Analyzing a shitpost

For most people, social media can feel like a gamble. A shot in the dark with no guarantee that it will find and resonate with an audience.

However, it has more of a science than you might think, which is why we have seen more and more shitposting accounts that are solely meant to garner as much engagement as possible by gaming the system.

Let’s look at this post I saw this morning and find out what made it go so viral so quickly.

Time

One of the first aspects we have to look at is the time when it was posted, why it was posted then, and how this connects with our audience.

Looking at the date posted on the tweet, we see that it’s only been up for about 12 hours as of writing this. Another core piece of information is the time, 11:41 pm.

This post was sent out at the perfect time for people still awake and struggling to go to bed, spending time scrolling through their phones. It helps boost the relatability factor; people quickly can feel like they are in the same boat as the poster, especially with an image like this:

When we look at the other tweets made by this account during this same time frame, it shows how this one over-performed in comparison to the others.

These are the tweets before and after this one:

Posted less than one hour after

Posted two hours before

While still receiving thousands of likes and views, it doesn’t reach anywhere close to the same level of engagement that we see with the post about sleeping.

And when we look through earlier posts in the day, ones posted around the same time as the topic tend to receive more likes and views than those without.

It's clear that time plays an important factor in how people interact with posts, but there are more factors that show why our initial post performed so well.

Content

Choosing the right content is core to making any post effective. Whether a picture of your family, a wise subtitle, or a cute video, the type of content that goes into a post will significantly affect how people interact with it.

Our post shows how text and an image are used in unison to create something relatable to a broad audience.

Let’s look first at the image. One of the first positive aspects is how this is taken straight out of Duolingo, an app currently very rooted in pop culture through a successful marketing campaign with their Duo mascot.

All this means is that people viewing the post instantly recognize who this is, and for those who use the app, where the screenshot is from. This translates into goodwill from people who already like and use Duolingo, meaning you go into the post positively, wanting to like it more than a traditional post.

Now, let’s add the text in.

The joke itself is pretty funny, especially for someone who is Gen-Z and appreciates the self-deprecating type of humor we’ve employed growing up.

It also just is quite relatable. Many people (even myself) will often stay awake all night with their minds racing, thinking about what happened throughout the day, especially if they did something embarrassing or awkward that they kinda regret.

All of this, combined with the perfect timing discussed before, makes for a post that is effective in gathering attention and likable to basically everyone looking at it.

Interactions

Interactions are an excellent way to see how well a post performs. By looking at how many likes, shares, and comments are on a post, we can see what is working and if people are reacting positively or negatively.

Likes are clearly a standout here, with over 370k people liking this post. This shows a level of relatability, as most people who scrolled past this post found it meaningful in some way to like it.

Reposts (or essentially sharing on Twitter) are another core metric, as it stands as the number of people who found this inciteful enough to want to share again with their followers or respond in some way through a quote-retweet. With over 70k retweets here, it shows that this post connected with a good amount of people in some way.

Lastly, comments, which on shitposts like this one, will often be low unless about a topic divisive enough for people to want to respond or voice their opinion in a space other than quote-retweeting. Since this post has only a couple hundred comments, this shows that most people are reacting positively and passively.

Conclusion

Overall, this post achieved everything it set out to do: it made a likable tweet that connected to a broad audience.

By using time and content effectively, the user was able to craft something that people found enjoyable, especially when doom-scrolling at midnight, trying to force themselves to go to sleep.