A few days ago I experienced what I’m sure will forever be one of the most important and exciting moments of my life. Something I’ll tell my grandchildren about when they sit on the floor in a circle around my armchair to patiently listen to the wisdom I have to share with what little time I have left. On Sunday April 27th, 2014 @Netflix retweeted me:

I was elated. I felt invincible. Within minutes the internet had retweeted and favorited me over 500 times. Within an hour, those numbers had doubled. The thought I had, actually while watching NBA Playoff highlights and not binge watching on Netflix, had resonated with the brand it referenced and the audience that followed it. Planetwide people were forcefully exhaling from their noses in good humor at my joke. #BigDeal #RealMan #WhatNowTweeps

I realized, however, that my new found fame and fortune was deteriorating more quickly with each passing moment. All on Twitter is temporary, and although I was still collecting stats, I had gained only a few followers. In minutes all the value I had gained from my original, revolutionary, and world changing brainfart would be lost. So of course I sprung into action and salvaged what little I could from the wreckage of my dying tweet. #LetsDoThis #Hustla #NoRest4TheWicked

My first reaction was go through and follow each of the users that had favorited my tweet. The more recently they had interacted with it, the more likely they were to follow back. However only a small percentage of the people I had intellectually clicked with so well were willing to #followback. Maybe they were busy, or maybe the special moment we’d shared hadn’t meant as much to them as it did to me. #SadMe

Instead of giving up, I pushed harder. At first I favorited the retweets I was receiving and the rate of followers added increased slightly. Next, I started quickly doing the same for tweets from that users’ original thoughts, and the number of followbacks I was getting for each effort continued to rise. Finally I began following and responding to the people who had snuck replies into the 40 characters I had left them. Almost all of these folks, including  @moniquedelacruz and @festerLA below, returned the favor. #Follow4Follow #RealFriends

In the end I came out with about 100 more followers, significantly more than the few that decided to follow me based off of my idea alone. Certainly the way I plowed through profiles in an effort to hit numbers was not entirely moral, but it’s a dog eat dog world out there online. Sure, my Twitter feed is now inundated with users that spam low quality content and block out the accounts that I actually care about, but luckily there are great tools like JustUnfollow and ManageFlitter to alleviate such issues. #FirstWorldProblems #AintNoThingButAChickenWing

In any case, I’m seeing some long term positives from this effort to squeeze some value out of what could have very easily been the temporary boom of the most important retweet of my Twitter career. The users that I connected with successfully are more active and loose with favorites and retweets, as they were willing to reshare my idea in the first place. #GetMoneyGetPaid

Already I’m getting action on mundane Tweets which would normally go ignored such as the one above. Hopefully this will lead to a long term increase in my popularity and sharability. Ensuring a continual increase in my clicks, and more importantly my Klout, which has now leapt to a massive 63. My posture is now better, beautiful women stop me to ask for my number when I walk down the street, I’ve lost 5 pounds of fat and put on 10 pounds of muscle, I got a raise at work, and my parents are finally proud of me, all thanks to my tweet heard round the world. #AllIDoIsWin