Twitter experts explain how videos go viral

A recent blog released by Twitter’s UK Research team, entitled How videos go viral on Twitter – 3 stories, has offered insight into how 3 recently popular videos went viral.

The blog argues that although there is ‘no magic formula‘, digital marketers can analyse the research in a bid to try and understand how to similarly match their campaigns to those that took off across the internet so successfully.

The team looked at Dove’s Real Beauty campaign, singing astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield’s rendition of Space Oddity, and the classic Ryan Gosling won’t eat his cereal Vine.

With regard to brand management, the video for Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches #WeAreBeautiful campaign was found to be popular due to link-sharing and positive audience reaction and sentiment.

Burning out slower than the other two videos, Twitter found Dove’s campaign to be an excellent example of a digital outreach programme, as conversation existed in clusters of communities spread around the world and highlighted the value of local engagement.

Check out Twitter’s analysis into the spread of the campaign below.

The social media site discussed the importance of videos in the blog, revealing that Tweets containing videos have generally strong engagement rates, with 42% being likely to retweet, reply, or mention brand Tweets that have a fun or interesting video attached.