This document summarizes strategies for engineering content to go viral online. It discusses focusing content on strong emotions, framing content effectively, doing an initial push on social networks like Facebook to test engagement, recognizing content with viral potential, and pushing that content to other channels. It also discusses optimizing websites for sharing and mobile, such as using share buttons, social media integration, responsive design, and scaling infrastructure to handle traffic spikes. Testing new features through A/B testing is also recommended.

1. Engineering Virality
Andrew Forrest
Audience, Analytics, & Business Manager
Luigi Montanez
Founding Engineer
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
DC Week 2012

4. Founders
Eli Pariser Peter Koechley

5. Millions of unique visitors
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1
0
April May June July August September October

7. Not this...

8. This.

10. Most Popular Content

16. Common Threads?

17. The Secret Formula
For Virality

18. Clickability =
Headlines

19. Curiosity Gap
• Too vague, don’t want to click.
• This is an amazing video!
• Too specific, don’t need to click.
• Chimpanzee sniffs own butt,
passes out from doing so.
• Just right, compelled to click.
• Adorable chimpanzee does
something rather unexpected.

20. Obama Blasts Obama's Evasive Stance
On Gay Marriage
Obama Says Same-Sex Marriage
Should Be Legal
Now THIS Is Why I Voted
For Barack Obama

21. We write 25
headlines
for every piece
of content

22. 25 Headlines
• Start strong, then get desperate, get creative
• Explore all possible angles
• Useful outside of headlines: share text, tweet
text, lede

23. Click Package

24. Thumbnails

25. Shareability

26. Why People Share
Anger
The
Sweet
Spot
Relaxation Happiness
Sadness

29. Share Buttons Are Effective

30. Dark Social
• URLs shared via email and IM
• Over half the traffic to established media sites
• Measured by direct traffic to content pages
• Provide an easy to copy-and-paste URL

31. Building An Audience

32. Broadcasting vs. Virality
• In theory, you only need virality.
• In practice, you need both.

33. Our Broadcast Network
• Facebook page
• Email list
• Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest accounts

36. Footer Signup

39. Engineering A Hit

40. Step 1: Content
• Impossible to know a piece of content will go
viral.
• Find the right qualities to give it the greatest
chance of success.
• Strong, positive emotional pull.

42. Step 2: Framing

44. Step 3: Initial Push
Post to Facebook page and monitor results

45. Step 4: Recognize Potential
Real-time traffic + tracking generations of sharing

46. Step 5: Push To Other Channels
Email, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.

47. Engineering The Site

48. Social Networks

50. Facebook Share Button
• The “Like” button isn’t effective.
• Sharing is a much stronger signal than liking.
• Do the extra work and implement a custom
share button using the Facebook Share Dialog
API.

51. Facebook Share Dialog

52. Open Graph API
• Learn it. Implement it fully.
• Provide title, description, url, & image meta
tags in your HTML.
• Double-check your implementation using the
Facebook Debugger.
• Full integration increases your viral capability.

53. Tweet Button: Intent

54. Twitter Cards

55. Social Mobile

56. Mobile Traffic
• 29% of all traffic in April
• 31% of all traffic in October
• Highly viral content sees a higher percentage
of mobile traffic
• The most popular mobile browser: the built-in
browser in the Facebook iOS app

57. Mobile From Day One

58. Mobile Implementations
• Do nothing
• Responsive Design
• Mobile website (m.upworthy.com)
• Native iOS and Android apps

59. Scaling For Spikes

60. Aggressive Caching
• Static content should always be cached
• Don’t need powerful servers
• Bypass complicated web frameworks
• Use content-delivery networks

61. A/B Testing
• Use Optimizely to test new features
• Approach new features scientifically
• Form a hypothesis
• Run an experiment with a proper control
• Trust only statistically significant results
• Building in-house experiment framework

63. Questions?