How To Create Viral Content

Most of the time when a viral content takeoff happens no one even understands why, it just happens. A friend of mine posted a pizza photo on his FaceBook, the next thing he knew there were 10,000 views. Just because it looked yummy. We can analyze this kind of viral happenings and use them in our own marketing.

We want something viral

Almost every meeting concerning marketing strategy someone brings up viral content marketing: Inbound marketing of this type is one of the most cost-effective ways to generate very high levels of awareness and make sales. Although every brand has dreams of millions of people seeing its content, most would argue that a viral hit is simply too difficult to plan for — and nearly impossible to replicate on a regular basis.

Research has shown that virality is closely connected to your website content’s ability to trigger specific emotional responses from the users. In another study, marketing researchers examined how certain emotions would encourage massive shares. They found that page content goes viral when it brings out an emotional response that meets certain levels of interest and dominance, these two dimensions are used to categorize our emotions in this research example.

We Can Take A Closer Look:

Interest ranges all the way from incredible excitement to relaxation. Being bored, for example, is a low-interest emotion, while anger is high-interest. The dominating feeling describes whether you feel that you are in control. For example, fear is low-dominating, while admiring something has high dominance because it’s an emotion someone has more control over.

My associate here at Glenn Website Design wanted to figure out what were the top emotional combinations of viral content. We used Reddit for our study. — Reddit has a trove of strange viral content. We took the top images from the r/pics community group and used the Pleasure-Interest-Dominating model to analyze what were the most frequent emotional responses. In this study we found there were three ideal emotional combinations for viral content, which you can see below:

So what does this mean for your content marketing strategy? I will use examples from two brands that created their own viral marketing campaigns:

1. Any content which is positive can be ready for huge social exposure…go viral
   One of the biggest takeaways from our study was that viral happenings have a very close relationship with positive emotions. The top 10 emotional respons types are listed below:

Admiration, happiness, and love were the most common positive emotions to appear in viral actions that took place. Particularly when the dominating situation was high. Feelings, where the study group is dominating, have been proven to generate much higher social shares, so if you want your content to be in everyone’s news feed, produce something which will give your audience the feeling they are in charge.

The Ad Council ran a live test “Love Has No Labels.” The idea was quite simple for the study: Through an X-ray machine, people strolling by saw different sets of skeletons showing various signs of affection to one another before revealing themselves — this was demonstrating whether love is love and challenging each viewer to rethink their bias for what love is

The video from the Ad Council was a huge success. By sourcing highly shareable feelings like happiness and love, the marketing campaign earned more than 57 million YouTube views in a very short time.

1. Also negative content can also be successful for viral responses sometimes as long as it taps into high-interest emotions like disgust. Although no one cares to see something they don’t like, the research shows that negative content still has high viral potential, sometimes — it just needs the right trigger of a high-interest emotion like anger or disgust. This is especialy true with children photos.

Consider this campaign which asked various designers located in 18 different countries to use Photoshop to make a female model more attractive looking using to their own country’s standards of beauty. The resulting images produced were shocking, to say the least. The images reinforced the idea that human body image issues are felt around the world, which helped the project earn thousands of viral shares.

In conclusion, a viral take-off is the product of a highly felt emotional experience. So the next time your boss asks you to produce something viral, remember that it is possible in the right setting. Researchers continue to prove that virality isn’t something left only to chance; it is actually the end result of your audience’s ability to make a strong, emotional connection with the content of your website.

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