As I’m writing this blog post, I have thousands of people liking, sharing, and quoting me on Twitter. And this whole thing was totally planned. Before I posted my tweet, I knew exactly that this could happen. And it did.
That’s not to say that if you were to replicate the strategy that I’m about to outline you will always go viral on Twitter… There is a certain degree of fortune or just pure dumb luck involved as well. But nevertheless, if you repeat this strategy often enough, you will significantly reduce the amount of luck needed to go viral on Twitter.
Here’s How It Went Down
Yesterday morning, I woke up and listened to a debate between Erik Voorhees (Bitcoin maximalist) and Peter Schiff (dinosauric gold defender). It’s a really funny one that I encourage everyone to watch if you’re into economics and investing. But, nevertheless, there’s a segment in this debate in which Voorhees outlines why fiat money - EUR, USD, etc. - is bad money. The clip lasts about three minutes, and it is absolutely fantastic. It’s a masterclass on how to be insightful, entertaining, and eloquent.
When I was listening to it, I knew that it’s a three-minute clip that anyone with no knowledge of economics should watch, as it could open their eyes about the irregularities and injustices around the currencies that we citizens use to operate amongst each other.
And so, the plan was clear. I would grab that three-minute clip, find a way of adding captions, as I knew that these make a big difference to enticing people to watch a video on social media. And then I would have to feed a little bit of Erik Voorhees’ ego by praising him on Twitter and hope that he would share my Tweet.
Early this morning, I asked a friend of mine who happens to be a video editor which tool he was using to add captions on our social media shorts. He sent me a link to a tool called veed.io, which works pretty well. I signed up for a free account and figured out how to add captions to the three-minute clip. In fact, veed.io did it all by itself. Although it wanted me to pay 30 bucks to get rid of their watermark on the video. I didn’t; I was just playing with this idea, I wasn’t sure if it was going to work yet…
But… It did. It did take me 10 hours for Erik to notice my tweet, but once he did and he hit that RT button… Madness rolled in. And nobody seemed to care about the watermark.
I’ve had accounts with half a million followers like and share my tweet. I’ve been quoted over 80 times, had over 600 retweets, gathered over 200,000 impressions, and over 600 people have bookmarked it to watch it later.
Oh, and all of this without paying for Twitter Blue or anything like that.
Update: if you head over to my profile now, yes, you will see that I am currently paying for it. But at the time, there was no blue tick by my name.
Like I said, I’m not saying that this strategy will always work for you. There are some things that you can definitely do to try to have the odds in your favor though. For example…
Don’t try doing this with Beyonce. Or Madonna. Or Barack Obama. I just don’t think they’ll ever see your tweet.
Find an influencer - who, by the way, doesn’t need to have millions of followers - in your space who you think manages their own Twitter account and who likes to spend some time on Twitter. Praise their persona, feed their ego and share value to increase the chances of them giving you an RT!
