10 Yetis Insight Blog- How Kanye West Helped Me Go Viral

A few weeks back I was experiencing a pretty boring and uneventful Saturday night. My boyfriend and I (pretty unusually) didn’t have any plans and so we plonked ourselves down on the sofa to experience some of the Glastonbury highlights from the comfort of our warm and mud-free flat.

I’m going to be honest with you, watching Kanye West perform his headline set was not a major priority. We were both much more interested in watching the sets of bands who ACTUALLY PLAY LIVE MUSIC like The Maccabees, The Waterboys and Young Fathers, than some egotistical rapper who pretty much deems himself as the second coming of Jesus (Yeezus if you will).

Having said that, as an avid Tweeter and lover of all things social media, I couldn’t help but get sucked into the mass of activity and trends surrounding Kanye’s Glastonbury set. Not only was #KanyeWest trending worldwide, the excitement must have been a little too much for some bad spellers, as #KayneWest was also one of the most tweeted hashtags that evening! There was also MASSIVE speculation about what the rapper was planning to do on stage, how he’d appear and who would make guest appearances during the evening (Jay-Z, Rihanna, Chris Martin and his equally famous wife Kim Kardashian-West were all rumoured to be joining him).

So we watched the entire set from its (late) beginning to its dragged out ending, and it was amazing, but for all the wrong reasons.

Granted, the bloke that ran on stage wasn’t Kanye’s fault, and I will give him that; but what is undeniable is the fact that the seemingly endless car crash moments made for one of the most exhilarating Twitter feeds I’ve ever witnessed. Some personal highlights included Kanye shouting expletives at his poor stage manager Mike, wanting to re-start songs that he was already halfway through, his awful use of a cherry-picker to fly above his audience and the fact he declared himself to be the ‘greatest living rock star on the planet’.

The jackpot moment for me came as soon as Kanye brought out his keyboards, with a complete range of snazzy sound effects more at home in a classic 1980’s teen movie. Immediately it reminded me of a classic episode of F.R.I.E.N.D.S where Ross Gellar rediscovered his high school passion for keyboards and subsequently began to perform excruciatingly embarrassing, and hilarious, sets to his friends in Central Perk. Being the relentless Twitter fiend that I am (@laurenwilden if you’re wondering!) I immediately tweeted the following…….

AND THEN EVERYTHING WENT MENTAL.

By this point the set was so cringe-worthy and addictive that even people who don’t care for Kanye or Glastonbury were following #Glastonbury2015 and it was one of the most followed and engaged with hashtags of the year. Even viewers from across the world who were either live streaming or just following the updates online were hooked in to the discussions, and I have no doubt this is why my tweet sparked such a ridiculous amount of traffic and interest.

Within less than 30 seconds of uploading the tweet, my phone was inundated with notifications declaring an incessant amount of retweets, favourites and engagements. It even got to the point where my boyfriend had to leave the room as a result of extreme annoyance. All in all the tweet received 219 retweets and 238 favourites, as well as a total of 46,879 impressions and 2,931 photo and video clicks. I’m not going to lie to you, as someone who typically manages a handful of retweets or favourites from followers, the viral nature of this simple but effective tweet was seriously exciting for me, and I was even receiving texts and direct messages from friends who saw how popular my tweet was. I even had someone troll me for daring to publicly humiliate Kanye.

I HAD FINALLY MADE IT!!!!

I am under no illusion that in terms of the millions of engagements the likes of Harry Styles, Justin Bieber and Barack Obama receive for even the most boring of tweets, my results were less than impressive; yet after seeing recently how shockingly low engagement can be amongst even the most prolific of businesses and brands on Twitter, I am most definitely taking my brief brush with viral fame as a win. The one disappointing outcome of my tweet doing so well was the fact that I only managed to gain an additional 8 followers, bringing my total up to around the 1,190 mark; and whilst I would like to say that I am above the desperate want for more followers, I am definitely not.

I suppose this is an important lesson to bear in mind; in order to keep your followers engaged and encourage a new following, you need to be constantly creating and pushing the kind of content they are used to seeing from you. I know only too well that tweeting something not typically ‘me’ has previously led to a huge loss of followers.