Ellen's Tweet

There is nothing quite like the Oscars. A giant ceremony, idolizing A-List actors and what they have achieved in the past year. Ellen Degeneres hosted the Oscars in 2014, and posted (then) the most retweeted “tweet” of all time. At first the situation didn’t surprise me, a famous person getting a lot of retweets on a post, big whoop. Then I started to think what it would take to make a post get retweeted that much. Other celebrities post things everyday, but they don’t get millions of retweets within hours of being posted. After doing some research I found out that one of the main reasons for the mass amount of retweets was because Ellen made the audience (viewers) feel a part of the tweet. Ellen is a great host on her own show and there is no surprise she made everyone feel comfortable during the Oscars that year. The tweet was retweeted over 3 million times and it was retweeted more than 1 million times within the first 30 minutes of being posted. Putting that kind of attention on Twitter’s servers made Twitter crash, Ellen stated that Twitter sent her an email stating that she had “broken Twitter” http://www.eonline.com/news/830850/the-biggest-oscar-moments-of-all-time-ellen-degeneres-epic-star-studded-selfie . Going off of what has happened, a Pro to the situation would be that millions of people were now tuned in to the Oscars. Making it one of the most successful Oscars to date. This kind of attention is great for getting your brand/event out there, I see it as not only being good for the Oscars, but also for the actors in the picture and Twitter. Now an obvious Con to the situation is how it made Twitter crash. This is not a good thing for a company to have to say out loud, but at least it showed some flaws that Twitter might have had. Putting the numbers in perspective, that year the Oscars was being tweeted about more than 250,000 times per minute. That was more times than the Super Bowl that year. Since the tweet was a picture known as a “Selfie” it made that pop culture term immortal, having over 92 million mentions on twitter that year. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2014/12/10/twitter-entertainment-highlights-most-retweeted/20142541/ . I think Twitter is a very valuable tool, being able to expose yourself to millions of individuals is any businesses dream. It has its pros, that it can make something “viral” in an instant, but the con to that can also be that you are now “viral” and making you have a target on your back, becoming exposed. Social media is a valuable marketing tool, but can sometimes cause headaches to certain organizations that are not ready for big time exposure.