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What Makes Content Go VIral
Content can go viral when one takes care of the following things:
- The emotional value of the content.
- Arousal of positivity or excitement in the reader.
- An insider culture, a social currency that is understood by a subset of people.
- A memory-inducing trigger, which helps one remember the core message.
- Practicality and usefulness of the information, making it shareworthy.
- Good quality content, packaged in a great story, making it compelling to view and share.
MORE IDEAS FROM THE ARTICLE
Content persuasive and memorable enough has the tendency to evoke the person to share it to others, has ethics, emotion, and logic. If the content is credible, has some emotional appeal, and is logical, it has a high probability to be shared among others.
Why some stories go viral and others don’t was first discussed back in 350 BCE by Aristotle.
Studies on the ‘viral’ tendencies of articles showed that:
- Positive messages were shared more often.
- Articles evoking an emotional response to the reader fared well.
- An exciting headline made a big difference.
- Amusing stories of the same event or news performed better than the duller versions.
RELATED IDEAS
- YouTube videos that contained elicitors of hope were more likely to be viewed.
- On Facebook, depictions of nature, vastness, art, and gratitude in the form of thankfulness, predicted how many likes it received. The more inspiring elicitors from any category, the more likely it is to go viral.
- Articles that were longer and contained more inspirational words (e.g., awe, inspiring, profound, appreciate) were more likely to be viral.
- Inspiring movies and TV shows that contained hope were the most liked. The most frequent environmental elicitors involved nature and vastness.
- Over all of the media, the most liked content portrays nature, encouragement, and overcoming obstacles (hope portrayals).
Strong Emotion. Create shareable, viral content that is relatable to the the audience.
Progress. Reward people who always patronize your service or product to make them always go back to you.
Strong Feature Design. Consider the right color for your ads to enhance the sense of excitement of the audience.
Price. Establish a low price or make it look like it is. Have promos or discounts.
Limited Products. There is always a demand for seasonal or limited products.
Internet memes are units of popular culture that are shared, imitated, and changed by users.
The first meme on the internet was the sideways 'smiley' :-) , created in 1982. The practice of using punctuation markers to show emotion spread quickly and later other expressions, such as :-( and ;-) were added.
The first example of digital viral content is the Hampster Dance meme - rows of dancing hamster GIFs - created by an art student in 1998.