How to increase your content's viral potential

Viral content is sort of the holy grail of internet marketing; everyone wants it, but almost no-one knows how to get it.

Whatever it is that makes content inherently shareable – and, at the extreme end of the spectrum, go viral – seems like more of a mystical art than a science; a fortunate coinciding of different elements like timeliness, relevance and tapping into something in the wider consciousness that resonates with people.

But many researchers and marketers have set out to define, scientifically, what exactly it is that makes us share content?

What are the emotions and thought processes that are involved in the process of deciding to share something? And is there something inherently unique about viral content that makes it go viral, over another piece of content?

Fractl conducted a study aimed at discovering exactly that. They surveyed 400 people on their emotional responses to a set of viral images, using the PAD emotional state model to score their responses and determine how viral content resonates with us emotionally, as well which combinations of emotions are most likely to make content go viral.

A surprising result

The survey assessed respondents on their emotional responses to 100 of the top images from Reddit's /r/pics subreddit: 50 with captions, and 50 without. They were able to choose from a range of emotions belonging to the PAD emotional state model, a psychological model developed to describe and measure emotional states, to describe how they felt about the image presented in the survey.

The survey's respondents were English speakers from all over the world, and so the research team chose images which could be understood regardless of cultural background, avoiding references to pop culture or current events. Each of the images had thousands of upvotes and hundreds or thousands of comments, plus at least one million views on Imgur.

The list contained emotions ranging from love and admiration to relief, pity, remorse and hate. Although humour, a key component of viral imagery, is not represented by the PAD model, other emotions like happiness and satisfaction come close to expressing the same sentiment.

Andrea Lehr, brand relationship strategist at Fractl, said that the agency already knew that humorous content can create an “extremely positive emotional experience”, but that “we were interested in looking at more nuanced instances of viral content where it's not as clear why something became hugely popular.”

Fractl found that the top three emotional responses to the viral images in their survey were happiness, surprise and admiration.

Negative emotions were reported far less than positive emotions, with the bottom three responses being hate, reproach and resentment.

These results for the most part match up with the findings cited by Kohlben Vodden, founder of StoryScience, in a talk at a CMA Digital Breakfast on the science behind shareable content.

Vodden noted, referencing a study by Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman, that content with an overall positive sentiment will always be more shareable – hence the popularity of feel-good viral content websites like Upworthy and Thought Catalog.

However, Berger and Milkman also found that high-intensity negative emotions like anger also made content highly shareable.

This finding was not reflected in the study by Fractl, who found that anger was the sixth least likely emotion to be felt in response to the viral images they used, out of a possible 26 different emotional responses.

Complex emotions

Fractl's study also found that viral images are frequently emotionally complex, eliciting multiple emotional responses at the same time. Positive emotions along with surprise were found to result in massive shares – you only have to look at the recent 'Chewbacca mom' viral hit to see this in action.

As well as the initial emotional reaction, the survey asked participants to assess how pleasant each image made them feel, on a scale of 1 to 10. They were then asked to rate their levels of 'arousal' and 'dominance' in response to each image.

'Arousal' essentially measures the level of excitement and energy produced by emotions: anxiety, anger and excitement are high-arousal emotions, while sadness, relaxation and depression are low-arousal emotions.

'Dominance' measures the level of control that a person feels through their emotions. An emotion like anger is high-dominance, while fear is a submissive or low-dominance emotion, as it tends to result in feeling out of control.

Again, surprise was a recurring theme among the researchers' findings, which makes sense when you think about the natural of viral content: it often catches us out, is shocking or unexpected, which is what drives the urge to pass it along to everyone we know so that they can share in the amazement.

The study found that images which made people feel high levels of dominance and arousal were all accompanied by positive emotions, or positive emotions plus surprise. For images which caused high arousal and low dominance, the emotional responses tended to combine surprise with negative and/or positive emotions.

For instance, this image of a diver taking a selfie with a great white shark behind produced high arousal and low dominance, with emotions ranging from fear and surprise to admiration.

Low-arousal and low-dominance images resulted in a mixed bag of emotional responses, but surprise was almost always present. Boredom was also a frequent response to these images, indicating that not every surprising image is necessarily interesting!

