How Videos Go Viral
In the past 10 or so years social media has become a huge part in the lives of almost everyone. Whether it’s you interacting with your friends or a way for you to get news, learn more about music and other industries. The ease of the Internet has made a large amount of knowledge very accessible to the masses. One thing that social media created is the idea of a viral video. Viral videos come up all the time from things like the Harlem-Shake, which was huge in 2013, to videos of kids saying “WHAT ARE THOSE!” Jess Owens and Francesco D’Orazio have been working with Twitter UK to explore viral videos and how they came about. They chose 4 very different types of viral videos and found that they all gain popularity very differently. Here is a map of what they found,
They found that some videos become viral as soon as they are posted and that the original post has the ability to connect to large amounts of people very quickly. While other videos take much longer to peak. They might have a small original network that they are associated with and it might takes a pretty long time to find its way to larger networks and take a while to be reposted by other twitter account with large amounts of followers. The article concludes that these are the two ways videos can go viral. Spike and Growth are what they called them. Spike viral videos peaking earlier, while growth viral videos are slower and may peak a couple times.
This is very related to what we are learning in class. Videos going viral on the Internet allow you to see how information can flow to large amounts of people with ease. The study of viral videos can help companies learn how to market their products through social media. People with strong ties to there friends are very likely to see or show there friends a video which will spread very fast until very tight circles of friends have all seen it. Then once leaving that group it’s much harder to make an impact on people whom they have weak ties with.
I was very interested in the slow growth type of viral video. Its cool to hear how videos I have seen grew and how a post by a person with a small social media network can impact its own network to the point where it leaves and makes it way through weak connections till it gets picked up by an even larger network. It is also interesting to see how connected graphs work and the effects of strong and weak ties and how they effect who people will share there videos with and who will watch the videos.
http://www.facegroup.com/blog/how-videos-go-viral.html