9 Data-Driven Share Triggers That Make Your Content Go Viral
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on | Feb 25th, 2025 With 5.22 billion social media users worldwide who love shareable content, it leaves us wondering why some pieces get an exponential number of views, shares and audience engagement while others don’t. The viral marketing moments we marvel at are not always due to a streak of luck but by deploying certain share triggers that move the audience to hit social media share icons.
In this article, you will learn how to use share triggers for creating shareable content and why they spark conversations and drive significant traffic to your site.
Understanding the Psychology of Social Sharing
The content that spreads rapidly across platforms uses psychological principles to encourage readers to share. People share content to express themselves, provide value to others, connect with their network, support a cause and more. Doing so uplifts their social currency and makes them look knowledgeable, compassionate or funny to their peers. It gives them a status boost within their network and motivates them to actively share what they resonate with.
Let’s analyze 7 data-driven, psychological share triggers you can apply that answers how to create shareable content that explodes into our feed and receives tons of engagement.
Share Trigger #1 - Utility
Did you know that articles rated as having high utility are 30% more likely than average to crack the topmost emailed list? When you say ‘Utility,’ we mean create content that’s super practical. These amazingly crafted content pieces present helpful information and ideas that enable readers to improve their lives somehow.
Thus, audiences save, send, and revisit highly practical, actionable articles of which How-to Guides and Expanded List Posts are great examples. These frameworks work and are shareable content because they are highly useful to people.
Share Trigger #2 - Length
Longer content is 76.8% likely to make it to the New York Times’ most emailed list, as opposed to 23.2% for short content. Dr. Jonah Berger investigated why longer blog post performs so well and found that they elicit a feeling of awe. People share content and are genuinely impressed with the comprehensive research and numerous facets covered in the long format, which makes it shareable content. One just can't resist sending such incredible content pieces to their circle of family and friends.
Share Trigger #3 - Memory Glue
Highly memorable ideas and concepts are more likely to be shareable content. The trademark technique is a straightforward strategy to create content that sticks to the memory. Express an impactful, super practical idea and give it a simple, easily remembered name, which becomes the trademark readers call it by.
Like Nike's "Just Do It," your blog will be remembered by the Trademark idea it presents to readers.
Share Trigger #4 - Positive Emotions
Studies show that content that triggers emotions gets up to 39% more engagement than the average, with positive emotions prevailing. Upbeat, inspirational social posts and blog posts evoke positive emotions such as amusement, happiness, surprise, amazement, admiration and more, which move people to send them to their community and make viral content. It builds deeper connections and supplies the reader with peace.
So strike the right emotional chord with the triggers that make people click ‘Share’. Brainstorm creative ways to authentically inject feel-good emotions for creating shareable content. You can integrate heartwarming stories, funny videos, examples of human kindness, nostalgic pieces, shocking statistics and more into your content strategy.
Share Trigger #5 - Social Currency
People love to share content that aligns with their identity, interests, values and personal brand. They want to start conversations about what feels authentic and share relevant content such as social causes they support, hobbies they pursue, industry news articles that showcase their professional interests and more.
Social sharing is another outlet for people to express their personalities and interests and get social proof of acceptance with likes, comments and shares further on.
Share Trigger #6 - Curiosity and Intrigue
Questions that we are ridiculously curious about, for example, questions like why are bananas not straight?, Why are zebras black and white?, Why are rainbows curved?, Why are sloths so slow? makes for engaging, shareable content that piques curiosity.
Reading such pieces is like uncovering a mystery, solving a collective enigma and who wouldn’t want to share such click-worthy, interesting articles. These contain cliffhangers and riddles that keep people guessing what is going to happen next or wondering why this happens.
Share Trigger #7 - Sense of Belonging
People love sharing relevant content in their communities that helps them connect with people who share similar interests or values. This makes them feel seen, heard and understood.
Content sharing becomes a way to express who we are, validate our place within a group and forge strong emotional bonds with others. For example, book reviews or articles that one agrees with are shareable content in your book club that will spark a fulfilling community discussion.
Share Trigger #8 - Storytelling
Stories have extremely powerful effects on our brains. They add the relatability factor to the equation and create an emotional connection between the content and the target audience, causing them to laugh, cry or feel profoundly. Despite that, few content people or marketers use storytelling in their content, and it hurts them.
You don't need to create content with sensational stories, such as being chased by a bear (though that would make for good content). Instead, it needs to cover a human experience you had with a particular problem.
For example, you can share about a time you or someone you knew used one of your tips or achieved a specific result, and that will make compelling, shareable content. Tell stories that resonate with your audience, and you will get shares.
Share Trigger #9 - Visual Appeal
The way you package and deliver your content matters. This calls for content optimization as the website pages with a well-defined layout, vibrant color palette, and high-quality visual elements (images, videos and infographics) are more shareable.
For example, after achieving content quality, work on the content design to optimize it for easy consumption and shareability. Use short paragraphs, clear headings and social share buttons.
Pro Tip - Bank on trending topics such as sports clips and news during sports season to get more shares.
How to Measure Content Shareability?
An impactful marketing strategy or campaign is just half done without analytics. As marketers, we need to focus equally on how a campaign looks and how it performs, as results matter ultimately. Keep track of your content shareability with your analytics focused on these five metrics.
- Social Share Count - You can evaluate shareability directly by counting the number of times a piece of content is shared on different social media platforms.
- Calculate Share Rate - To calculate the share rate (shareability percentage), divide the total number of shares by the total number of views or interactions with the content.
- Engagement Metrics—Go beyond shares and pay attention to engagement metrics like likes and what's happening in the comment section to get audience reactions to understand user interaction and the likability of your content.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR) - Analyze the number of people who click on a link to your content when it is presented. This indicates its relevance and appeal to users.
- Time Spent on Page - If users spend a significant amount of time on your page, it suggests they find the content valuable and are more likely to share it.
Best Tools for Analyzing Content Shares
- Web Analytics Tools: You can evaluate CTR and time spent on page with tools such as Google Analytics, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Adobe Analytics and more.
- Social Media Analytics Tools: To analyze your social media marketing efforts, engagement and shareability, use platforms like Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, and LinkedIn Analytics, which provide detailed share metrics.
Conclusion
People share content with a WOW factor that impresses them so cut through the noise and write epic content pieces. Employ a cluster of share triggers, such as positive emotion, long format, storytelling, utility and more, to get shares and exposure on social media networks, news websites, aggregators, email newsletters and search engines.
If you need help creating high-quality content that resonates with your audience, NMG Digital provides content marketing services to help you do so. Our team is an expert at creating shareable content that aligns with your target audience and marketing goals. With expertise in content marketing and advanced SEO, we have helped numerous clients increase their rankings.
We will help you out with content strategy development, content creation, content promotion and more. Book a free consultation with our digital marketing agency for content marketing and SEO services today.