The big topic of the day is how and why videos or pictures go viral. Everyone these days wants to be famous and post things that they thing is going to get a lot of likes but it ends up failing and they get frustrated. We read a little bit about what the word virality meant and it means the tendency of an image, video, or piece of information to be circulated rapidly and widely from one internet user to another, which means to be viral in some way. Growing up in today's society, I find it easier to go viral then for someone growing up back in the day. The reason I believe so is obvious. We have grown up with so many resources that allow our post to be viewed by many people, including people that we don't even know and haven't even met before. People from the the past generations did not have the technology that we have today and their form of "viral" might be way different then what we know it as.
Why do certain things go viral and what are those types of things? After reading an Business insider article, it says that the barrier to entry for creating and publishing content is at an all time low. This means that social media distributors are always having new content coming in and therefor we gravitate towards all of the feed that people are sharing. This makes us very curious as to what is going on and we tend to look into it even more. For marketers, the whole point is to go viral and get as many people as they can to share and see the content that the post. First, you have to see what type of things people are sharing and what they are interested in. The top topics that are being shared these days are the news, humor posts, opinion based posts, how to's, warning/alerts, and lastly fiction posts. According to these statistics, people who view shared content are 15% more likely to enjoy it more, then if they were to find the information out themselves. This means using more interactive content in your post lead you to gaining more attention as it gets consumers more excited that they feel more involved.
Why do we share certain content? According to Outgrow outgrown the reasons we tend to share things is to connect to someone over a shared interest, to promote a product that they believe is useful for people, to be involved in a current trend or event, to be the first to tell a friend about an event or product, to share something about themselves, to socialize with friends online, to promote good cause, to demonstrate their own knowledge on a subject, to start an online conversation, and to gain opinions from their online friends. All of these reasons lead individuals to share the content that is on their feed. There are also factors that trigger virality that consist of hope, happiness, joy, excitement, affection, surprise, pleasure,delight,etc. Do not get it twisted, negative feeling also bring people to share with remarks of disagreements and hatred toward certain topics and thus could bring lots of conversations which lead to a possibility of the post or video to gain more recognition throughout social media. We also need to realize the times that the majority of people are on their phones because that plays a big role on weather or not people see your post or video. I don't know the exact time but from what I do, I am on my phone a lot from the hours of 6 and midnight.
Psychology plays a role in why things go viral. Our minds are sick of seeing the same thing roll up on our time line, This allows things that are new and that are not usual, tend to get more attention leading to virality. Another psychology aspect is that humans are obsessed with new information and are really interested in the world around them. Social media helps the world find the solutions to their curiosity with just one click and that makes us feel the need to click on everything that we are interested in to find answers. As life goes on and generations get older, no matter what people will always be curious so making people more curious allows for the opportunity to get action on your posts.
The moral of the article and what I am trying to say is that it does not matter how hard or how long you work on creating content when it comes to today's society in the social media world. You need to do your research on what people enjoy to see or what people will want to talk about or interact with. I'm not saying that it is an easy thing to do because trust me, I've tried myself to go viral and my stuff seems to not reach my expectations. Find out what people enjoy or even dislike to start conversation, post it, and hopefully your chances of becoming viral shoot above and beyond.
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