A Tweet goes Viral

Yesterday morning, when newspapers worldwide covered the shut-down of the MasterCard website by the hacker group "anon_operation", I tweeted:

This Tweet went viral, got 321 RTs and >100 old RTs and mentions - was translated to Spanish, Japanese, German - and for 1-10 hours, this tweet was globally top in the Twitter search for MasterCard, anon_operation, Wikileaks, "freedom of expression", and even "priceless" and "everything else"

If I look at the @Twittercharts of the last 8 months, it looks like there was never a tweet in that time coming close to these numbers of RTs - at least by the Swiss private accounts included in the charts (which are mainly German accounts of course with a much smaller potential audience)

I discovered the quote the previous night & retweeted it:

I was following the story around anon_operation: a hacker network shutting down postfinance, mastercard, visa and a couple more as a "pay-back" DDOS for wikileaks. A lot of the coordination of their actions happened on Twitter, and I was surprised to see, that the account was not closed earlyer. The account grew to 22'100 followers with >100 new followers per minute (1am, when I checked), and was finally shut down (ca 1.30am).

The tweet was taken up by a few of my Asian friends - but as it was 1am, it didnt get much of RTs. The next morning, I Tweeted it again for my Swiss friends, who may not have seen my late night tweet - I didn't mention the source anymore, as it was a rather 'obscure' account (no name, no bio, no url) - and anyone could find out the source, as it was the previous tweet in my timeline.

I hoped for some reaction - but what happened then took me by surprise: When I checked next time, the tweet had almost 50 RTs already, more than any of my previous tweets ever got! -

@Palsule mentioned later, that there was a previous top tweet, where @missvee79 probably had it from:

Why did it go viral?

As @RetoHartinger mentions in his blog post: the best 'ingredients' for a message to go viral are: irony & 'hot news' (by the way: for examples, see his personal Facebook profile! - he masters it well) -

I could add two more factors, which are crucial for a good tweet:

Simplicity - and this is the great power of Twitter & its limitations to 140 characters. Many tweets are read by hundreds, maybe thousands of people, and it is worth to spend some time on the right "design" of the tweet. With every additional character added, you potentially lose readers - and with ever 'hot' keywords, you win a few. All three words "Wikileaks", "MasterCard" and "Anon_operation" were high search terms that day - and the tweet was minimized to the essential - If I would have started my tweet by "I read yesterday ..." or even "RT" and some obscure handle, it would probably not have gone viral -

Timing is another crucial factor, especially on Twitter. The best time to tweet something for Europe & Asia is around 9am - for the US, it may be 2pm CET - weekdays only, of course. I re-tweeted the original tweet at 1 am in the morning. As Twitter is very short lived, it got notice only by a few people in Asia. When I tweeted the main tweet however, it was 9am in Europe - and it got picked up in Europe & Asia quickly.

The first 200 RTs came in the first 2.5 hours - and after that, it slowed down heavily (in the following 22 hours, 121 more).