Going viral pt. II - lessons learned

"Everyone has a plan until they get hit in the face." - Mike Tyson

I was unprepared to go viral and probably lost thousands of followers and set myself back six figures (in future Kong income) as well.

You, my fren, can better capitalize on your moment of glory and weird people photoshopping penises into your avatar’s hand and mouth.

Lesson one - it will be unexpected

You can practice ways to tweet to get attention and build a following -

The Resilience Report

/Ed Latimore has a twitter PDF I bought that shows how he gets engagement.

I did not use that for my tweet, but if you broke it down some of the lessons are there.

However - I wrote my viral tweet from a parking garage at lunch and it was about dating/society, not law or comedy. Another example is BowTiedGator - his going viral moment was a frustrated tweet about tipping culture that

Cernovich

retweeted.

LOL Coquito, guy is everywhere.

You will never know what will hit, but you can prepare for it…

Lesson two - have your bio set up to scoop up followers

I did a generic ‘check out my substack’ tweet which, hilariously, is also almost at one million views.

My account was not set up to scoop up followers. Around 10 am, aka 22 hours after the tweet,

BowTiedTikTok

DM'd me saying I was dropping the ball, here's what I should do:

• Remove/don’t ask for tips. That ended up being a total $0. That’s right, not even a $1 ‘sup’. Bad move.

• organize my profile and have good info to attract people - I added ‘male rights activist’, tried to entice people to follow me and sub the stack with some re-wording and putting my most popular substack article pinned on my profile.

• People originally hated my friend and my comments ended up moving the hate to me. BowTiedTikTok was confused as to why I did this. I know - its because I’m a lawyer and troll who loves riling people up. Did it cost me? Probably. Do I care? No, because ultimately that day probably never happens again and it was a blast of a 48 hours.

  • However…if you WANT more followers…optimize, stay out of the fray.

Lesson three - get verified

I now have around 1,500 followers. When the comments were coming in rapid fire (literally 24 hours straight of hitting the notifications to read and it immediately going to 20+ and my screen being flooded with new one), I started first looking at the verified comments.

I had no idea there was a way to only read verified first. NOW I GET WHAT THE DEAL WAS WITH THE BLUE CHECK DRAMA.

I could read and react to the blue checks because there were so few. My suspicion is that larger accounts do the same, there is too much riff raff otherwise.

I now start with verified comments and notifications as well. If you look at my followers you’ll see some larger accounts. I think that is partly because of switching to verified.

Having your tweet seen 16 million times helps too.

Lesson four - enjoy it!

Being on a bachelor party while going viral is a weekend I will never forget…from what I remember. Enjoy your moment! Do whatever is your style, whether wanting to grapple with Malcolm Nance or sit back and let the followers pile up. I had a blast, and I thank everyone of you, whether fren or hater, for making that so. I doubt that combination will ever happen again, but who knows. Either way, I’m moving on after this article.

No, seriously, I might.

Lesson five - take time after to read some of the arguments that broke out within the tweet

That was my favorite part of Trump’s 2016-2020 tweeting, seeing and occasionally jumping in to the random arguments. I had a few break out. Feel free to retroactively read them and laugh, as I do now. I’ll probably comment here and there since I did not have time to during the moment, do my chaos lawyer thing.

Lesson six - know when to move on

I am still working on this. It is INTOXICATING to blow up, high of highs. Eventually, you need to let it go. It is TOUGH. I think it was BowTiedKobra who saw me mix it up for the 1,000 time and said Kong, let it go. Kobra was right. It becomes like your precious, you want to see the numbers go up and UP AND UP AND UP….

When, in reality, it means nothing. Your family might think its cool, but you can’t tell many people. You still have obligations and a job/side hustle. I luckily put my phone aside most of the bachelor party, if you can believe it. Thank goodness I did, otherwise Kong would have seen far less titties….

and that would have been the real crime.

Final numbers, odds and ends:

• Tweet did 16 million views and impressions.

• I added about 400 followers in the last week plus (from 1,100 ish to close to 1,550)

• 60 substack sub ads, from 140 to 200 (including the two people I had to ban from my stack for constantly calling me gay and talking about my cock)

• One former Ukrainian "war hero" as a reply guy (Malcolm Nance)

  

Other note: when you go viral, you get HOT! Look at how BowTiedGator turned 7,000 followers into close to 30,000. Your tweets below the tweet will get tens of thousands of eyes on them (see above pic). Even now I am still running hot, having thousands of eye balls where before it was hundreds.

Hope this helps/you enjoyed! DM me on twitter for other questions at BowTiedKong

Namaste,

KONG