25 May Breaking Down Virality: An Analysis of 4 Posts That Went Viral
Jennifer Johnson
Trying to go viral? It seems like everyone is these days.
That’s because having a post take off can benefit your brand’s reputation tremendously — just look at how the blue and black dress (or was it white and gold?) affectedBuzzFeed’s traffic.
While the success of a viral post often hinges on chance, my team at Alexa set out to uncover some of the common characteristics of viral content to help others inform their content strategies.
In doing so, we examined four “viral” posts using our competitive intelligence tool to analyze website traffic, and BuzzSumo and SharedCount to analyze total social media shares. It’s also worth mentioning that we chose to focus on smaller sites for the sake of this analysis to get a better idea of how one viral post can affect traffic, reach, and page rank.
Here’s some of what we learned …
Measuring the Effects of Virality: An Analysis of 4 Unique Viral Posts
1) “Dad Sings Anti-Bullying Song to Daughter”
Faithtap.com — a social website with interesting and inspiring videos — shared a video of a dad singing an anti-bullying song to his daughter. Within a couple of months, the site’s global ranking had jumped by 43%.
Takeaways:
- Including a strong emotional hook in your content can help increase the chance for viral success.
- Knowing which emotional themes resonate most with your audience and weaving those into your content is important.
- Utilizing videos will help grab the audience’s attention fast and create a strong emotional response.
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