HOW WE MAKE STUFF GO VIRAL-Bizarre News

Stories.

If you are fortunate enough to have a popular website, it is fairly easy to make something that a lot

of people see. You just put it on your front page. It is slightly more difficult (but still not very difficult)

to make something that people will click on. You write a grabby headline, or pair it with a thumbnail

that stands out and demands attention like strange stories from around the world

But if you want to make something that people will share – something that a reader, after coming to

your front page and clicking on your clever headline and reading all the way to the bottom, feels

compelled to tweet or put on their Facebook page or email to a group of friends who share the same

interests – the whole process gets a lot more complicated (and a lot more interesting).

At viralpursuit, we've made a science of trying to figure out exactly what goes into that process. Our

interest in trying to make things that people want to share has helped us grow to over 10 million

monthly unique visitors, 75% of whom come to our site from social sources, such as Facebook,

Twitter and Pinterest.

The first thing we learned about viral content is never, under any

circumstances, say the words "viral content". Because it sounds like a vomit

bag. You'd be surprised by how many people break that rule.

The second thing we've learned is that the things people like to share the

most are things about themselves. This isn't as vain as it sounds. Sharing

something about yourself is often a statement about what you believe in,

what causes or values you align yourself with, and what, in particular, you

love and identify with. And although it's true that people's motives for

making identity statements online aren't always quite so lofty as saying:

"Here I stand. I can do no other," it's worth remembering that even a selfie

can be raised to an art form (as you will know if you've ever had the good

sense to Google the term "extreme selfies") and even a bizarres news

stories.

But the lesson here for an online publication is that on today's internet,

your readers are your publishers – they are the people who decide which of

your articles or lists or quizzes or infographics (another piece of jargon

that's worth avoiding because it sounds like homework) to share with their

friends. They are more likely to do that if the act of sharing helps them to

make a strong statement about who they are.

The third thing that we've learned about viral content is that people are

more likely to share something if they have a strong, positive emotional

response to it. A 2010 study of the New York Times "most emailed" list

found the articles that made the list tended to fall into one of four

categories: awe-inspiring, emotional, positive or surprising. And the lesson

from this isn't so much that people like to feel feelings when they engage

with a piece of content, it is that when it works – when the thing actually

makes them cry or exclaim or feel inspired or shocked or happy – they want

to share that experience with others.

This is a good thing for the internet, which has emerged from a dark period

of clever headlines written specifically to trick Googlers into landing on a

page that may not be particularly valuable to them into a vastly more social

space; one in which online publishers, who now need to compete for "likes"

rather than clicks, must focus on creating things that people genuinely find

engaging enough to share. Funny stories in the news will make people share

your stories with their friends.