[Infographic] What Makes Content Go Viral

Let’s assume that creating high-quality, useful, relevant, and meaningful content is the key to your business success (well, that’s a fact, not an assumption). And, content marketing is one of the ways to improve search engine rankings, user engagement on your website, brand visibility and to get shares and engagement on social media.

So, you build a great content, share on social media, optimize it for search engines and take a deep breath that it will be going to give you many eyeballs rolling on your content.

Sounds great, Isn’t it?

But in reality, with ever-changing customer preferences, search engine and social media constant algorithm changes and increase in content produced daily, the social media sharing and the links to content are falling, according to the latest 2018 content marketing report from Buzzsumo.

So what do you do? How do you make sure that your content is getting shared, liked and linked by users?

Making content spread like fission through social shares and linking can make you a success overnight. To make your content go viral requires understanding the psychology behind what kind of content people like and why they share content.

A study titled “What Makes Online Content Viral” by Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman found that content that evokes high-arousal positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions are more viral. Content that evokes low-arousal, or deactivating, emotions (e.g., sadness) is less viral.

The infographic from Outgrow beautifully explains the science behind content virality that you can use to make your content marketing campaign a success.

Consider asking these questions –

• Is your content connect with your audience emotionally? (joy, inspiration, laughter, excitement, surprise, etc.)
• Is your content well-distributed on all social and content sharing platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit?
• Is your content easy to read, share on social media and link to other websites?
• Is your content allows the reader’s interaction by letting them put their thoughts in the blog post as a comment?
• Are you using visual elements such as images, videos for better interaction?