Back on July 21, 2020, Victor wrote about one of his videos “blowing up” on TikTok and some of the peculiarities that ensued. Today, the future of TikTok in the United States remains in doubt due to its ties to the Chinese Government. What is not in doubt, however, is that The New Leaf Journal had its own miniature social media “blow up” story recently, not on TikTok, but instead on Twitter. This article chronicles our humble website’s first brush with social media fame, or something to that effect.
Background
I discussed in brief The New Leaf Journal Twitter account in June and in September. I made clear in both posts that I am no fan of Twitter, and that the main reason we have a Twitter account is for box-checking purposes. Already having the account, I post links to our content several times each week. The tweets generally garner few impressions and even fewer interactions, but there is no harm in posting, I suppose. Every so often, someone clicks a link.
The Suspensful Tweet That Changed Everything
On September 14, I posted a tweet to an August article that I wrote about using a chrome extension, “The Great Suspender,” on the Vivaldi web browser. In the Tweet, I mentioned the official Twitter accounts for both Vivaldi and The Great Suspender. After posting the tweet, I forgot about it, assuming that it would be forgotten as soon as most of my tweets.
The next day, I logged on to Twitter to post another article and check the analytics. To my surprise, I saw that my Tweet had garnered a response from a gentleman named Tor Odland. Mr. Odland replied: “Interesting! I’m giving this a (suspenseful) shot!” I regretted not having come up with that pun myself, but I overcame my sorrow to see who Mr. Odland was. It turned out that Mr. Odland is the Chief Marketing Officer for Vivaldi. I responded to his response by approving of his pun and thanking him for the work he does on my favorite web browser.
The next day, I found that Mr. Odland had enjoyed his experience with the extension: “So I downloaded and tested the extension. It has some nice advanced features that go beyond the built-in functionality in Vivaldi (where you can hibernate all other tabs but the one you are using, for example). I will keep playing with it. Thanks for the tip!” I thanked Mr. Odland for reading and stated that I would look to post some more content about interesting extensions with Vivaldi if I found any.
The Great Suspender Tweet “Blows Up”
Perhaps based on Mr. Odland’s positive assessment of the article, we were “retweeted” by Vivaldi’s official account, which caused a dramatic spike in Tweet impressions and interactions on September 17. We received four other straight re-tweets, and two accounts re-tweeted us with quotes. Video game connoisseur JRPG Tea re-tweeted us and stated that while he loved discovering new browser extensions from random tweets, he wished he could find some more about video games. I am actually working on that, but those articles and associated tweets will have to wait for another day. An account called “suppe” described my article as a “Mega feature!” I thank suppe for the high praise.
As of 9:20 PM on September 24, 2020, The Great Suspender tweet has garnered 4,515 impressions, 92 interactions, 12 likes, and 7 re-tweets. Most importantly for my purposes, nearly one third of those interactions resulted in link clicks. To be sure, all these numbers are relatively small fry by Twitter standards, but to put how out-of-line they are from the rest of our Tweeting adventures, our account has garnered approximately 6,900 impressions over the last 28 days.
Parting Shots
To start, I must thank Mr. Odland for taking the time to read my article and Vivaldi for sharing it with a broader audience. I am glad that fellow Vivaldi users found the information therein to be useful. For my part, I am still using The Great Suspender extension with Vivaldi, and the good things I said about it in my initial impressions remain my views today.
After that Tweet, our Twitter returned to normal, with subsequent tweets receiving few impressions, much less link clicks. While I do try to post several articles on Twitter every week, I would still recommend bookmarking our site, subscribing to our RSS feed, or better yet, our newsletter if you want to stay abreast of our new content. In the long run, I still hope to make The New Leaf Journal the kind of “Twitterless success story” that I described in an earlier essay. But in any event, I welcome new readers wherever we may find them.