Luna Marketing Services made an (LinkedIn word warning) insightful point in a recent Instagram post.
“According to a study by Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman, certain pieces of online content that evoke high-arousal positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions are more viral.”
That part wasn’t a surprise to me. I’ve talked about it before. And here’s part of what Berger and Milkman said in 2012:
“This article takes a psychological approach to understanding diffusion. Using a unique data set of all the New York Times articles published over a three-month period, the authors examine how emotion shapes virality.”
But this was the insightful part. From Luna:
“The study also found that content evoking emotions such as happiness and sadness is less likely to be shared or go viral.”
From the original authors:
“Experimental results further demonstrate the causal impact of specific emotion on transmission and illustrate that it is driven by the level of activation induced.”
As I mentioned in a comment to Celia, I hadn’t thought of the distinction between high arousal and low arousal.
No, not that.
I’m thinking about emotions akin to complete bliss.
We need to let our readers experience them.
Bredemarket 