What Makes Online Content Viral ?

 What Makes Online Content Viral?

What Makes Online Content Viral?

Option No:1

Why are certain pieces of online content (e.g., advertisements, videos, news articles) more viral than others? This article takes a psychological approach to understanding diffusion. Using a unique data set of all the New York Times articles published over a three-month period, the authors examine how emotion shapes virality. The results indicate that positive content is more viral than negative content, but the relationship between emotion and social transmission is more complex than valence alone. Virality is partially driven by physiological arousal. Content that evokes high-arousal positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions is more viral. Content that evokes low-arousal, or deactivating, emotions (e.g., sadness) is less viral. These results hold even when the authors control for how surprising, interesting, or practically useful content is (all of which are positively linked to virality), as well as external drivers of attention (e.g., how prominently content was featured). Experimental results further demonstrate the causal impact of specific emotion on transmission and illustrate that it is driven by the level of activation-induced. Taken together, these findings shed light on why people share content and how to design more effective viral marketing campaigns.

Option No:2

Why are certain pieces of online content more viral than others? This article takes a psychological approach to understanding diffusion. Using a unique dataset of all the New York Times articles published over a three-month period, the authors examine the link between integral effect (i.e., the emotion evoked) and whether the content is highly shared. Results suggest a strong relationship between emotion and virality but indicate that this link is more complex than mere valence alone. Positive content is more viral (than negative content), as is content that inspires awe. But while sad content is less viral, anger or anxiety-inducing articles are both more likely to make the paper’s most emailed list. These results hold controlling for how surprising, interesting, or practically useful content is (all of which are positively linked to virality), as well as external drivers of attention (e.g., how prominently articles were featured). The findings shed light on why people share online content, provide insight into how to design effective viral marketing campaigns, and underscore the importance of individual-level psychological processes in shaping collective outcomes.