How do I go viral? Its the first question Im usually asked when I meet someone.
The truth is, although were known for creating alotof viral content, there really is no guaranteed formula to manufacture virality (almost every week well see content go viral at Brilio which completely surprise us). The fact is the virality of content is influenced by a wide range of factors, most of which areas much as we hate to admit itoutside of our control as publishers.
In the era of social media, our role as media owners have changed. Media companies are no longer one of the few voices capable and responsible for setting the conversation and shaping public discourse. The unprecedented popularity of social media and the resulting proliferation of user generated content has given users the ability to define what content is popular, and what is not.
This shift in the control of content production from media firms to users has made it far more difficult to predict what content will turn into a 'hit' with audiences. Simply put, when you had an audience focusing on a limited set of channels, it was a fairly safe bet that one of those channels would generate a popular hit. Today, we effectively have an infinite number of channels, and the next hit could come from an established media company or from a woman hallway around the world in Texas sitting in a parking lot outside of a Kohls department store.
Now while we dont believe that theres a sure recipe for virality, we thought it would be interesting to look back on the 1 billion+ content views we generated in 2016 to see if we could glean any insights on how one might increase their odds of actually going viral. Weve organized our findings into three categories; distribution, genre, and content type. Lets take a look at the insights.
Distribution
At Brilio, we think that the single most important thing you can do to maximize the popularity of your content is to distribute on multiple platforms. Contrary to when we started, today the majority of our content views (~80%) actually occur off-site through a combination of social media platforms, chat applications, and news aggregators.
The table above shows the mix of content consumption by platform for the month of January, 2017. As you can see, the majority of our content was consumed off-site with only 21.2% of views occurring on our website. Users, particularly on mobile, have alimited attention spanand spend themajority of their time on a few apps, usually a combination of social media applications and chat. If you want to reach your audience, you must publish on the apps where they are spending their time.
Genre
Heres a quick breakdown of the most popular content categories we saw in 2016:
One thingthatis immediately apparent is that the 80/20 rule applies when it comes to content. We have 32 content categories at Brilio, but our top 5 categories (15.0% of total categories) generated 75.0% of our total content impressions in 2016. We see this trend continuing in the early months of 2017.
Within the top 5 categories at Brilio, Celebrity and LOL (humor) lead in terms of views, generating close to 50.0% of our total views in 2016. This should come as no surprise;celebrity and humor content are extremely popular among young audiences in Indonesia. Interestingly the Celebrity category ended the year ahead of LOL in 2016, switching places from where these two categories stood in the beginning of the year.
When we rank content categories by content efficiency (i.e. Avg. Views Per Content) The LOL and Celebrity categories trade places. This is because Celebrity content consumption is less evenly distributed than LOL content, with a few standout hits that help carry the average for the entire category. As a case in point our best Celebrity article generated close to 2 million views, about 70.0% better than our best LOL article, however in terms of volume we created 20.0% more viral LOL articles than Celebrity articles (we define viral content as any content piece which exceeds 200,000 views soon after release). The takeaway is clear: Focus on humorous content if your goal is to reach the widest possible audience and maximize your odds of going viral in Indonesia.
Content formats
What about the form and subject of the content? Note that for now Im going to ignore video as over 90.0% of our content views last year were driven by written content. At Brilio we have four kinds of written content: Standard articles (a short 300400 word article supplemented with images and video), Listicles (a list of images or text), Memes, and Interactive articles (Quizzes, Polls, Surveys). What does the data say about the most popular content format?
Here are our top 10 articles in the Celebrity category:
And here are our top 10 articles in the LOL category:
The overwhelming number of articles in the top 10 lists of either category are listicles (6 out of ten in the Celebrity category, and 9 out of 10 in the LOL category). Within the LOL category the combination of Listicle and Meme content formats perform extremely well with 5 out of the top 10 articles being a combination of these two. We believe this reflects a millennial preference fordense content formats,meaning that millennials favor formats which can convey more information with less time and space
One final interesting point to note is the similarity in content themes within the top 10 lists of both the Celebrity and LOL categories. In the Celebrity category, content focusing on comparisons of celebrities performed particularly well with 5 out of the top 10 articles focusing on these kinds of stories. In the LOL category we saw that content which combined humor and nostalgia, specifically humorous stories around major life events (e.g. high school, first job, marriage), performed quite well.
Closing thoughts
There is no secret recipe for viral content, the ever-changing interests of our audience make such a simplistic formula impossible, but there are ways to increase your odds of success. First, make sure that you are distributing your content across all the distribution platforms available to you. Mobile users represent the majority of the audience in Indonesia and youre much more likely to reach them if they can find your content on the apps on which they spend most of their time. Second, focus on humorous content, and make sure to write a wide range of articles within this genre. The 80/20 rule is dominant in content creation, and if you write a wide range of pieces youre much more likely to arrive at a topic which will resonate with readers. Finally, focus on maximizing content density when thinking of content formats. Providing as much information as possible to be consumed in the shortest time possible is surefire way into the hearts of attention deficit millennials throughout the archipelago.
