Viral News on Social Media

Viral news is defined as networked news stories that spread online mostly through social media in a much faster and wider manner than other news stories, and this study investigates the elements that make a news viral on two social media platforms. The goal is to fill a gap in the literature on viral news, especially on social media news as previous communication studies mostly focused on news sharing habits on the news organizations’ websites as well as editors’ news selection criteria. The top 50 news stories are selected for this study by examining the most viewed videos on the Guardian, the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal’s YouTube channels as well as their most retweeted news stories. The study introduces a mixed model to examine viral news, borrowing from previous studies on emotions and others that focused on newsworthiness. The results indicate that social media news readers prefer to read and share overwhelmingly positive news, while social significance and unexpectedness in news stories are the most appealing viral news elements.

The prerequisite to getting your content shared widely is to write compelling content.

There's just no replacement for that. No gimmicks, tricks, or sleight-of-hand to trick users into making crappy clickbait go viral.

But once you’ve written a well-crafted, useful article, how do you make sure it sticks out among all the noise?

For those of you with content you’re proud of, I’m excited to introduce you to a formula you can use to increase the chances your content goes viral.

Here are 10 ingredients that will help increase the shareability of your content:
1) Long form content gets more social shares than short form content.

We've all heard stats on how more people are consuming content through their mobile devices. This means you should write short, bite-sized content to satisfy your readers's short attention spans, right?

We analyzed the top 10% most shared articles to see if this was the case... and according to our research, the opposite is true.

On average, long-form content actually gets shared more than short-form content.