Adorable man aims to beat Ellen’s retweet record with photo of himself and his dogs

Terry Shipman, 65, is not a celebrity. In fact, until March 4, he had just five followers on Twitter. He's tweeted a whopping seven times in his life.

And yet one of those seven tweets — a photo of him with his two small dogs — has been retweeted more than 130,000 times so far, all because he wants to beat the retweet record set by Ellen's Oscar selfie.

He now has more than 6,000 followers, and a new fan in Sports Illustrated cover model Chrissy Teigen.

"I was just totally amazed," Shipman told TODAY.com of the viral response to his tweet. "It was just kind of as a lark last (Tuesday) evening. Obviously I saw the selfie being taken on the Oscars, and then I did see the photo on the Internet and saw she had three million-plus retweets."

"I took that photograph, tweeted it to my son who was at a Houston Rockets game, then he and his roommate retweeted it a couple times, and then their phones started blowing up. My daughter was then calling saying it had been retweeted 900 times, and that this was a big deal."

Shipman said he's having fun with his newfound fame — he has to turn his phone to silent because it's constantly going off — but has no plans to take advantage of his 15 minutes in the spotlight.

"I really don't have any plans to do a whole lot of tweeting in the future,'' he told TODAY.com. "It was kind of a one-time thing. I'm not sure I have a whole lot to tweet that people would be interested in."

Shipman told Mashable that he only learned the term "selfie" in December, while watching the evening news.

"I have done a few selfies, not many, but a few," he said. "It's not totally out of character for me. I like to take photos and record family history."

"I think it's positive," he told Mashable of the viral response to his photo. "I do a photo album every year and this will definitely go into the photo album."