How do you differentiate normal content from viral content? Often we turn to historical data, and we say a content "went viral" when the data looks something like this:

That's the spike we're looking for. But why does that even happen?

There's a great deal of researchers and authors who tried to figure out the why's and how's of this spike. Check our link collection at the second part of this chapter if you're interested.

For now, let's say that when this spike happens, that means a near perfect, delicate, and short-term balance exists between the way the content itself was created, distributed, and promoted and the audience.

The key here is the short term. This is why you cannot put a deterministic value against virality as threshold. Anything that goes way above normal can be considered viral. I'd highly suggest to see how this viral spikes still end up increasing the "normal" as well and end up in an ever-growing spiral. Check "The Linkbait Bump" article for that.

"Anything that goes way above normal can be considered viral."
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The first thing we need to clear up is that going viral is not magic . While there's still a great deal of luck in this (there are way too many variables in the equation), if you follow our framework and apply consistent trial and error, you'll definitely be able to dramatically grow your audience's size and engagement.

To understand what really happens when something goes viral, think of it like an epidemic. Usually, when you publish your content, there's a limited percentage of your audience you can directly reach. This is the organic reach of your Facebook page, the click-through of your sponsored content campaigns, your email subscribers, app users, and visitors of your site who come from organic and search sources.

And then a proportion of all of these people will start clicking on sharing buttons and copy/pasting the URL of your content to their friends on messaging apps, texts, emails.

When the latter kind of behaviour locks into a loop and keeps happening, a spike happens in your traffic. This is when your audience keeps passing your content along from one sharer to another, like when a carrier infects someone with the virus, and the new infected also becomes a carrier.

In your case, the pathogen is your content and every time you publish a new one, you test how catchy it is.

Before we move on, let's differentiate your website's traffic into three major groups. We'll use this segmentation later.

Seed Views:

When you, as a marketer/editor/social media manager, share a link to your site somewhere (it can be your social media account, page, email newsletter, sponsored Facebook ad, etc.) and someone clicks on that link, that'd be a seed view. It was shared by you but the only thing you did was plant the seeds. You'll look at clicks, engagement, conversion, etc., from this one. Depending on your industry, a major part of your audience might come from seed views. But now, we're looking for something else.

Viral views:

Every time you publish a post, you're testing how catchy it is. Once you have planted the seeds and visitors start pouring in, if the content is indeed contagious, viral views will spike. That's when your "seed visitors" start driving others by sharing your links. That's what you're aiming for.

Other views:

There's also a third group, which we obviously have to mention but does not directly affect what we want to achieve. Every other visit you have, coming from non-social sources like search or organic, will also play a role in getting viral traffic done, but you don't have a direct impact on that. What we're looking for is to optimise your resources around making those spikes repeatable, so consider this one as a plus.