Researchers at the Department of Social Sciences and Economics in Sapienza University, Rome, studied post virality in four European countries over the course of five years and found that most viral posts on YouTube and Facebook actually do not significantly increase engagement and rarely lead to sustained growth.
Generally, if you’re in the nonprofit or corporate sectors specifically, social media content and viral efforts are excellent tools for capturing attention and building momentum in a short period of time.
Except viral posting can be the exact opposite when it comes to helping you actually build long-term trust in your brand, product, services, or cause. It depends on your niche. It depends on your intent. It depends on your audience’s appetite. It depends on a lot, but it can make or break your success over the course of time.
If the idea of letting go a little on the socials feels like a relief, keep reading, because I found an interesting study that looks at virality as less vital that we thought when stacked up against foundational content like blogs, interviews, profiles, mission-driven stories, and other long-form assets.
When the honeymoon’s over: the pitfalls of the virality effect
From a long-term audience engagement standpoint, I’ve always had the feeling that viral social media content isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, yet many of us keep putting most of our eggs there anyway. Unfortunately, there is little research or data that studies the differences between short-form content and long-form. Yet.
I did find an intriguing paper from the Department of Social Sciences and Economics at Sapienza University, Rome, that showed a little what I’ve been mulling: most viral posts on YouTube and Facebook actually do not significantly increase engagement and rarely lead to sustained growth.
The researchers examined 43 million Facebook posts and 769,795 YouTube videos from four different European countries between the years of 2018-2023, seeking answers to these two questions:
Does virality induce engagement growth?
Do the faster-manifesting effects persist longer?
Here’s what they found.
The success of a viral post is often influenced by how your content was performing beforehand
If your engagement is steadily growing, your audience is warmed up and primed to make a piece of your content hit the algos hard.
On the flipside, if engagement is flat or declining, the virality of your post might be more random or fueled by novelty.
In other words, you won the algo lottery for a hot second.
If viral is the sizzle, long-form is the steak
Study authors also discover that viral content actually fizzles out faster than we thought, creating an unsurprisingly huge storm of success, only to go out like a lamb after a couple of weeks.
“When news emerges unexpectedly, viral events enhance users’ engagement, reactivating the collective response process,” the study posits. “In contrast, when virality manifests after a sustained growth phase, it represents the final burst of that growth process, followed by a decline in attention.”
Think about that the next time your board, stakeholders, or bosses want you to come up with a “viral campaign.”
“These findings highlight the transient effect of viral events and underscore the importance of consistent, steady attention-building strategies to establish a solid connection with the user base rather than relying on sudden visibility spikes.” — Researchers at Department of Social Sciences and Economics, Sapienza University, Rome
Going viral requires you to keep going viral—it’s a lot of pressure, really.
Viral or high-performing posts are excellent at grabbing attention, but keeping up the momentum is absolutely exhausting, right?
It’s because we’re constantly looking for ways to outdo the last post, which is often very difficult or impossible.
Most days do not include a legit communications emergency, so why do we keep acting like it?
Slow down.
Pull out a pen and paper.
Dust off that blog.
Refresh that newsletter template.
Get back to the basics and write some long-winded content your admirers will share for you, because that is where the long-term connections that matter actually exist. The ones that plant the seeds of growth for well into the future, not just in the moment.
It doesn’t mean you can ignore social media, but perhaps we can lessen the pressure of managing our online communities in favor of tried-and-true, never-going-out-of-style long-form content.
Social media is critical, but so is long-form.
Time to put a little sizzle in that steak.
To read the entire European study and explore research methodology, go here.
About the author
Lonna is the founder of Garden Communications Co. She has more than two decades of experience in content marketing, journalism, fundraising communications, and public relations. #ENDALZ
GET IN TOUCHlonna@gardencommunications.co
