Have you even been scrolling on a brands social media and been really impressed? So impressed that you not only follow, but send the post to a friend? Knowingly or not the marketers and digital communicators behind the post are using vital elements to produce virality.
So, lets take The Museum of English Rural Life -The MERL for short, on a fated day on Twitter in 2018… Adam Koszary the program manager and digital lead, tweeted a simple 5 word sentence – ‘look at this absolute unit’ which accompanied an image of a giant sheep.
A unit of what?
This tweet garnered 27.5K retweets and 103.8K likes, and even spawned a back-and-fourth engagement with Elon Musk which eventually got Koszary hired by Tesla.
The tweet juxtaposes a historic photograph of a large sheep with a then current humorous meme. The text relates to a Twitter joke of captioning images of large objects or people with a variation of, 'In awe at the size of this lad. Absolute unit.'
To pull a part and inspect the anatomy of this absolute unit’s virality we can use Jonah Berger’s six elements, STEPPS, which stand for social currency, triggers, emotion, public, practical value, and stories. According to Berger at least one of these six Twitter: @TheMERL ‘ingredients’ are present in such a scenario.
So which STEPPS is it?
This tweet, without a shadow of a doubt, is very humorous. Humorous content is particularly sharable as it is often surprising, which invokes high arousal – a key for virality.
So it’s safe to say emotion, the E in STEPPS, is the driver of this tweets virality. When assessing other content for emotional impact, not just humour but a whole bag of emotions such as admiration, inspiration, awe, excitement, humour, anger, or anxiety trigger high-arousal in audiences.
To quote Berger; “when we care, we share” – emotion is very important in the digital space.
So in your position as a Social Media Marketing Guru or a casual ‘netizen’ you can use high arousal emotions to connect to your audience and ‘softly sell’ your message in a non-intrusive way. Humour, such as the combination of an adorably chunky ye olde sheep mixed with a funny modern meme, is a unexpected and high candidate for positive high-arousal. So what are you waiting for, go hunt for your own absolute unit!
If all things social media interest you check out our post about eWoM and TikTok and let us know below if you've tried out any STEPPS in your social media marketing posts, were they successful?
Elon in on the joke- Twitter: @elonmusk
Hi Nicole with the plethora of content available on social media and our schedule getting busier by the day, I must admit that there would be fewer times where a post would catch my attention on social media platforms where I will be compelled to share on my feed.
This blog post is an excellent reminder that as marketers, we have to be mindful of the fact that the social media marketing campaigns that we are developing and implementing for our brands may be overlooked unless it's useful, relevant, high arousal and memorable to our target audience. John Berger's STEPPS to virality is a good tool that we can definitely use as a guide when we are in the planning…