It all started when Japanese comedy website Omokoro hit 10,000 followers on Twitter.

In order to leverage their growing fanbase, Omokoro’s chief editor Harajuku called resident writer Sebuyama into the office at around 10pm and asked him to research what kind of tweets are most likely to be retweeted.

What ensued was a hilarious social experiment that grabbed the attention of net users across Japan and ended with Sebuyama sitting in front of his computer in nothing but underpants with nearly a hundred clothespins stuck to his naked body.

Harajuku proposed the research be carried out with the following simple experiment:

1. Using his personal twitter account (2131 followers at the time), Sebuyama will tweet about whatever he thinks would be likely to get attention.

2. The experiment will end when Sebuyama reaches a total of 1000 or more retweets.

3. To ensure blindness, twitter followers will not be informed of the experiment until the 1000 retweets goal is reached.

4. Sebuyama is forbidden from leaving the office until the 1000 retweets goal is reached.

Given no room for protest, Sebuyama was left blinking on the office sofa as Harajuku left for the night…and thus started the experiment!

Despairing at the situation he was left in (he apparently had plans the next day), Sebuyama whipped out his iPhone and tested the waters with several straightforward pleas to his followers along the lines of: “Everyone! Please retweet this!”

Surprisingly, this actually netted him as much as 52 retweets, bringing him to his first conclusion of the night: Even with no content, some people will retweet for you if you ask them nicely!

His next plan of action was to try random bits of trivia, but three tweets later and he couldn’t get any more than 17 retweets, leading him to conclusion #2: random trivia tweets can be hit-or-miss, but are overall difficult to get retweeted!

As the hours passed, Sebuyama desperately tried a number of other strategies but, oddly enough, only few were able to beat his early record of 52 retweets for a simple “please retweet this” tweet. It seemed like a long road ahead indeed.

At around 11am the next day, the tired Sebuyama got the idea for a new approach: “Alright, if it’s come to this, let’s try the ‘I’ll do ______ the number of times this is retweeted’ pattern.”

He then posted the following tweet: “I’ll stick clothespins on my body equal to the number of times this is retweeted and post a picture online.”

Sebuyama hit the send button and dozed off for about 2 hours and awoke to a startling result: the clothespin tweet had been retweeted 1815 times.

True to his word and probably just happy that he could finally leave the office, Sebuyama covered his body in clothespins (supposedly using all he could find in the office) and posted the pictures online for the world to see.

The conclusion: ”I’ll do ______ the number of times this is retweeted” tweets get retweeted like crazy

After exposing the experiment to his followers, Sebuyama wrote up a detailed report and posted it on Omokoro, where it rapidly gained attention from net users across Japan. He even began to see Hangul retweets appearing on his feed and, before long, her had a good group of Korean followers as well!

Be sure to check Sebuyama’s full report to see exactly to what lengths he went to for a few retweets (Probably NSFW & Japanese only, which is unfortunate because it’s hilarious).

And remember, if you want to test Sebuyama’s findings for yourself, be sure to have plenty of clothespins on hand.

Source: Omoroko (Includes man-butt, possibly NSFW)

▼Sebuyama’s Moment Of Truth▼

“Oh man, I fell asleep! I wonder how that last tweet is doing…”