Twitter is a place for quick information
But beware of the gifs and misinformation
By Jeff Boulter
Gifs can be a fun addition to any text, tweet, or post you make via your many different social media platforms. Just be cautious about when and how you use them. A lot of people these days are tuning out when it comes to people that use gifs. This potentially annoying add on can interfere with what people scrolling through social media may think of a story or a post you present to the world.
Here is a funny example of what happened to one of my tweets earlier this month.
Here is a screenshot of my original Tweet.
On one early morning I noticed a story on Reuters that was just released that morning, it came from Hong Kong. I felt it was worth a share on the popular social media app Twitter. The story itself had no photo or footage of the incident that was being discussed.
Here is a link to the actual story for those that might me interested. It is a very short story. (Tesla car catches fire in Hong Kong parking lot: media)
The story was about a potential Tesla catching fire in Hong Kong. Here are some of the points made in the actual article.
“A Tesla Inc electric car caught fire in a parking lot in a Hong Kong shopping mall, the Apple Daily newspaper said on Tuesday” HONG KONG (Reuters)
“Firemen took 45 minutes to douse the fire.” HONG KONG (Reuters)
“There have been at least 14 instances of Tesla cars catching fire since 2013, most of them after a crash.” HONG KONG (Reuters)
The story was reported on by Donny Kwok and Shellin Li in Hong Kong, Yilei Sun in Shanghai; Editing by James Pomfret and Clarence Fernandez of Hong Kong (Reuters)
So when I read this and wanted to share it I noticed that the article did not have any photos or video of the incident and only showed the link when I shared. So I decided that it needed a bit of pizazz to showcase on twitter. I clicked on the, add a gif, feature in the Twitter app and typed in car fire. I found the gif I ended up using to share my tweet.
It seemed really over the top to me, some young man standing on top of a burning BMW in the middle of what looks like suburban America.
By no means did I think anyone would take it to be related to the actual story itself. You could clearly see the BMW logo on the front of the car and it just seemed like the photo itself might have been a CGI created gif, I dug a bit deeper when reading this article and found that the gif was created and uploaded to the site GIPHY on January 29th 2019, it was a shoot from some music video I still have yet to find (If by chance you read this and know please shoot me a message and I will update this article).
Well my tweet went mini viral considering at the time I only had about 20 or so followers. It got nearly 7000 impressions in just 2 days and was retweeted 0 times, yes at the time of this post it has never been retweeted. So where did this traffic come from? Well I can’t take the credit for that either I only did what millions of others on Twitter do, found a story and tweeted the link with a couple of hashtags and a goofy gif.
It took its mini viral spiral from one comment made by one fairly famous person on Twitter, this was the self proclaimed “Investigative journalist and best-selling author. Host of ABC Media Watch.” Paul Barry @therealpbarry , I have to give him all the credit for my silly amount of publicity based on this one comment he made about my tweet.
This turned it into a fairly HOT topic for a little while that day. Many people on Twitter started to comment about how this was fake and not even a Tesla. They were 100% correct. Most of them were only pointing out basic facts about the Gif itself and I believe only a few actually took the time to click the link to the article. There were a few that took some of the typical low blow insults, so here is a compiled list of some of the comments
What does this say about how we interact on social media? I know personally I like to investigate deeper into a topic before I start assuming anything, but when you have someone that you believe is credible making a comment it’s just to easy to piggy back on the same idea.
I did my best to explain to most of the respondents and those that left comments on Twitter, that it was only a little gif fun and humor and hopefully those that felt mislead were turned into happier tweeters later.
This is something you can take with a grain of salt! When you engage in social media, like I did, remember that the things you post might get taken as truth right from the start. I am not saying to stop being funny or playing around with using Gifs, just know how to take any form of backlash that might be headed your way. I would also like to say to those that are just scrolling along and see something, to not take it completely serious before you look a little bit closer at the subject matter, no matter who is the one commenting on it or sharing it.
I was fairly impressed that my tweet got as much attention as it did, considering I am new to Twitter and really do not have a whole lot of followers or clout. So maybe you can utilize a bit of my information and what I learned here to find new techniques to improve you own social media platforms.
Here are a few of the stats related to this mini viral tweet.
Here is the list of comments I got screenshots of from my Twitter account, I did not post them all but tried to get some of the good ones.
Another side comment thread from a different stream.
A trickle of comments and a bit of my silly sarcastic humored response.
Below I tried to breakdown some of the tweets based on the time line they came in. Tried not to put in duplicates.
