What makes super-viral content so shareable?

Dr Brent Coker collects memes.

A lecturer in the Department of Management and Marketing, Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne, he says “I spend most of my time researching and reading and, of course, watching memes is one of my hobbies.”

Dr Coker has always been fascinated by why certain things get shared more than others.

“There is a lot of psychology that goes on in marketing nowadays. Quite often we rely on intrigue. But what is intrigue?” he asks.

“In psychology, there’s this idea that people need to finish the story. They don’t like it when the story’s unfinished.”

He uses the example of lying in bed at night when you hear a bump.

“You’re not going to go to sleep very easily unless you get up out of bed and go see what that bump was, so in other words, you finish the story. We rely on that kind of thing when we’re creating content, as well, creating that intrigue,” Dr Coker says.

He notes we see this pattern in super-viral content, that is content that has over one million shares. Dr Coker explains that when looking at how viral something is, the metric is shares, not likes.

“We find that the pattern very often begins with intrigue and then we have this spike in the story framework where emotions get injected over time and then there’s a big resolution at the end of the story.”

Episode recorded: October 16, 2020.

Interviewer: Dr Andi Horvath.

Producer, audio engineer and editor: Chris Hatzis.

Co-producers: Silvi-Vann Wall and Dr Andi Horvath.

Banner image: Getty Images

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