thus, my account. However, it makes tweets less attractive and less readable. So I usually do use them for a tweet on a technical issue (#wastewater) or to reach a community (#climatecrisis), but I don’t use them for a catchy video.
3. Ask for a retweet (or don’t)
This is tricky: people usually don’t like it if you ask for retweets, so I don’t do this too often. But here, I changed the wording and asked readers to use the retweet button to confirm that the illusion worked for them. So it changed the retweet button into a yes/no question.
4. Make it a challenge
This follows my previous point. As a reader, you don’t want to fail when being asked something. Looking back now, I believe that the more retweets the tweet received, the bigger the feeling may have been of being left out from a large group of successful tweeps that saw the stars move. It seems that social media psychology was at work.
5. Use a catchy video
This video was catchy. It was colorful, contained an element of recognition (the Starry Night), and there was the intriguing movement of the black and white lines. Make sure your video instantly plays instead of adding a YouTube link. Twitter and the tweeps reading your tweet don’t want to switch to another platform to see your video.
If you are not on Twitter, this is another version of the same the video (just to prove the point that I also don’t want you to leave this Medium article):
6. Send out your tweet at the right moment.
I sent out my tweet at midnight in Europe on Thursday night. But since most of my followers live in the U.S., they received it between 3 and 6 p.m. on Thursday afternoon. That seems to be a good moment to post a potential viral tweet. A Dutch Twitter friend with a hugely popular account with viral videos told me he never tweets before America wakes up.
A last thought to share
Then there is one more thought to share: is it relevant that a tweet goes viral? Some of the best tweets I have read only received a few retweets, and some of the best accounts I follow have only a few hundred followers.
It is not all about numbers; there is so much to learn and so many valuable connections to make that going viral shouldn’t be your priority. My TEDx talk has been retweeted some 2,500 times, far less than the 60K of the Van Gogh tweet, but that is much more valuable for me than the retweets of the Starry Night image. So it shouldn’t be about numbers.
However, many more people read my article and saw my video thanks to this tweet, and I gained hundreds of new Twitter followers and dozens of new followers on my newsletter. So perhaps it is safe to say that although social media shouldn’t be about going viral, it is fun to experience these numbers once in a while, and I like the idea that this tweet was enjoyed by so many.
I hope these thoughts will help you while producing your social media content. Please reply in the comments if you have other ideas or experiences that may help other readers compose their tweets and posts on other social media.
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