Had a really interesting experience today, one that shows just how powerful Twitter has become. Normally I don't get many views on my Flickr stream - it's not particularly important to me work wise, and it's mainly a hobby, posting favourite pictures, picture a day and so on. My most 'popular' image was an early one in my photostream, which over 5 years had amassed about 2,000 views.
Adding in the retro #savelibraries posters, both individually and as a set did make something of a difference to the number of visits that I got. On Sunday I noticed that I'd had 2,000 views of images; mainly the posters, which was to be expected. The most popular were some of the early ones (logical) with five or six hundred views. Come Monday, people started to notice the posters and tweeted them, which was very kind of them, and it helped get the #savelibraries concept out a little further. I looked at the statistics for my account, and it had shot up to 15,000 visits. All nice and lovely. Then something else happened - Neil Gaiman; @neilhimself with his 1.5 million followers posted this tweet:
At which point I thought to myself 'this is going to be interesting..' (Well, actually the first thought that I had was along the lines of 'OMG, Neil Gaiman!' - I don't see why I shouldn't be a fan boi) so I started to watch the stats rise. At one point I was getting an extra thousand hits *per minute*.
By the time the day finished this is what the graph looked like with 42,692 hits:
For my ego, it's great of course, and I'm not going to deny it. But that's not the point of the post. One simple tweet from someone with a reasonably good following (but certainly not one of the largest by any means) can really blow something out of all proportion. The reach of celebrity, and the touch of Twitter is long and heavy - not to be under estimated. I know of absolutely no other resource that would have had that affect that quickly. The only other experience I've had of anything like this is when I put my 'I want to' page together - at the end of a week I got 50K hits on my page, but that had to build up over time. My most popular image now is the 'Women of Britain' poster, and basically it did in 6 hours what the previous most popular one took 5 years to achieve.
It's really no surprise that tweets can bring down entire websites - but then as we can see with the situation in Egypt, some people worry that tweets can bring down an entire government.
Well done Sir!
Posted by: Lindsay Wallace | February 01, 2011 at 11:47 AM