What Makes Content Spread Virally?

B2B marketers increasingly understand that in the early stages of the buying process, customers today find them through internet searches. Vendors realize that they can be found by providing content that addresses customers’ business challenges. And the brass ring for vendors who provide this content is for their content to go viral—and then be passed along from reader to reader so that readership grows exponentially without any effort on the part of the vendor. The question is: Can you control whether something goes viral?

I once worked with an editor who seemed to know the secret. Whenever he wrote his column, he always got tons of reader response. When I asked him his secret, he said he made sure to write controversial opinions—even if he didn’t necessarily believe what he wrote.

Now, Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman, both assistant professors at the Wharton School, have come up with research that puts some science behind what this editor instinctively understood. In conducting research specifically on what makes content spread virally, they found that after controlling for all other variables, “Content that evokes emotions characterized by high arousal (i.e. awe, anger, and anxiety) is more viral.” While other factors also influence how viral a piece of content becomes, this effect enhances virality even after you take these other factors into effect.

Furthermore, Berger and Milkman found that “The most powerful predictor of virality…is how much anger an article evokes.” After all, the emotion of anger motivates people to act. Clearly, it invoked the readers of the columns from the editor I mentioned. Politicians and cable TV pundits have also long understood the impact of evoking anger both in the polls and in the ratings.

But, of course, anger is probably not the emotion marketers are likely to want to evoke to make content go viral.

So what’s a marketer to do?

Luckily, the Wharton study, which looked at which articles from the New York Times were most likely to be passed along, and then tested these findings with experiments of their own, found that other factors also caused articles to go viral. Some of these are more likely to prove useful to marketers, including:

• Information that invokes awe—invoking a strong, positive emotion can both make something go viral and reflect positively on your product.
• Informative articles that are useful—this validates many arguments that content marketers make about the need to provide informative content.
• Surprising articles—marketers can easily capitalize on this finding if they can find an angle for their content that’s unexpected.
• Placement of the article—while in the New York Times, this refers to an article that appears on the front page or one that’s the lead article in its section. For a marketer, this could refer to high profile placement on a popular content aggregation site, blog or online magazine, or even on their own website.
• Longer articles—the authors of the Wharton study assumed that longer articles are more viral because they contain more useful information. This is in interesting finding and appears to contradict the belief among many marketers that people are looking for shorter content.  
• Articles by more famous authors.
• Articles written by women.

Overall, content that evokes strong positive emotions, as well as anger and anxiety are most likely prompt people to pass along content virally. However, you can also provoke virality by creating content that’s useful or surprising and making sure to place it prominently.

What have been the characteristics of your most viral content?

Comments

[Elaine Starling]

Excellent article. It's confused me to see how much emphasis is on more "negative" information. Now I see that it corresponds with the most elemental part of human nature - the reptilian brain, which is focused on security and predictability. Anything outside the norm is to be feared and shunned. Perhaps we'll evolve enough to pay more attention to positive emotions soon...

[Robespierre, Paris, France]

Nothing quite like made-up and misused words. You have been nominated for the Sarah Palin Ditz Award for "virality" and "Clearly, it invoked the readers..." (blame Berger and the Milkman?)

[Cheryl Goldberg]

Robespierre, Indeed Berger and Milkman used the term in the title of their study. Since I am mostly commenting on their work, I adopted the term as well. So if you don't like the term, you might want to take it up with them. Cheryl

[Franz Perrigo]

Aside from putting informative content in an article, it is also important to create a short line that can attract the attention of readers. There are times when even the most informatve articles are not noticeable enough to readers. So it is important that you create a unique title for it.