Buzzfeed study challenges viral content myths

A goal for many marketers is to see their content spread far and wide online. Crafting a post or video that takes the Web by storm might be less complicated than many pros might think.

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PR pros are often told to abide by certain “rules” if they want to see their organization’s content go viral.

Do these sound familiar?

o Keep it concise.

o Use plenty of images.

o Don’t exceed 800 words.

o Tell a story.

A recent study from Fractl examines content from BuzzFeed—a vaunted platform for viral content—to determine which forces (supernatural or not) had the greatest influence on a post’s garnering of shares.

“We wanted a get a better understanding of the anatomy of content on BuzzFeed, so we used BuzzSumo to analyze 100 most-shared articles between March 15, 2015, and March 15, 2016,” Fractl’s study states. “We looked at word count and image count. We also categorized the articles into 11 different topic areas.”

From Fractl’s website, here’s the study’s breakdown by article type:

Content lengths and shares

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