What is Twitter seeding and what is it for?

11 January 2012

“Seeding” is the practice of carefully distributing content online through various channels, in the hope that it will become “viral” and be spread of its own accord. If this content is an advertising campaign cleverly disguised as a joke or some other kind of content that is noteworthy, the company that created it can reap huge benefits.

Twitter is uniquely suited to seeding viral content, because of its unique “trending” feature. A trending topic on Twitter can be seen by everyone - not just the people in your immediate network. This means that all you have to do to get tweets about your “topic” (for lack of a better word) seen by millions of people is reach a critical mass where that topic begins to “trend”.

What Does it Take to Make a Campaign go Viral?

The most impressive example of an advertising campaign going viral by means of Twitter and other social media, is the Old Spice Guy commercials, which are basically “required reading” for anyone going into online marketing. Old Spice created a series of commercials that they filmed in only a few days, and produced excellent examples of the specific brand of left-field, subtle-yet-over-the-top humor that the internet loves to spread around.

One of the main things that makes these commercials so successful is that they contain a large number of very quotable phrases that instantly become in-jokes. “I’m on a horse” and “these [somethings] are now diamonds” will immediately recall the joke for anyone who has seen them. If someone doesn’t get the joke, they are immediately shown the videos because “omg dude you have to see this.”

How Do You Seed Virals on Twitter?

Creating viral content is hard enough, but even if you think you have something that is truly viral-worthy, it might just not get the right amount of notice if you post a link to it once or twice from your twitter account.

Your chances of success can be dramatically increased by the process of “seeding” your content as much as possible. This involves posting it to as many social networks as possible, but on Twitter there is a special approach you can take. It’s not difficult to pay a marketing agency to get your tweets out via a large number of accounts. There are plenty of bloggers who will take as little as $10 for a sponsored tweet - you just need to find the channels that will be appropriate to your content.

If you can get your content tweeted by a few hundred people, it is almost guaranteed to be a moderate phenomenon, at least for a few days.