How, exactly, do things go viral on Twitter? It's a question that thousands of self-styled social media mavens, gurus and ninjas claim to have the answer to, but Twitter itself should be much better placed to explain.
The bad news from the company's latest UK blog post: "There is no single magic formula." That's one finding from Twitter's study of three videos that recently went viral on its network: the Ryan Gosling series of "Won't eat cereal" videos; astronaut Chris Hadfield's performance of Space Oddity; and Dove's Real Beauty marketing campaign.
"One of the key things we learnt from looking closely at these three is that videos don't go viral in the same way," writes Twitter UK's Gordon MacMillan in a blog post based on the work of researchers Jake Steadman and Louise Chow. "There are no rules to 'virality' — while some ignite, and spread like wildfire across the web, the growth of others is much more measured, like ripples spreading across a lake."
"One of the key things we learnt from looking closely at these three is that videos don't go viral in the same way," writes Twitter UK's Gordon MacMillan in a blog post based on the work of researchers Jake Steadman and Louise Chow. "There are no rules to 'virality' — while some ignite, and spread like wildfire across the web, the growth of others is much more measured, like ripples spreading across a lake."
