A Viral Story Must Evoke Emotional Responses
Research reveals insights that can help you write more viral stories
Most of the bloggers and vloggers quit before seeing a single story or video that goes viral. However, the work of a small minority — people like John Lee Dumas, Pat Flynn, Michelle Gardner, and Lindsay Ostrom — consistently goes viral over the years, developing a huge fan following in the process. The uncertainty of going viral forces me to think if there is a credible way to go viral. Can we reliably have a new insight into this issue?
Science provides us with the tools to explore this question: why some of the ads, videos, and stories go viral, and others don’t?
A study — conducted by Katherine Milkman and Jonah Berger of Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania — sheds light on this point.
When a story or a video establishes its worth and starts to spread extensively from one place to another, the process is called diffusion — in journalistic jargon. If the information and ideas expressed in the stories impact our lives significantly, we tend to share more.
In the Wharton School study, the scientists tried to understand the psychological reason behind the diffusion of stories. They read and analyzed the New York Times articles that went viral in the last three months. They concluded that the emotions expressed in the stories had a lot to do with their virality.
Their study revealed that positive stories had a higher chance of going viral as compared to negative ones. But the relationship between diffusion and the emotions expressed in the story was complicated — how good you felt after reading a story did not ensure virality.
Virality is associated with the feelings of vigor, energy, and tension that a story elicits. The stories that evoke feelings of positive awe or anger and anxiety go viral more often. If an article does not stir emotions or a video evokes sorrow, it has a lesser chance of going viral.
If a story is more surprising, absorbing, or practically useful, and it appeals to emotions as well, it is more likely to go viral. How prominently the story is featured also changes the chances of it going viral but only if it evokes the right emotions.
The study supports the idea that if a story elicits stronger emotions, it diffuses more quickly and reaches its viral potential early.
Takeaways
I feel that understanding human emotions is as necessary for bloggers and vloggers as for novel writers to write viral posts and make viral videos. But bloggers and vloggers have to create an emotional impact with fewer words and in lesser time.
I see now why all of the successful bloggers and vloggers do crazy things all the time. They clearly express their anger and anxiety in their words, show fights, and their shopping sprees — to elicit the desired emotional responses from their audience. Guys like PewDiePie, Whindersson Nunes Batista, and Badabun go nuts to get more views on Youtube.
This successful minority has learned with hit and trial the exact lesson that the more their audience can feel, the more they can relate with their work.
