Crafting successful content for social media takes a lot of hard work and insight. That being said, you also can’t discount the impact that pure luck has: sometimes, random posts go viral because the stars line up and the timing’s great. In the meantime, what seems like objectively great memes might sometimes get lost in people’s feeds.
Good and bad luck are unavoidable. You never know what might resonate with your loyal followers, target audience… or complete strangers on the internet. So, it’s best to keep trying new things until something works instead of getting upset that your first batch of memes didn’t quite make you a social media superstar (yet!).
Instead of fretting about luck, digital creators ought to focus on the things they can actually control. Things like the quality of their images, the fonts they use, the brief-but-punchy captions, posting consistently, carving out a niche for their chosen topics, and testing out new formats.
Going viral might be part science, part art, and part luck, but if you consistently share engaging, entertaining, valuable content, sooner or later, you should get people’s attention. Adding a dash of relatable humor never hurts, either! But it’s best to focus on relatability, not just being witty.
Speaking with the team at The Journal of Consumer Research, Marketing expert Jonah Berger at the Wharton School said there are six principles that drive what people talk about and share.
These six things make up the acronym STEPPS, and the letters stand for social currency, triggers, emotion, public, practical value, and stories. For example, in terms of social currency, the more something makes someone look good, the more likely they are to pass it on.
Furthermore, Berger explained that something that’s top-of-mind will become tip-of-the-gonue. People also tend to share the things that arouse their emotions, whether they’re positive, like excitement or humor, or negative, like anger and anxiety. Moreover, human beings imitate what they see others do in public.
Content that’s practical and useful is also shared more, as people want to help others. And content that is part of a broader narrative can be more successful than when it’s just, for instance, a straightforward ad.
That’s not to say that if you do all of those things, something will become a viral sensation. However, it can improve your content’s average performance.
According to Listen+Learn Research, because people are emotional beings, the virality of content depends a lot on whether or not it can trigger specific emotional responses. Three emotional triggers are particularly effective in getting people to respond: awe, laughter, and amusement.
Novelty is also a major factor in virality. New and unusual content, including different meme formats, is likely to catch people’s attention. On the flip side, even though old formats can be successful, they might eventually grow stale, and your followers will migrate to other groups and creators that feel fresher and more innovative.
Meanwhile, some of the main reasons why people share content are to grow and nourish their relationships, feel more involved in the world, bring valuable and entertaining content to the people they know, define themselves to others, and spread the word about the causes they care about.
