How to Make Content People Actually Want to Share
I used to think going viral was about luck. You post something, the algorithm gods smile on you, and boom, millions of views. After working in marketing for a while and watching campaigns succeed and flop in equal measure, I’ve come around to a different view. Virality has patterns. Not guarantees. Patterns. And once you see them, you start noticing them everywhere.
Start With Emotion, Not Information
Here’s something I learned the hard way: nobody shares a post because it’s accurate. They share it because it made them feel something.
Researchers at Wharton studied this years ago. Jonah Berger’s work on contagious content found that high-arousal emotions, both positive (awe, amusement) and negative (anger, anxiety), drive sharing far more than low-arousal states like contentment or sadness. People don’t forward things that make them feel calm. They forward things that make them feel something urgent.
Think about the last thing you shared. Was it a balanced, nuanced take on a complicated issue? Probably not. It was probably something that made you laugh out loud, made you furious, or made you go “wait, WHAT?”
A campaign I worked on for a small skincare brand flopped for months with standard product posts. Clean photos, ingredient lists, the usual. Then someone on the team posted a genuinely funny behind-the-scenes video of a product testing session going wrong. Bottles exploding, someone yelping, total chaos. That video did more for the brand in two days than three months of polished content. Why? Because it was funny and real, not because it was informative.
Ride Existing Waves Instead of Making Your Own
This one’s uncomfortable for a lot of marketers because it feels like cheating. But trends exist for a reason. People are already paying attention to them.
When a sound, format, or meme is gaining traction on TikTok or Instagram, jumping on it early (not three weeks late, when everyone’s sick of it) gives your content a built-in audience that’s primed to engage. Duolingo’s social team has built an entire strategy around this. Their owl mascot shows up in whatever meme format is hot that week, and it’s worked because they’re fast, not because the owl is inherently funny.
The catch is timing. Trends move fast, and brands that try to “do it properly,” getting approvals, shooting something polished, running it through legal, usually miss the window entirely. The accounts that win are the ones with someone empowered to post something rough and immediate.
Make It Easy to Steal
Sounds weird, but stay with me. The most viral content tends to be content other people can remix, reference, or copy.
Templates, formats, sounds, challenges. These spread because they give other people a structure to plug their own content into. The “POV” video format. The “rate my setup” trend. The countless variations on “tell me without telling me.” None of these were one off pieces of content. They were frameworks that thousands of people adapted.
If you’re creating content for a brand, ask yourself: could someone else do their own version of this? If the answer’s no, if it only works because of your specific product or your specific team, it’s much less likely to spread beyond your own followers.
Specificity Beats Polish
I’ve sat through a lot of meetings where the instinct was to smooth everything out. Better lighting, scripted dialogue, professional voiceover. And sure, sometimes that’s the right call for certain kinds of content. But for social, especially short form video, overly polished content often performs worse than something rougher and more specific.
Why? Because polish reads as “ad,” and people scroll past ads. A slightly shaky video where someone says something oddly specific, like “I tried this for 11 days and here’s exactly what happened to my skin,” feels like a real person talking to you. The specificity is what makes it believable, and believability is what makes people stop scrolling.
Wendy’s Twitter account became famous for this years ago. It wasn’t polished corporate copy. It was sharp, sometimes mean, very specific replies to specific people. That specificity is what got screenshotted and shared constantly.
Hook People in the First Three Seconds
This isn’t really up for debate anymore. Almost every platform’s own data shows that the first few seconds determine whether someone keeps watching or scrolls away. If your video opens with a logo animation or a slow zoom in on a product, you’ve probably already lost most of your audience.
Instead, try starting mid action, posing a question the viewer wants answered, or showing the most surprising part of the video first and then explaining how you got there. “I didn’t expect this to happen” is a stronger opener than “Hi everyone, welcome back to the channel.”
Don’t Ignore the Data You Already Have
One thing that gets overlooked: your own analytics are usually telling you what’s working, and most teams don’t look closely enough. If one post in twenty performs three times better than the rest, that’s not noise. That’s a signal. What was different about it? The format? The topic? The time it was posted? The person in front of the camera?
I worked with a team that kept producing the same style of content for months because “that’s our brand voice,” even though one outlier post, a quick unscripted reaction video, had outperformed everything else by a wide margin. Nobody investigated why. They just filed it under “lucky.” It probably wasn’t.
A Word on Expectations
Here’s the part nobody likes to hear: most content doesn’t go viral, and trying to force virality on every single post is a good way to burn out your team and water down your brand. The accounts that consistently produce viral hits aren’t hitting every time. They’re posting often, experimenting constantly, and treating the occasional viral hit as a bonus rather than the goal.
Consistency builds the audience that occasionally turns one piece of content into something huge. Virality without an audience already in place tends to be a one off spike that doesn’t convert into anything lasting.
What to Do With This
If you’re working on a content strategy right now, here’s where I’d start. Pick one piece of content you’re planning this week and run it through these questions. Does it make someone feel something strong? Is it riding a trend that’s still rising, not falling? Could someone else copy the format? Does it open with something that grabs attention immediately?
You won’t hit all four every time, and that’s fine. But if you’re hitting zero of them consistently, that’s worth a hard look at what you’re putting out.
Start small. Pick your next post, apply one of these ideas, and watch what happens to the engagement compared to your usual content. Then do it again. That’s really the whole game: testing, watching, adjusting, and not being precious about content that doesn’t land.