How to increase your content's viral potential

So how can you put these findings into practice and increase the shareability of your content marketing? Fractl offered some key takeaways for marketers:

1. Combine positive emotions with surprise for huge sharing potential.

“Want people to share your content? Feel-good content is primed for social sharing,” said Fractl in their report on the results of the study. The research found that admiration and happiness had a strong correlation with high dominance, which helps drive people to share things.

Combining these with an element of surprise can help to magnify the positive emotions and spur users to pass along the content. With that said, the surprise needs to be genuine: clickbait headlines such as “You'll never believe…” which lead to unsurprising or boring content are quick to annoy users.

2. Pair 'low-arousal' emotions with admiration or surprise.

If your content is a bit of a downer, incorporate an element of surprise or admiration to increase its viral potential.

Fractl had previously assumed that 'high-arousal' emotions like excitement or anger were needed for content to go viral. From the study, however, they discovered that negative, low-arousal images which evoked images like sadness and depression could still go viral when paired with surprise or admiration.

A good example of this technique is 'The Song', Apple's famed Christmas advert from 2014:

'The Song' pairs a sad and wistful story with elements of surprise, admiration and hope, for an uplifting after-effect that makes the advert eminently shareable.

3. Play up high-arousal emotions in unsurprising, negative content.

Generally speaking, an element of surprise is also needed to make high-arousal negative content more shareable: most of the images in Fractl's study which received negative reactions were also rated as surprising.

Only two images provoked purely negative responses, and both of those made respondents feel very high-arousal negative emotions: anger, fear or distress. Therefore, it is possible to have negative content which is still shareable if it energises people in some way; but overall, positive and surprising content is still the clear winner if you want your content shared widely.

What can Medium's Creative Exchange bring to native advertising?

Last week, social publishing company Medium announced the launch of a programme that will allow its writers to partner with brands to create dedicated sponsored content: the Creative Exchange.

The Creative Exchange is by no means Medium's first foray into native advertising: in the past, it has produced a number of verticals in partnership with different brands, including BMW, Marriott and Samsung. But this is the first time that Medium has opened up native advertising for the wider community to take part in.

In its blog post announcing the new programme, Medium acknowledged that, “One of the things we've heard consistently is that our community wants a way to make money from their work on the platform. It takes effort to produce a piece of high-quality content and that effort should be rewarded.”

While this is undoubtedly true, the writers who called for Medium content to be monetised probably wanted the ability to earn money from the independent content they write, rather than to be paid to write sponsored content for a brand.

Still, there are no doubt plenty of others who will welcome the venture. But what can Medium contribute to the field of sponsored content, already crowded with publishers and platforms, that's particularly new? And what do brands stand to gain?

What can Medium bring to native advertising?

Medium has always been a slightly strange entity, whose exact nature is hard to pin down: it straddles the divide between publisher and network, between social and blogging; giving writers a space for their voice to be heard, but very much on Medium's terms.

“Medium's greatest asset is our community of writers and publishers,” the blog post which announced the Creative Exchange began. Clearly this is what Medium intends to be its main selling point as it expands its venture into native advertising: an established network of writers, many with huge followings, and readers who will eagerly consume writing published to the platform regardless of whether it is sponsored or not, as long as it is of the quality and type they have come to expect.

A piece of sponsored content on Medium, with branding clearly marked

Medium's blog post cites two past pieces of sponsored content as examples of what writing produced by the Creative Exchange is likely to look like. One is sponsored by Guardian, a life insurance company, the other by Upwork, a freelance marketplace.

Both are well-written and valuable pieces of content which don't read like advertising or even mention the sponsored brand by name (although they are both clearly marked as sponsored with logos above and below the piece).

Neither of them made me want to buy anything either, but then, the aims of native advertising are usually more subtle than that.

In many ways, Medium is exceedingly well-suited to native advertising, much more than other publishing platforms. For one thing, it's already heavily branded. Criticisms have been levelled against Medium for taking away creative control from writers who publish to its platform, denying them the ability to choose how their content looks and is offered to readers.

