College does need to change”.Initial TractionEven if you have good content, you need strong initial traction to have your tweet to show to more than a portion of your followers.The way Twitter’s home feed ranking algorithm works is like this (click here for more info):They initially put your post in front of a small sample of your followers.If you’re tweet performs well in this sample, then it gets put higher on the feed for the rest of your followers.If the tweet performs very well with all of your followers, it will appear in their follower’s feeds.And if the tweet keeps performing well amongst these groups, then it will continue to be spread further and further.So in order for a tweet to go viral, it must first perform well with a small sample of your followers.Twitter and other social platforms only show your content to a portion of your followers.In my example, my tweet had great initial traction..Within a minute of posting, I received likes from two of my followers who don’t usually like my tweets..From there I got 7 more likes within the first 30 minutes of my tweet, which is a lot for someone with just over 80 followers.This strong initial traction pushed my tweet from around 1/3 of my followers to all of them..It also provided strong social proof that my tweet had share-able content.First RetweetsWhat really makes tweets grow are retweets..Likes are nice, but retweets get the content in front of more/different people.Best case scenario with no retweets, my tweet gets in front of around 80 people..However, with retweets my audience is nearly infinite.One of my first retweets occurred around when the tweet had 11 likes and was by someone who had over 1,100 followers..This pushed my tweet in front of hundreds of users that never would have seen my tweet otherwise.I got a few more retweets soon after, but what really made the tweet viral was when I got my first second-level retweet..By second-level retweet, I mean someone I don’t know who retweeted my tweet..This person saw my post from a retweet of one of my followers..This second-level retweet was by a verified Twitter user from the University of Delaware with over 5,000 followers.With one retweet, my post only gets out to around 500 people, but once it starts getting second-level retweets, the tweet grows exponentially.Expanding the Network — Hitting the Early MajorityOnce I started getting second-level retweets my tweet started to grow exponentially.The reason for this is because my tweet no longer was just for my niche group of followers, it meant that my tweet also had mass appeal..People outside of my network could relate and could find the content shareable.This idea is very similar to how startups go viral..Early customers for startups are called early adopters.. More details