The Paradox of a Viral post

The dream of every Social media enthusiast including myself is to see his or her post goes viral. They would do everything including telling a great story, using visuals and making it emotional. Yet, the paradox is that social media posts that actually went viral were never made with the intent of going viral. It just happened. Is “going viral” therefore just a random phenomenon or is there a method to it ? If there was a method, social media pundits would have surely mastered it and succeeded at making their posts go viral at will. But somehow that never happened. Why ?

This is an interesting paradox. Let me take a stab at explaining Here is one of the top viral videos of all time – The Sneezing Baby Panda.

In my observation, such posts that went viral have the following attributes.They are spontaneous, genuine and innocent. They are made with the intent of genuinely sharing something and not with the intent of getting a million likes. If you noticed, the moment you start with the intent of making the post viral, these attributes are invalidated. They are no longer spontaneous or genuine. It works somewhat like the Heisenberg’s principle which says that the more accurately we try to measure subatomic particles, the less precise the result will be. Or in this case, the more deliberate you are about making the post go viral, the less the chances of success.

Will this post go viral? I don’t care ( to be more honest, I will try ) . I had an idea to share and hope the readers found it useful – that’s what I care for.

Image credit : Ross Simmonds