Humans are a tricky species to understand, there’s no doubt about it, and a study by Twitter has highlighted just how unpredictable we can be.
Marketers have no doubt spent many hours trying to come up with the winning formula for what makes an item “go viral” on the internet, but it seems there just isn’t one single recipe.
Twitter recently conducted a study of three subjects that went viral on its pages, in an aim to understand just what it is that makes the general public tick.
Twitter UK’s Gordon MacMillan reported the results in his blog post and for all you marketing gurus out there, they may make disappointing reading.
The subjects studied were Ryan Gosling’s series of “Won’t eat cereal” videos; astronaut Chris Hadfield’s performance of Space Oddity; and Dove’s Real Beauty marketing campaign.
MacMillan wrote: “One of the key things we learnt from looking closely at these three is that videos don’t go viral in the same way.
“While some ignite, and spread like wildfire across the web, the growth of others is much more measured, like ripples spreading across a lake.”
However, he did come up with a few suggestions that may help your company get the hits you are looking for:
- Tweets that contain a video are much more likely to be retweeted, replied to or mentioned in another post (42% of tweets containing videos are shared in some way).
- Latch on to promoted tweets or trends to help get your message out there, with the help of hashtags or key words.
- Use Vine to create your videos as these are instantly shareable.
Happy tweeting!
https://blog.twitter.com/2013/how-videos-go-viral-on-twitter-three-stories