Exactly How to Capitalize on Your Viral Tweet
To leverage your 15 minutes, act fast
Of the 500 million-plus tweets that are sent each day, only the teeniest, tiniest fraction go viral. But recently, I won the Twitter lottery when a thread I wrote about preordering from indie booksellers took on a life of its own. To date, it’s garnered thousands of retweets. Patton Oswald and Candace Bushnell shared it; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez smashed the like button. IndieBound, a place to preorder books that I’d linked to, crashed from all the inbound traffic.
As my notifications mushroomed, I went from excitement to wondering… now what? Amazingly, my viral tweet was met with near-universal positivity (phew!) and was about a topic totally on-brand for me, a novelist. But in a way, this increased the pressure I felt to do something: Was there some way I should be capitalizing on the sudden, unprecedented, and sure-to-be-temporary influx of attention?
After all, I’m not exactly social-media famous, so I was unsure of how to deal. “What’s both wonderful and scary about Twitter is that a viral tweet can come from anywhere,” says the author Aliza Licht, who hosts the career-advice podcast Leave Your Mark (and who had her own experience with virality when her anonymous, now-defunct Twitter account @DKNYPRgirl, took off a decade ago). “You don’t have to be…
