Do you want to create viral content that’ll drive more traffic to your website? Do you know that viral posts share some common features?
If you want readers to share your content over and over, then you must invest quality time to create content that resonates with them, provides value and triggers their emotions.
This is no easy task but thanks to research, you can now pin point some tactics that are in use today to make content go viral.
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Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman of the Wharton Business School carried out a study titled “Social Transmission, Emotion, and the Virality of Online Content” in 2010.
The research involved studying every article in The New York Times over a 3-month period – a total of 7000 articles. In addition, they ran detailed laboratory controlled experiments with individuals.
The goal was to uncover the emotional sentiment hidden in the articles that were shared the most to see if there were any patterns. Then following this, they used the controlled laboratory experiments to manipulate and measure arousal in humans in order to study how this affected social sharing.
The research paper is well worth a read if you are interested in the psychology of social sharing and the emotions that trigger a viral response, as it will help you to write better blog posts, tweets, Facebook updates, Adwords ads, etc.
What Berger and Milkman found was that:
1. Positive content is more viral than negative content (but it is a lot more complex than just this).
2. The key to social sharing is the level of arousal of the viewer/reader – the more highly aroused they are (positively or negatively), the more active they are in sharing content; even content that is unrelated to the cause of their mood.
3. Positive content that inspires surprise, amusement and awe is shared more.
4. Negative content that inspires anger and anxiety is shared more.
5. Content that inspires low emotional arousal (sadness) is less viral.
6. People share content in the hope that it will raise their social standing, generate reciprocity (i.e. to get something tangible or not in return) and simply to help others.
Do these findings sound like truth to you? Review this infographic from Backlinko to discover 21 ways to create traffic boosting viral content, backed by the research above. Enjoy!!
Written by Toka O. @SwoopStudios
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