Image credit: Icerko Lýdia via Wikipedia
What causes some content to go viral while most posts are ignored? As you might suspect, emotion is a key factor, but not how you might think. It’s true that people abundantly share positive, feel-good posts, but new research reveals that reasons why some go viral involve more than just one emotion.
Where emotions fall within the Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) scale, which psychologists use to categorize emotions, can predict if content goes viral, according to research by Jacopo Staiano of Sorbonne University and Marco Guerini of Trento Rise.
“These results are relevant not only for social science researchers interested in understanding the factors behind virality phenomena, but also for marketing and industry people as they can be very valuable in contexts such as content marketing and native advertising,” the researchers state. Public relations should also take note.
The Combination of Characteristics
The scale rates individual emotions based on a combination of three characteristics:
- Valence is the positivity or negativity of an emotion. Happiness has a positive valence; fear has a negative valence.
- Arousal ranges from excitement to relaxation. Anger is a high-arousal emotion; sadness is low-arousal.
- Dominance ranges from submission to feeling in control. Emotions that people have little control over, such as fear, is low-dominance. Emotion that people have more choice over, such as admiration, is high-dominance.
In the study, readers assigned emotional scores to 65,000 articles on two news sites, and researchers compared the scores to articles that received large numbers of comments and shares. High-arousal emotions, such as anger and happiness, combined with low-dominance emotions like fear received the most comments.
Articles that gained the most shares elicited strong feelings of dominance, such as inspiration or admiration.
Both Positive and Negative Emotions
“Emotional valence was less-connected to virality, with the viral stories having both negative and positive valences. However, the researchers did find that negative emotions contributed to higher virality,” summarizes a trio of Fractl marketing experts in a Harvard Business Review article.
In its own study, Fractl surveyed about 400 people on their emotional responses to 100 of the images on Reddit’s r/pics community that had received thousands of upvotes and hundreds or thousands of comments. It scored the responses using the Pleasure, Arousal, Dominance (PAD) emotional state model, which is similar to the VAD scale.
It found that viral content tends to be surprising, emotionally complex or extremely positive. It also hits the right combination of arousal and dominance.
If arousal is high enough, viral content can be primarily negative. High-arousal emotions such as fear or anger are necessary for negative content that is not surprising.
Sad content can still be viral if it includes a strong element of surprise or admiration. Images could still go viral even if they did not incite high-arousal emotions. Images could be copiously shared if they evoked negative, low-arousal emotions, such as sadness or depression, but were also surprising or inspiring.
“Research on viral emotions continues to prove that going viral is not a matter of luck, as was previously thought, but rather is a matter of creating a powerful emotional experience,” the Fractl team concludes. “Marketers who understand how to strike the right emotional chords with their messaging can greatly increase their chances of viral success.”
Bottom Line: Crafting viral content is more complicated that just making heart-warming cat memes. Creating content that audiences respond to and share calls for understanding the different combination of emotions. Marketers who understand those mixtures are more likely to exponentially extend their reach.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
