How things go viral?

Our new brief is about viral communication. The first thing I wanted to look at was how exactly things go viral. Here are some of the points I found:

1. Focus on current events and trends. If something is current people are more likely to search it on twitter and google etc thus resulting in the content being found, news breaks first almost always on Twitter, so pay attention to trending keywords and hashtags.
2. Make a video. Videos are a big part on the web and people will share them. Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube.
3. Get noticed by someone big. Things often go viral because celebrities will share and promote them. Celebrities have a big fan base, on twitter some have millions of followers that will see everything that they tweet.
4. Start a contest. If you can give away something of value, you can get people to like your Facebook page, follow you on Twitter and even require them to have to tweet about the contest or post it on their Facebook profile to pull even more people in. A lot of social media campaigns make good use of contests and giveaways to keep their current audience engaged and attract new people.
5. Humour. Funny videos and images are shared daily across social media sites.