What Happens When A Post Gets Shared By It's Subject

If I'm talking frankly, I would say that my target audience would fall under at least one of these categories.

• My Twitter followers
• People who have nothing better to do
• Those playing click lottery

A good week generally translates into page stats like these.

Then I posted this. My review of Frightened Rabbit's gig at Cabaret Voltaire.

Then this happened:

...and in turn, this happened:

I guess over 800 people reading something I wrote was the whole point of writing a blog but it's left me confused.

Obviously the success was down to the fact that the band retweeted me, meaning that it went to their 24,000 followers, anyone visiting their website that afternoon could see the RT. The Pop Cop linked to it from the goss box (Jan 20), and a few other random people appear to have stuck it on twitter or facebook in some form or other.

It's making me wonder if I'll realistically ever be able to repeat this feat. Despite all these page views, not one comment was posted (have I somehow restricted these?) and nobody new followed the blog. It looks like a few people have read other posts, but that's about it. This really highlights the fact that if this ever does happen again, I'll need the assistance of a RT. Next time, perhaps by someone with 25000 followers!

What does it take to get retweeted? The tweet announcing my blog post didn't contain their handle, "@FRabbits", just "Frightened Rabbit" so I'm guessing they have a search on twitter for their own name. Mine was one of about half a dozen retweets or replies about the gig. It was among quite a few positive ones but many many more negative ones. It's certainly possibly that they took a cursory glance through mentions of their name and chose a few people who were taking their side to RT.

I only decided I was going to blog about the gig about 2 songs in, taking notes on my phone about what was said and what was played. (I didn't really have much else to do- I couldn't move!), then I stayed up writing the post in my frinds flat 'til it was finished (3:45am). I'm thinking the promptness of the post played a major part in it's success. I slept in past noon the next day, by  which time it had already been retweeted and was well on it's way to becoming old news.

My conclusion really has to be that I'd provided the first coherent report on their a messy night, and that's why the band chose to share it. With their seal of approval in place, the page views steadily came in.


If I get the chance to ask, I probably will.