The goal of every digital marketing professional is to create viral content that sweeps the world wide web and drives abundant amounts of traffic to their business. Going viral is a buzz worthy term and unless you have lived in remote regions of the world you know exactly how important viral content can be. As entrepreneurs and business owners it is very important to stay current with digital marketing trends and do the best you can to include strategies to drive your business into the future. Working with Wazala we come across businesses of all types and sizes and each and every one could benefit from viral content. But how does something become viral in the first place? Is it luck, chance, or something else?
University of Pennsylvania professor and author of the book Contagious: Why Things Catch On, Jonah Berger says, “There is a science behind why people share. It’s not chance, and it’s not random.” Berger has studied viral content and human behavior for years and has developed several properties that viral content share. His properties are known by the acronym STEPPS. Let’s look at each STEPPS property a bit closer.
Social Currency: This is the sharing of content that makes people look good. Maybe its a new feature, job title, or award.
Triggers: These are the topics and subjects that come off the top of your mind. These can be click-whir type instances where you see a topic and it immediately causes a reaction in you.
Emotion and Public: These content pieces play on our natural feelings of belonging to a group and how emotions can drive actions. For example, your friend posts an article about a child who has terminal cancer but wants to use his illness to raise money for other children with the same situation. The emotional reaction that a story like that has causes a large amount of people to share, comment and engage. It’s highly emotional and public.
Practical Value: This type of content is fairly straight forward. If your content has real world value to a large group of people then it has a high likely hood of being shared. Like an article with information about a new email virus going around and how you can avoid it.
Stories: This content has entertainment value and isn’t generally formatted as professional business communication. Stories and be relatively casual tweets or status updates that seem like idle chit chat but also have relevant business application.
Give these properties some time to sink in and see how you can implement them into your business communication. Let me know how things are working out.
