6 Research-Based Insights About Viral Content | Cision
If you’re like me, you probably greet articles about content virality with a healthy dose of skepticism. Of course anyone writing content or posting on social media hopes for the largest possible distribution, but the articles that purport to tell you how to make content go viral are oftentimes less useful than they intend to be.
One of the most prolific researchers on the topic of virality and content perpetuation is Wharton Marketing Professor Jonah Berger, author of “Contagious: How Things Catch On.” One of the great aspects of Berger’s work is that even the most counter-intuitive conclusions that he proposes are supported by sound research (examples of his counter-intuitive findings being assertions that offline word-of-mouth is far more prevalent than online word-of-mouth, or that Cheerios is discussed more frequently than Disneyland).
For me, Berger’s research is far more actionable and thoughtful than 99 percent of the stuff that’s been written about viral content, so I wanted to find out who else is researching virality and what we can learn from their insight.
What I want to do with this post is to explore what research has been done that can help content marketers and communication professionals better understand how content goes viral. I’m not sure that it’s all explicitly actionable, but I think a lot of these insights give a better sense of what viral content looks like and how people act on it than is usually shared.