4 secrets to creating explosive articles

Popular articles have their inherent commonalities. The article shares four secrets of fission that everyone can master: social currency, fun, practicality, and positive emotions. How many of these do your articles meet?

1. The Forbidden City started its elephant transformation from "Meng Meng Da"

The Forbidden City turns 600 this year, and it has not been easy for the "elephant" to come this far.

The Forbidden City has twice as many visitors as the British Museum. Generally speaking, the revenue from cultural and creative products should be at least lower than that of the British Museum, even if it is not twice that.

But before 2013, the Palace Museum’s revenue from cultural and creative products was only 600 million yuan, less than half of that of the British Museum.

Fortunately, in recent years, the Forbidden City elephant has turned around frequently, and it has captured the public with the emperor's "cuteness" and the social currency of national trend culture.

The initial opportunity came in 2013, when the National Palace Museum in Taipei launched a "I Got It" sticker adhesive, which immediately became popular in the market and quickly became popular on the domestic Internet.

In the same year, the newly appointed director of the National Palace Museum, Shan Jixiang, led a team to visit the National Palace Museum in Taipei. After returning, they quickly conducted a series of research and embarked on the road of "cuteness and freshness".

In 2014, the Palace Museum Taobao published an article on its official account titled "Yongzheng: I Feel So Cute". In the article, Yongzheng changed the serious and solemn image of ancient emperors and gained public favor by showing cuteness through contrast.

Within 48 hours, the article was read over 860,000 times and was frequently forwarded on WeChat Moments.

According to official WeChat data from the same year , 80% of the readers of the most popular articles on WeChat came from Moments, 20% of users selected content from subscription accounts, and 80% of users read content in Moments.

From this point of view, an important factor in promoting an article to become a hit is whether it can produce content with social currency to encourage its forwarding.

As one hit article after another about the Forbidden City Taobao appeared, the Forbidden City’s cultural and creative product revenue reached 1.5 billion yuan in 2017, surpassing the British Museum.

We can't help but ask, what kind of content and ideas can become the most popular forwarded content in the current mobile Internet era, becoming as deeply rooted in people's hearts as a virus, and allowing most people to spread it in the same amount of time?

Let’s explore the essence behind this and what characteristics the “forwarded” content has, and analyze it based on marketing experts’ experiments.

Feature 1: Good Internet design will generate more social currency

People naturally have social needs and need to share and communicate with their peers. People like to share their opinions and information with others. Whether it is positive or negative small talk, it will form a connection between you and your friends and colleagues.

If a mother sees an inspiring educational video on WeChat that can help her children solve math or writing problems, she will naturally click the "forward" button to let more mothers and friends see it and pass it on to more people in need.

The design of the Internet technically promotes people's instinctive needs and generates more social topics and social currency.

The reason why people share positive and sunny messages is that such messages can bring us face and respect from others.

Features 2 and 3: Finding patterns in the Wall Street Journal list - interesting and practical

Jonah Berger, a professor at the Wharton School of Business, once conducted an experiment in which he selected the five most popular articles and the five most popular forwarded links from the Wall Street Journal every day.

After a few weeks, his collection started to pick up. He entered the popular charts and began to look for patterns in the charts.

On one day, "Talking to my lover is too tiring" and "Disney jackets are for big girls" were the most popular links of the day.

A few days later, "Should economists study autism?" and "Why are bird watchers now using multimedia players?" became popular links.

On the surface, these headline links have nothing in common.

• What does a hard conversation with a loved one have to do with a Disney coat?
• What do Disney jackets have to do with economists studying autism?

These connections appear to be illusory. But Professor Berger did not let them go. With the help of computer programmers, he created a web crawler website to analyze the patterns.

Web crawlers are like tireless readers. The program can automatically scan the homepage of the New York Times website once within 15 minutes and record the relevant content in full.

This method not only records the content and title of each article, but also the author of the article and the characteristic area where the article is displayed (for example, some articles are displayed on the main screen, and some articles are displayed as links at the end), the professional field of the article (such as health or business), and the specific page number of the article (for example, whether it is the homepage or the third part at the end) can also be recorded.

After 6 months of data processing, the professor collected a large number of data combinations, totaling 7,000 articles. This would not only detect privately shared content, but would also make content shared by all readers, regardless of age, wealth, or other background, searchable.

