Contagious Content

Objective

Despite a wealth of existing metrics helping to quantify social activity; brands continue to struggle to understand the motivations behind why people share their content online. Call it gossip, word of mouth or citizen journalism, the fact remains that digital content of all kinds regularly breaks and spreads through the ether of social media. It’s vital that content providers understand how contagion works and how it can be utilised to best effect. We set out to demonstrate what makes content contagious.

Method

Contagious Content has been a journey for us that started back in December 2012. A journey that has seen us move through five key stages of research from concept initiation and ideas labs, through hypotheses generation, qualitative testing, quantitative beta testing and finally alpha testing alongside our development partner Yahoo.

Results

We have developed, refined and validated a framework for producers to consider when creating content that they want to go viral. We have identified five key driving factors and understand the importance of imagery, demographics and social currency in affecting likelihood to share content.