The other morning we were pleasantly surprised to see a tweet from Paris Hilton on behalf of DonorDrive client, Cesar Millan’s Millan Foundation for animal welfare. When Paris tweeted her followers and asked them to support the cause, we saw it as a good opportunity to dissect the success of a celebrity tweet. Here’s what happened over the 24 hours we tracked it:

Trail of the tweet.

Paris tweeted at 8:35am Eastern Time. So when it hit, the Western half of the US was still asleep. Within four minutes there were already over 100 clicks on the link in the tweet. Looking at the graph from Bit.ly, you can see that a majority of the clicks in the first hour happened in the first 10 minutes:

The First Hour of Paris’ Tweet

Before the end of the first hour, there were 529 clicks on the link. This negates all those theories that early morning tweets never fly. 26% of the clicks were in the US and the rest from 48 other countries, so the tweet went worldwide.

The First 24 Hours of Paris’ Tweet

The typical trail of a successful tweet is that it starts big and just slowly fades. But this one got a nice bump four hours later at 1pm Eastern/10am Pacific (lunchtime for many) with 151 clicks.

Checking the 24 hour mark, TweetReach says that the tweet was viewed by 21,104 people. It landed 111 favorites, was retweeted 331 times and the link to The Millan Foundation was clicked almost 1,000 times. Topsy.com ranked the tweet as “Highly Influential” with the Millan Foundation getting almost twice the mentions that day as any other day in the previous month.

Now that’s just tracking the original tweet. Cesar Millan replied to Paris with a tweet of thanks. His reply generated 24 favorties and 53 retweets, putting the tweet in front of 9,192 more followers.

So just one tweet by a celebrity can really give your cause a nice boost in awareness and engagement.

Getting your cause a high-profile mention.

So how do you get a celebrity to tweet about your cause? Admittedly, much of it is dumb luck, but these tips to increase your odds:

• If your cause has a celebrity spokesperson, ask them to tweet. Even if you’re a local chapter and the celebrity represents your cause nationally and internationally, it couldn’t hurt. They already support your cause, so they might be open to tweeting on your behalf.
• Ask celebrities to retweet. We often see participants in DonorDrive events and campaigns ask stars for a retweet. Many celebrities get too many requests to honor them, but supporters do sometimes get retweeted by the famous. A simple way to encourage this is to tweet your cause’s supporters and request that they ask their favorite stars to retweet their message.
• Ask for a share on whatever channel the celebrity uses most. Not everyone tweets. Many public figures have a Facebook Page. Famous tech people may use Google+. Known business people may be active on LinkedIn. Since these are the places where they’ve found an audience, their followers are likely to pay close attention to their updates.

Remember that it’s perfectly acceptable to ask a star to tweet or retweet. You’re not asking for money, you’re asking for a few typed words. And many celebs don’t even tweet themselves: They have a social media staff that monitors and tweets for them. This staff may be happy to pass along the ask for you or for your supporters.