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RSSHow to write a viral tweet.
Oct 05
During a trip to Seattle last weekend, the power suddenly went out on Sunday night. We looked outside the window of the apartment and saw all the other buildings dark too.
Plunged back to the stone age, we had no way to get any information about the situation. No TV news, no internet, no land line. I did have an iPhone, but the power outage was too recent and too local to be on any of the mobile news websites.
At a loss, I considered my Twitter app. I use Twitter occasionally, but I continue to be skeptical about its overall usefulness. But here was a situation tailor made to show off the strengths of the medium!
Using searches for tweets that contained “power outage” and “Queen Anne” (the neighborhood in Seattle where we were staying) along with searches filtered by proximity, I was able to get a realtime stream of comments from others nearby who were experiencing the same thing. I found out that the power company was just becoming aware of the issue, and that there was no ETA for a resolution. I also saw tweets from the local news stations that were taking this news and retweeting it. I even had one of my tweets retweeted a few times.
If you know what retweeting is, please roll your eyes *now* and proceed to the next paragraph. Otherwise: retweeting is when others who read your tweet reshare it with the Twittersphere (and more specifically, those who follow them). This behavior, when repeated, can lead to a viral spread of your original message.
This was my first time being retweeted, and it was really fun to see how people commented on my message as they forwarded it on. Based on my experience, here are a few learnings on how to get retweeted:
Useful tweets articulately impart unprecedented information. Be clear and intelligent in what you write (a useful strategy for life in general, of course). Your at an advantage if your tweet contains up-to-date and breaking information, and possibly your take on it. The idea here is to convey information that people will want to relay instead of rewriting it or tweeting their own take on the event.
For example, when Michael Jackson died, the Twittersphere was flooded. Retweeting was probably much less likely in this case, because everyone was more concerned with tweeting their personal feelings about Michael Jackson and his music.
Limit your tweets to ~100 characters. The maximum tweet is 140 characters, but if you want to be retweeted you’ll want to keep it shorter. Why? When someone retweets your message, your original tweet will be repeated along with an extra 4 characters in the message to call this out as a retweet (“ RT”), as well as a repeat of your user name preceded by an “@” to indicate the source. Assuming you also want to give your retweeters some space to put in their own commentary, you’ll want to keep closer to the 100 character mark to avoid them having to truncate or edit your original tweet.
As our power outage in Seattle cleared up, we were able to see the resolution in real time as those who were getting power back tweeted about it. This was very valuable information since we were hearing nothing from the power company or the news stations.
All in all, it was a shining moment for Twitter, and I look forward to the next disaster when I can use it. Well, you know what I mean :)