hautepop:

abc3d:

How do videos go viral? How do people share them through social networks? And what are the dynamics of ‘virality’?

Following the success of our Gangnam Style vs. Harlem Shake study (May 2013), Twitter UK invited us to explore four more big viral phenomena. The stories we selected have all been driven by video, and have been chosen to represent various types of video content:

• Commander Hadfield singing Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on the International Space Station (music)
• Dove “Real Beauty Sketches” for advertising (the most-watched advert EVER on YouTube)
• Ryan Gosling Won’t Eat His Cereal series of Vine videos, for serialised narrative content and mobile
• A grass-roots video of June’s protests in Izmir, Turkey, to provide an international and news dimension

Turns out there’s not a single model of virality. Instead, different types of videos spread in different ways. Different types of content appeal to different audiences and the structure of these audiences is what shapes the viral diffusion.

Understanding the dynamics of that spread – quantifying it using metrics, and digging into the influencers and demographics to understand some of the “how”, is what we’re going to talk about in this series of blog posts.

But first, take a look at the diffusion maps below, which show the pattern of tweets and retweets for each video (click to embiggen). It’s immediately clear that there’s something different going on for each. Some, like Commander Hadfield, have one big hub (Hadfield himself) driving half or more of the sharing. Others like Dove Real Beauty and the Turkish protest video show a constellation of many smaller influencers, each being reblogged by smaller groups. Read on and we’ll explain why.

(Blue nodes = tweeters. Yellow nodes = retweeters. Size = author visibility, i.e. estimated reach).

What we did

We used Pulsar’s content-tracking technology to collect and analyse any tweet containing a link to the videos we were tracking and understand how they were shared on Twitter. What we’re studying is content diffusion and content discovery – the way videos are shared, recommended, and retweeted until they become viral phenomena. Of course people share content in other ways too – not least on Facebook – and YouTube search is in fact the second biggest search engine in the world, after Google. But Twitter provides the strongest dataset for analysis, and its role as a “hub” for curating content from across the whole social web makes it an apt case study.

Read on at http://www.facegroup.com/how-videos-go-viral.html

By me and Fran (@abc3d) of FACE, using our social media research platform Pulsar (PulsarPlatform.com). As presented at Strata, the big data conference, today. And there’s Part 2 to follow next week, digging deeper into how this content is spread through social networks.