A social media experiment started by a fourth grade teacher from Ontario has shown up in the feeds of 42 million users, according to Twitter analytics specialist SocialBro. The post was retweeted 88,898 times with London the most active city, even though the original post originated in Canada.
The teacher, whose Twitter handle is @MrLaythorpe, wanted to teach his class about internet safety and demonstrate how far a photograph can travel in a week via social media. He posted an image of himself and a colleague holding a sign stating, “I am talking to my 4 grade students about internet safety and how quickly a photo can be seen by lots of people. If you are reading this please retweet it.”
Researchers at SocialBro ran analytics on the retweets and found that the tweets crossed language barriers with many users getting involved despite not speaking English as their mother tongue. A number of influential users helped to spread the picture far and wide and well known participants in the experiment included Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, comedian Dara Ó Briain, and actor Zach Braff. The highest proportion of retweets came from the US, which counted for 15.3%, closely followed by the UK at 5.3% and at city level London was the top location.
“Twitter is an incredibly powerful tool for spreading messages and information around the world,” says Javier Burón, founder and CEO of SocialBro. “The experiment highlights how quickly a picture can go viral on Twitter and that language barriers on the web are less of an issue today. This is clearly highlighted by the number of countries retweeting where English isn’t the first language.”
SocialBro is an advanced cloud solution for the management and analysis of Twitter communities. It enables Twitter for businesses, helping companies to better engage with their audience and increase their communities’ growth qualitatively.
Since its launch in May 2010, SocialBro has achieved rapid growth attracting over 180,000 users from 70 countries including a significant proportion of professional Twitter users, corporates and agencies, such as CBS, NASCAR, Coca-Cola, T-Mobile and Publicis.
