Monday, March 6, 2023

This Researcher Claims He Cracked The Code To Making Tweets Go Viral By Observing The App’s ‘For You’ Algorithm

A couple of months back, Ryan Broderick, a writer and researcher who claims to work online on a chronic basis noticed something interesting about Twitter.

He says that there was a clear engagement linked to his tweets and one specific one had to do with the saying, ‘fell off a cliff’.

Moreover, he shared with the world how he had his usual engagement on the app, and with 60,000 followers, they adored sending reactions whenever he posted something.

On an average basis, a man named Broderick says he loves to talk about the web in his newsletter which is dubbed Garbage Day. And he’d get around a few hundred to 1,000 retweets across his posts in a week’s time or similarly seen every alternative week. And it’s not something new, it was like that for a few years.

He started to write again and soon, his work got recognition and a feature across Substack. Now, he’s working as one of Buzzfeed’s top reporters but then in 2020, he was terminated from his job for engaging in plagiarism. But he refused to comment on that news.


He says that figures and stats aren’t something that he enjoys speaking about a lot as he dubs them lame. But when Elon Musk bought Twitter, he saw how his retweets fell to just 5 on every tweet. And if he was really giving it a push, it probably reached 10.

In the same way, Musk lamented more about his engagement and was believed to have fired one of his workers over it.

Clearly, the writer was not happy with such low engagement stats. He felt dispirited regarding the matter and the fact that he was a freelancer meant that he was doing everything on his own and Twitter really helped him market things the right way.

On that note, he wished to seek some alternatives and even thought about giving up. Then a lightbulb struck to take a look at how Twitter’s ‘For You’ tab was doing after getting unveiled by Musk in January of this year. It was a lot like the Explore page on the Instagram app or For You as seen on TikTok.

Then in February, Musk also introduced a new feature called block counts and how that was affecting the algorithm. So on that note, this writer gave the app another shot and wanted to pay close attention to the viral tweet pattern.

After making a few tweaks to his own posts and habits of sending out tweets, the writer opted to publish one tweet that employed several methods. It worked, he was getting his engagement back and we’re talking 1500 retweets and 500,000 views. Meanwhile, his second one got 8000 retweets and some 13 million views.

The hypothesis was published in his newsletter on the app and got 600 retweets with 1 million views. It even came on Twitter’s page dubbed ‘For You’. Interestingly, all of the topics that got viral fame were very basic and evergreen.

His theory is that the For You algorithm was launched with accounts that came with tags for popular Twitter Topics. This was a sorting tool that the app rolled out in 2019.

He also noticed how the app was putting a lot of content that had already reached viral fame on display. This might be one reason why people were seeing these same tweets. It entailed some quotes and trending topic tweets too.

So as you can see, there are several things to consider when posting a tweet, and this theory is a great start for those that wish to use it at their disposal.

Read next: PC Industry Facing a Slump? IDC Predicts 4.2% Decline in Global Shipments for 2023
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

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