In contrast to the secrecy of other tech giants, Twitter has been conspicuously open about its network and how users can shine within it. In one recent instance of Twitter "virality," singer Katy
Perry retweeted a #LessAmbitiousMovies Tweet, but the hashtag didn't really take off until a few of her most influential followers -- Lizz Winstead and Barracks O'Bama -- carried the message to their
own highly-active followers. The lesson? "Getting a great hashtag in front of the right audience is more important than getting it in front of a big audience," Robin Sloan, a member of Twitter's
media-partnership team, writes in a
blog post.
"Katy Perry's 5.2 million followers saw #LessAmbitiousMovies, laughed, and moved
on. Lizz Winstead and Barracks O'Bama's crew of 35,000 saw it -- and they made it their own." Indeed, "What we can see here is the mechanics of Twitter virality," notes
The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal. That said, "It's hard to know exactly why certain memes take off on
Twitter," he adds. "The innards of the global Twitter brain are complex and sometimes sure thing hashtags (or links) go nowhere."
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