Publishing to Medium offers writers very little leeway, if any, to impose their own style on the content

The design, the layout, the branding is all very much Medium's; and so users who are happy with this arrangement are unlikely to object to a further level of branding being applied to their content. It seems unlikely that any devoted writers or readers, if they're content to use Medium as it is, will abruptly draw a line and say no, this amount of branding is a step too far.

So Medium can offer an engaged community of writers and readers among whom there is already a demand for some kind of monetisation, and an openness to sponsored branding. All points in its favour – but what else is Medium offering to brands in the deal?

How will brands benefit?

At the moment, Medium isn't opening up the Creative Exchange programme too widely to interested writers and publishers; the programme is currently in “closed beta”, and aspiring participants will need to add their details to a waiting list. But Medium is placing no such restriction on brands who want to take part. This makes sense, since Medium has writers in abundance, but the brands are where the real money lies.

Medium's approach to content publishing, that it simplifies the process by taking care of the unimportant details that no-one wants to concern themselves with (like design) is also the main thrust of its appeal to brands: it offers an all-in-one deal, “including writing, editing, project management, editorial strategy, publication creation, and publication branding.” In its bid, Medium plays up the fact that it can “manage the entire process for you, including publishing approved content from your brand account.”

Medium's native advertising aims to offer brands the whole package

Image by OpenclipartVectors on Pixabay, available via CC0

This is likely to be an appealing prospect for brands who are new to native advertising or don't have the time or the resources to micro-manage every aspect of the project. However, as with writers who publish to the Medium platform, there are drawbacks in the form of ownership and control. Medium is coy about the subject of brands owning the content produced via Creative Exchange, saying only that, “We have several different licenses available. We'll work with you to meet your needs. Contact us for more information.”

There is a lot to be said for publishing to a platform which, as I covered above, comes with an in-built community of readers eager to consume that content. In many respects it puts Medium ahead of native ad providers like Outbrain and Taboola which have to depend on luring readers away from platforms where they are already reading content, with gimmicky headlines and psychological tricks.

Brands are already faced with an overabundance of platforms demanding their content

Image via Wikimedia Commons, available via CC BY-SA 3.0

But there's a drawback to it, too: brands are already faced with an overabundance of platforms to which they could publish content, each with their own appeal. Medium boasts one engaged community of users, but Facebook has another, as does Twitter, and Google, and Snapchat, and every other contender which is throwing its hat into this expanding ring.

No matter how good the offer is, ultimately brands have to make a choice as to how many channels are worth spreading their presence across. And if they are a brand which already has an established presence on Medium, why pay for what they are already getting for free?

To an extent, Medium's all-in-one approach does solve that problem, by allowing brands to reach an extra audience without having to expend the time and effort that they would normally need to invest in publishing to a new platform: Medium will take care of all of that. But brands will still have to decide whether the exact audience they want to reach is present within Medium's walled garden, and if it isn't, they are likely to take their business elsewhere.

Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family: Here's Everything You Need to Know

The goal of Facebook's News Feed is to show people the stories that are most relevant to them. That's no small task when you have over 1.65 billion people to keep happy and over 1,500 stories per day to prioritize for each of those individual users. Now, Facebook has announced one of their most significant News Feed shuffles.

On Wednesday, Facebook shared that the News Feed algorithm is going to shift so that it will more favorably promote content posted by the friends and family of users.

These changes are likely to mean that content posted by brands and publishers will show up less prominently in News Feeds. In the announcement, the company explained their priority is keeping you connected to the people, places and things you want to be connected to - starting with the people you are friends with on Facebook.

Back in April 2015, Facebook made a similar algorithm update trying to ensure that stories posted directly by the friends you care about will be higher up in News Feed, so you are less likely to miss them. But based on feedback, Facebook understands that people are still worried about missing important updates from the friends.

This update is likely to affect all types of content posted by brands and publishers, including links, videos, live videos and photos. Facebook said it anticipates that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for many Pages who's traffic comes directly through Page posts.

The update will have less of an impact, however, if a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it. Links or Page content shared by friends or content your friends interact with frequently will still appear higher in the feed.

For example, the post from my personal Facebook account (on the right below) would be more likely to appear above the post from Buffer's Page (on the left) in the News Feed:

What do users expect from the News Feed?

Facebook's success is built on getting people the stories that matter to them most.

