In the earlier days of social media for a piece of content to go viral, it meant that,

People on twitter would copy the tweet and re-paste it with a RT sign. Or similar on Facebook.

It was all manual. So, the content had to be that good. Moreover, the platform did not prompt sharing in anyway – I mean there was no way to do it, except manual way.

Take Instagram for example, to share a post on it I have to actually use a different app to accomplish it. Imagine if we had a one click share button. Wouldn’t shares increase? And become more a part of the Instagram culture?

So earlier sharing content wasn’t a platform culture. On twitter it became an organic part of people culture and then over time the platform adopted it and provided an automated share option. Sharing is now just a quick click, so much so that sometimes I even click it by mistake! And of course Facebook has also adopted it, with similar impact on platform culture.

So virality became a bit easier as platforms started facilitating it.

In reality, it actually also got more diluted because of increased clutter.

Now the times have moved further ahead.

The other day I saw one of most useless Facebook post. It basically showed me a list of people that one of my friends added as friends. Imagine that half your Facebook feed is about 5 new friends that another FB friend of yours added. ^-^

The way LinkedIn does actually. 🙂

Twitter has another similarly annoying (at times) feature – favorites. At any given time at least a few tweets on the timeline are tweets favorited by the people I follow on Twitter. And I can’t ‘Undo’ them, the way I can Undo Retweets. At least not yet.

Twitter Favorites: Higher Content Visibilty

For content to go viral, now you can just entice a lot of people to favorite your tweet. Or get people to comment on your Facebook post. Because when a Facebook friend comments on a post it often comes up on my feed.

Basically, platforms are more and more geared up to cause greater reach for your content. You can take this into consideration – for example you needn’t aim for content sharing but something that people want to favorite or comment on.

It is a nuance, and not anything game changing. But I find it fascinating.

It is also because of increased information clutter that virality seems harder now a days. But the platforms, they are in for the kill, to increase content visibility. Which is also a cyclical phenomena. One causes the other and vice versa 😉

And as usual good to think niche and high relevance of your target group and brand message connect. And let revenue numbers be the guide.

 
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