Make Music go Viral

The case of One Direction’s Louis Tomlinson

In recent weeks, a number of faces that I don’t know have been popping up in my direct messages and mentions on Twitter. Teenage girls who asked me to tweet a certain hashtag. Now I am often asked to share something on Twitter — surveys for theses, calls for a lost kitten , stuff like that— but usually these questions come from people who have not spoken to me for years and suddenly turn out to be my best friend. But this?

“Sir, can I please ask you a favor? The thing is, in order to win a competition, I need to find as many people with verified accounts who want to tweet the hashtag #TeamWalls. You can help me a lot with this and it would really mean EVERYTHING to me.”

When a teenage girl calls you “Sir”, your hairline — or what remains in my case — will naturally recede by five centimeters. The questions in my inbox lacked any form of context and when I clicked on the hashtag I ended up in the parallel world of Teenage Twitter. Thousands of tweets about Louis Tomlinson, the singer who was once a member of One Direction. I know thanks to Wikipedia.

Of course I know One Direction — the band which was formed when jury member Simon Cowell brought together five participants from the British X-Factor. In recent years, the former members have been working hard on…