#FeriaDelHilo: First Tuiterature contest.
Last summer, the tweet, in the form of a story created by Manuel Bartual, @ManuelBartual , went viral and provided the pioneer of this phenomenon 300.000 Twitter followers in just six days!
Although literary critics were not on his side, fans of the social network did. The key to success? A story of intrigue that the users of the social network they thought it was real.
«I've been on vacation for a couple of days, in a hotel near the beach. Everything was fine until weird things started to happen. " said his first tweet.
Until the last post not unveiled the mystery that everything it had been a game and, at that time, the story was already viral.
Was Manuel Bartual's story the beginning of a boom on Twitter?
After the success of Bartual, the tweet got cold.
It was the same Manuel Bartual The one sponsored by Twitter, released a second story at Christmas 2017, announced with great fanfare and with a means that the first had not had: More than 20 people worked on it and a Twitter promotional campaign supporting the project long before its launch. Against all odds and, Despite sponsorship and preparation, the story went largely unnoticed. Maybe because the tweeters already knew it was fiction? Many disengaged before I even started publishing it. Bartual, despite the failure of the second story, the first served to get Planeta to ask him to write a novel developing the plot. It is title The other Manuel.
Although many were expected to try to repeat the phenomenon, the truth is that the expected tree of stories did not occur. The process was rather a drop by drop: little by little threads began to be published on Twitter, some fictional, others non-fiction, some that tell comic anecdotes, others tell stories of intrigue and some that dare with another type of genre , although the first two are the ones that take the cake.
#FeriadelHilo: An attempt to position Twitter as a literary platform?
Modesto García and Manuel Bartual: Authors of the two viral Twitter stories.
Less than a month ago, Twitter in collaboration with Samsung, El Corte Inglés, Nestlé and Ambito Cultural, organized the First Tuiterature Competition, under the hagstag #threadfair. On the page of the Yarn Fair you can see the participants and the winners.
The star of the contest was a story very similar to that of Manuel Bartual, by the hand of Mr. Brigthside, @plot_tuit, an alter ego of Modesto García @modesto_garcia in which a murder was being investigated live.
The key to success this time?
The users once again believed that it was real and they also had proof of it: he began the story by quoting the Police @Policia and they responded by following the game.
Got 113.000 Likes of the users. A story that narrates a live intrigue, where readers do not know it is fiction until the last tweet. Literarily speaking, as happened with Bartual's it has no value, but it does have it as a Twitter thread, because it hooked, liked and entertained.
Are we facing the birth of a new genre that is governed by new norms?