Viral Strategy
The viral strategy for this infographic relies on the strength of ties on your Facebook network. In an article published by Facebook’s data science team (Rethinking Information Diversity in Networks), analysis of sharing data via Facebook show that while consumption of materials were the highest among the strongest ties (friends with which you share common friends & networks), resharing of information was the highest among the weakest ties. This is because while your close ties share common interests with you, you’re less likely to reshare information that has already been readily shared within your networks; on the contrary, friends who are distant connections provide information which is novel and provide an interesting perspective, encouraging resharing of such information.
This fact can be combined with the information provided from Wolfram Alpha to target these so called weak ties to maximize information dispersal. Through the Facebook analysis functionality, there are 3 types of friends which can be identified: social outsiders (someone with at most one friend with you), social connectors (someone who connects groups of your otherwise disconnected friends), and social gateways (someone with a large number of out-of-network friends). By utilizing these lists of friends, I can target the exact demographic who would be most likely to reshare the infographic and increase its virality.
Finally, the infographic utilizes other factors such as providing share buttons (which have been shown to increase resharing by 7x) and inducing a “must be in the know” factor in readers.
