12200 Likes and still counting is what happened last afternoon (13th March 2012) and history was created!
I posted a picture on my facebook profile and played a game with it. I said –
Press ‘L’ and see what happens…
It became an instant hit! The itch to know what happens by pressing L drives the image to go viral! The image I put up for this activity was an enticing one from my Ladakh trip and it was key to the success (I guess)! Even if you press L again and again it will go like unlike like unlike! But most of the facebook users left with a like! 🙂
Facebook yesterday introduced keyboard shortcuts and L meant it will instantly like that photo. Not everyone was aware of this piece of news item as facebook introduced it quietly under the carpert, as it always has done in the past too! It would have worked on any other photo, but because no one knew, they thought it’s something very particular to his photo alone, given the naughtiness in the photo you would have imagined something will happen when you press ‘L‘ !
Within 2 hours it had 10000 likes already! Something that started as 1 like per 10 second turned opposite and became 10 likes per second. It went out of control after 10,000 likes as it was already shared for more than 150 times! The exponential growth and the coverage of a personal photo scared me! Hence I had to convert the property of the image to ‘friends’ only from ‘public’. But by then it had already got 12,000 likes. Mind you, it all happened in less than 2 hours!
Everything was not hunky dory, as an outfall a lot of comments started pouring, most of them were a comment with just the alphabet L as they thought they have to put L in the comment! but within seconds they also realized that it’s just pressing L and not commenting on it. It was ok till here, but then useless comments started pouring in and moderating those comments meant siting and doing it for hours without moving, which was not the best of tasks I thought my time was worth for. Hence I put a full stop on this mayhem!
If it was any other image, I would have left it to touch the skies for the highest number of likes, since it was personal I have it now open to friends only. The number is still growing, mind you!
Three things that got this working:
1. Novelty of the concept (thanks to facebook);
2. The timing was right – while it was not know to all;
3. The photo itself was very enticing.
As it’s said there cannot be a planned Kolaveri, there cannot be a planned way to take things go viral online. But am hoping I would be able to replicate something similar for my company page also, one day!
 |
| This is the image that was uploaded, it has 12210 likes on the last count. |
Btw, The video ‘Why this kolaveri Di‘ is about to hit 50 million views!