The Viral Preferences of Twitter Users

You have a Twitter account, and you're following some people. Some of those people are now following you back and you're thinking "great, now what?" Or maybe you saw my Viral Tweet Test and are wondering how to accomplish the same effect for your content.

In my Viral Content Sharing Survey I uncovered a bunch of information that could prove useful to you if you're trying to go viral via Twitter.

First, understand that as gregarious early-adopters Twitter users a very infectious vector to seed your viral content into. Twitter users tend to share content more often and with more people that the average user (in both one-to-one and especially in one-to-many ways). This means that it's probably a good idea to Tweet your new content, and include "Tweet this" buttons to make sharing easier.

Next we can look at where Twitter users tend to share content from. Here we see that they prefer spreading content from blogs and social news sites (rather than mainstream news, a favorite of non-Twitter users). If you want your content to go viral, don't do a press release or use a PR agency; post it to your blog and get it submitted to a social news site.

Lastly, determine what kind of content they like to share most often. The data says that compared to non-Twitter users (who share mostly humor) Twitter users prefer sharing news, opinion and even instructional content.