Why a news-breaking tweet didn’t go viral the first time

What if you were the first person on the beat of a major news story, and you beat everyone by like an hour? That was the situation of Aja Dior M. (Twitter handle @AjaDiorNavy), who was the very first person to post about the death of Whitney Houston last Saturday. Yes, she broke it. But as you can see in this graph above, a total of 16 people touched the tweet at first. When AP finally broke the news nearly an hour later, that’s when it went viral. It wasn’t until hours later that the media noticed that she had scooped them. Why is that? Gilad Lotan of SocialFlow argues that her network wasn’t built out in a way that would encourage the spread of this info beyond a small group. “We’ve seen this many times before,” he writes. ”The combination of the right timing, network and topicality make or break an information cascade.”