To help make sure you don't miss the friends and family posts you are likely to care about, Facebook try to put those posts toward the top of your News Feed. The News Feed learns and adapts over time based on the content you interact with the most, too. For example, if you tend to like photos from your sister, they'll start putting her posts closer to the top of your feed so you won't miss what she posted while you were away.

Facebook research has also shown that, after friends and family, people have two other strong expectations when they come to News Feed:

• The News Feed should inform. People expect the stories in their feed to be meaningful to them - and we have learned over time that people value stories that they consider informative. Something that one person finds informative or interesting may be different from what another person finds informative or interesting - this could be a post about a current event, a story about your favorite celebrity, a piece of local news, or a recipe. Facebook's algorithm is always trying to better understand what is interesting and informative to you personally, so those stories appear higher up in your feed.


• The News Feed should entertain. Facebook also found that people enjoy their feeds as a source of entertainment. For some people, that's following a celebrity or athlete; for others,  it's watching Live videos and sharing funny photos with their friends. Again, the company's News Feed algorithm tries to understand and predict what posts on Facebook you find entertaining to make sure you don't miss out on those.

The makeup of a successful social network (and why this update is essential for Facebook)

Despite its venture into publishing and partnerships with large news and entertainment brands, at its heart, Facebook is still a place for friends. And without solidifying our connections with those closest to us, Facebook could face struggles to keep its 1.65 billion monthly active users coming back.

To understand the inner-workings of social networks and what makes us keep using them, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology studied networks like Friendster and Myspace with the goal of figuring out what factors can be detrimental to a social network.

As explained over at Wired:

They found that when the time and effort (the costs) associated with being a member of a social network outweigh the benefits, then a decline in users becomes likely. If one person leaves, their friends become more likely to leave and as more people leave, this can lead to a cascading collapse in membership.

Networks like Friendster and Myspace were the Facebook of their day. Both had tens, and eventually hundreds, of millions of registered users, but what the study found is that the bonds between users weren't particularly strong. Many users had very few close connections, and it appears there's a direct correlation between how connected we feel to our friends and family and our affiliation with each network.

If Facebook users are worried about missing important updates from the people they care about most, then their affiliation with the network could begin to decline as they find other ways to stay connected. And once user begins to leave, or become un-engaged, it could have a waterfall effect on the network. David Garcia, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, explains:

“First the users in the outer cores start to leave, lowering the benefits of inner cores, cascading through the network towards the core users, and thus unraveling.”

You can see how a social network unravels in the below graphic (Friendster is used in the image):

For Facebook, the News Feed is the most integral part of their product to make us feel connected with those we care about. And as such, it's important for Facebook to keep the content we want to see the most at the top of the feed.

How will this update impact business Pages?

The changes will affect all types of content posted by Pages, including links, videos, live videos and photos.

In their “News Feed Values” shared alongside this announcement, Facebook made it clear that content from friends and family will come first. And the company also highlighted the importance of authentic communication and being inclusive of all perspectives and view points without favoring specific kinds of sources - or ideas.

We expect that this update may cause organic post reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages. The impact will vary for every page and will greatly depend on the composition of your audience or the way in which your content is shared on Facebook. For example, if a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it, there will be less of an impact than if the majority of your traffic comes directly through Page posts.

As with all Facebook algorithm updates, it may take a little time to determine exactly what will continue to work and how to increase organic reach (though Facebook feels like it's shifting more towards a pay-to-play market for businesses). 

One tactic that could become increasingly important is the amplification of brand content. With Facebook favoring content shared by users rather than Pages, it feels essential to find new and innovative ways to encourage your audience to share your content directly to Facebook. Ensuring your content is discoverable away for the Facebook News Feed could be another key play as well.

It also feels important to keep a focus on what people are looking for from the News Feed. As mentioned earlier, aside from friends and family, Facebook users turn to the News Feed to be informed and entertained. With those goals in mind, it's worth thinking about how the content you create for Facebook can satisfy those desires.

Over to you

In their announcement, Facebook says their work is “only 1 percent finished” so it feels like there are plenty more twists and turns ahead for the News Feed.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this update and how it may affect the way you use Facebook and the types of content your share? Please feel free to leave a comment below and I'm excited to continue the conversation with you.