I’ve been on Twitter since 2009 and I’ve gone viral twice in all that time. I have literally no idea why either of these blew up, but I thought it might be amusing to keep them in one place for posterity. Here’s the first one:
At the time of writing, this has been seen by over 2 million Twitter users. Mad. Anyway, here are a couple of blog posts about how it happened.
And here’s the second one, which as far as I can tell was largely ignored in the UK – at least at first – but somehow went big in Latin America:
At the time of writing, only 400000 users have seen this one, so it’s got a little way to go to catch up with its crypto chum. Still crazy, though. And in answer to your inevitable question, yes I did get a few more subscribers to my podcast as a result and I also think there was a hint of an uptick in sales of at least three of my books.
The weirdest thing about it was the way it kept ticking over all through Sunday July 11th, right up until the Euros 2020 penalty shoot-out, when it temporarily stopped being retweeted or liked, and it came to a grinding halt. Just like any virus, really.
This next one didn’t actually go viral, but it did get mentioned in the Indy100 list of 13 of the best memes about Tory MPs submitting no confidence letters to Sir Graham Brady. I actually did a whole sequence of these but for some reason failed to thread them properly. Never mind.