How to Create Viral Content: 10 Insights from 100 Million Articles

A while back, someone sent me a link to the BuzzSumo website. With a name that includes “Sumo,” I knew it was love at first sight.

And the love has lasted. Years later, I still use BuzzSumo regularly. It’s a gold mine of data for analyzing content’s popularity, social growth, and more.

#chaching.

Because I’m so impressed with the platform, I reached out to awesome people at BuzzSumo to let us go behind-the-scenes for the main ingredients to insanely shareable content are.

You’ve probably seen lame articles on the web like “10 ways to go viral” with super basic tips for creating shareable content. But his post crushes those posts because it’s backed by pure data. (Who doesn’t love some fancy images and charts?)

Use this knowledge with caution. And without keeping you waiting anymore, take it away Sumo brothers…

-Noah

Here at BuzzSumo, we've analyzed the social share counts of over 100 million articles in the past 8 months. So it’s fair to say we have a pretty good idea of what gets shared the most.

There have always been some nagging questions we’ve wanted to answer. So we came up with this set of questions, hoping to challenge popular assumptions on how to make your content go viral:

• What types of emotions did the most popular articles invoke?
• What formats of posts typically receive a lot of shares? (lists? infographics?)
• Did readers love to share short-form or long-form content? What's the ideal length to maximize readability?
• Does trust play a major role in whether someone will share an article?
• What's the effect of having just one image in a post vs no images?
• What's the effect of having just one influencer sharing your article vs 0?
• How do we make people share our post days and even weeks after it’s been published?
• What’s the best day of the week to publish an article?

Of course, all these questions come with a giant warning...

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:

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' 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.