Viral Content: Get Emotional

A study published in the Journal of Marketing Research found content that elicits the emotions “awe”, “surprise” or “anger” was 28% more likely to go viral.

BRIAN'S TAKE

If you want your content to go viral, there’s one thing you need to keep in mind:

“Sharing content is an emotional decision” — Tweet This Quote

In other words, the more emotionally stirred up someone gets, the more likely they are to share.

And Dr. Berger found that 3 specific emotions — awe, surprise and anger — stimulated the most shares.

Here’s a real-world example of a post that presses all three of these emotional buttons:

Google’s 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List

Because the post is stirs up people’s emotions, it’s generated 12,347 shares and links from 935 domains.

Let’s dive into the emotions from this post that got people all riled up.

Emotion #1: Awe

Like I mentioned in item #10 from this list, long form content makes people feel a sense of “awe”.

And considering this post clocks in at 5600 words, it definitely fits the bill.

Also, I didn’t just list out each ranking factor.

I included a brief description for each and every factor on the list.

This insane level of detail=more awe.

Emotion #2: Surprise

The fact that someone sat down to list out 200 ranking factors surprised a lot of people.

(I even surprised myself. That post took WEEKS to put together)

Emotion #3: Anger

I didn’t intend to upset anyone with my Google Ranking Factors post.

But you know how people online can be…

Even though I clearly stated that the ranking factors are “controversial” and “speculation”…

…some people still got bent out of shape.

In fact, a lot of those angry people shared my post to just say, “I hate this post!”.

And those “hate shares” led to more traffic for me.