I have to admit that I am really surprised that I have, naturally, over sixteen thousand tweets and retweets of one of my blog posts. Take a look at the stats on this blog post of mine:
I say, “naturally” because I honestly didn’t do anything to get these extra tweets. There are things you can do to get tweets unnaturally, such as buying tweets on sites like Fiverr.com and soforth. There are “services” where you can literally buy tweets or retweets. But that’s not what happened here.
Back in April 2014 I posted this blog post with the list of top 100 influencers on Twitter because it was a list put together by Business Insider. I had nothing to do with the list, but just thought that it was a great list–so I posted about it, and linked to it, at the bottom. In fact, I even mentioned Business Insider towards the beginning of the post.
But, someone decided to tweet a link to the post about 2 months after the post was originally posted. The list is still valid, and all those people on Twitter are still influencers. Just goes to show you that you never know when one of your blog posts is going to “go viral” or even when a Tweet can get retweeted a lot of times.
I’m not surprised, if I really think about it, why this particular post now has over 16 thousand tweets/retweets. It’s almost the “perfect post”:
– the post appeals to influencers
– the post is a list, and mentions influencers and their Twitter handles
– the post is something that an influencer is proud of
– the post is something that is very “tweetable” or “retweetable”
– the post has a great headline
But, probably most importantly, the post has the list, but then links out to the original list at the bottom. People don’t read full posts. They read the headlines and then don’t realize that it’s just reposted from elsewhere. Nonetheless, we are all inevitable lazy and don’t scroll down to the bottom of a post. If that were the case, then we would be tweeting the original list, not this particular one that I posted. You know, the whole “above the fold” thing, where typical users don’t scroll down much.