Welcome back to another week of Everitt’s Bangin’ Blogs! Today we are talking about virality on social media.
For starters, I would like to speak about our guest speaker, Jodie Dangelben. Jodie went viral for her hair tutorial videos which turned difficult and complicated hairstyles into very easily digestible tutorials to help girls achieve these seemingly difficult hairstyles. One of Jodie’s biggest tips that she gave when it comes to going viral was to leech off of every viral trend, regardless of the societal impacts. An example she gave for this was her using hashtags about the Black Lives Matter movement on a completely unrelated post. I would argue that this is not a good way to use social media for a few reasons. Firstly, it floods the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag with unrelated content which makes it harder for people to become educated and informed on the topic, and if enough people do the same thing Jodie does, it will ultimately lessen the social impact of the hashtag. Another impact that will have is potentially garnering negative attention to yourself by attaching yourself to issues you don’t belong to. Jodie of course is a woman of colour, so I am not saying that she does not belong to that issue, but her hair content specifically has nothing to do with the issue. This can make people think that she is just a clout chaser, and does not really care about the quality of her content. I personally prefer to use popular yet relevant hashtags in my content in order to find a balance between attracting eyes to my content and being respectful to social issues.
This week’s authors, Kelsey Libert and Kristin Tynski provide us a less controversial strategy for virality, which is by playing with the audience’s emotions, similar to how a movie or television show might. Evoking an emotional reaction is one of the best ways to spark engagement, especially shares. To personalize this topic, the number one most memorable ad that I have ever seen is the “Loretta” ad from Google, which depicts an elderly man with dementia asking Google to help him remember details about his wife who has passed away. This ad made me, as well as many others around the globe get teary-eyed, which makes it very memorable.
In conclusion, I think that using emotion to create content that DESERVES to go viral on its own right is a much better way to produce content than to abuse hashtags in order to make your content succeed when it may otherwise not.