For some people, the goal of being on Twitter is to become popular. People chase the dream of being retweeted or followed by celebrities, or having a tweet go viral.
I have had a few tweets go viral over the years, but I wouldn’t say I am particularly proud of them:
But then, there are some I am proud of
However, no one ever tells you exactly what it’s like when you do have a tweet take off.
I recently tweeted this dumb ass tweet:
I saw this Vine show up in my feed and couldn’t stop laughing at it. I tweeted it out not thinking much of it, and expecting that the people who follow me who have seen me tweet about Guy Fieri before would like it.
Within 5 minutes, I knew something was up. My Tweetdeck crashed almost immediately, and did 5 more times that day. I missed important @ mentions because I couldn’t see anything. All I could see was stupid animated Guy frickin Fieri.
And it’s still happening. At a rate of about 1 engagement per minute, I’m still getting RTs, likes and replies. It has basically ruined Twitter for the better part of 5 days.
Here’s how it breaks down in Twitter’s Analytics:
My very dumb tweet has been seen by more people than some episodes of Fargo.
That’s ridiculous. Fargo is one of the best shows of the last decade, and my tweet was about a human porcupine.
Something else you’re not prepared for when that many people view your tweet is the sheer number of replies you get. Some of these were funny:
Some of them were hilarious:
… and some of them were controversial
I will say Lean Cuisine did not deny he was signing Lean Cuisines at the event
What did we learn from this tweet, which I will reiterate was not good?
People love anything with Guy Fieri.
I have posted a few Vines of clips from his show and had moderate success
https://vine.co/v/OVWnM2Ldavx/embedhttps://vine.co/v/OVW67julx1Y
But people also love to HATE Guy Fieri. Mostly the type of people who like to brag they don’t own a TV.
On day one, the location was identified as Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Lean Cuisine should ABSOLUTELY DO THIS ACTIVATION because people went APESHIT
My main takeaway is to never tweet about Guy Fieri for the foreseeable future because the damage to my timeline is too great.
The other takeaway for Lean Cuisine is to sign Guy Fieri up for a contract IMMEDIATELY, even if it means front row seats to a Christian Audigier show in LA. I’m sure if you lead with telling him he gets to toss things at people, he’d be all in for a world tour.