The professor analyzed the data and came to some conclusions: areas such as health, sports, education or politics can easily become topics of discussion. In addition, education articles receive more reprints and attention than sports articles, and health news is more popular than political news, making it suitable for people to talk about after dinner.

And, importantly, people are more likely to share pictures of kittens or paintballs than ping-pong balls.

Combining the previous and this reasons, people are willing to share information largely because the information is interesting and practical.

Interesting things can bring joy to the public and increase people's willingness to share. At the same time, sharing useful information can help others while making the sharer appear noble in the process.

To test the validity of this deduction, the professor also hired some research assistants to specifically score the practicality and interest of New York Times articles.

• We consider an article interesting if it has reached the level of flu-like popularity through Google searches.
• If the article is clichéd, unoriginal, and as dry as describing a Broadway play, we will consider it boring;
• If the article is about how to manage your credit score, we consider it useful;
• If it's as obscure as an opera singer's obituary, we regard it as useless.

The final conclusion: Both features affect people's sharing behavior; more interesting articles appear 25% more times on popular links than boring articles; relatively useful articles have 30% more popular click-through rates than useless articles.

Feature 4: Susan Boyle's performance on Britain's Got Talent inspires awe

Emotions drive people's behavior. They can make people laugh, cry and shout. They can also make people talk and share inadvertently, and can also make us unconsciously purchase related products and services.

In other words, driven by this emotion, people will willingly continue to spread and repost.

There is a video where a plump, housewife-like woman walks up the stairs, making people secretly happy. She looked like a housewife getting ready for lunch, not a contestant.

She is a contestant on Britain's Got Talent and is more than twice the age of the other contestants. What is even more incredible is that the other contestants were dressed elegantly, sexy, fashionable, or generous and dignified, but only she looked tacky and her clothes were too dull.

When the judge asked her, "What is your dream?" she whispered softly, "I want to be a great professional singer." Before she finished speaking, the audience burst into laughter. Just when people thought she was going to make a fool of herself or even lose the stage, she started singing.

At that moment, time suddenly stopped, and she began her singing with the orchestral accompaniment of "I Want to Have a Dream" from "Les Miserables" as her opening remarks.

Her beautiful singing voice shone through the entire audience like a beacon. Such a beautiful voice, accompanied by the flowing hair behind her neck, seemed to make people feel as if they were floating in the air.

The referee was moved and in awe, the audience screamed, and thunderous applause broke out in every corner of the venue. The audience felt heartbroken and their excitement was beyond words.

This person is the now famous Aunt Susan. Not only did she become famous with this performance, but this performance also became one of the most popular videos today. Within nine days, the number of online on-demand views of the video has exceeded 100 million times.

If you watch the video, it’s hard not to be moved by her energy and heart. It is not just shocking and touching, but it will make people feel awe and admiration.

Many times, we don’t have to keep promoting products and related content, but should find more ways to arouse consumers’ emotional investment.

We need to care more about consumers' feelings - a potential emotion that can influence behavior. Data shows that the reprint rate of articles that arouse people's emotions is 30% higher than that of ordinary articles.

Positive articles are more popular and shared more often than negative ones. Positive news like "New couple falls in love in New York City" is more popular than "Celebrity animal handler dies."

Inspiration from the Forbidden City Case

After the elephant turned around, the Forbidden City was accepted by the public with its cute and interesting image, social currency and the sentiment of a cultural power. This year's epidemic will have some impact on the Forbidden City, but the Forbidden City, which is well aware of the rules of the "forward" button, will not be bound by it and will be brave enough to try.

On April 5 and 6, the Forbidden City, which was closed due to the epidemic, held three live webcasts for netizens, marking the beginning of its 600th anniversary celebration in this special form. The host's narration in the live broadcast room was different from the usual serious style and was humorous. Netizens exclaimed, "I love this Forbidden City!" More friendly, more interesting, and more socially relevant.

On May 18, the Forbidden City's brand Forbidden City Stationery will officially open a flagship store on Pinduoduo. This is also the first palace logo brand to enter Pinduoduo. The flagship store has launched more than 30 SKUs on Pinduoduo this time, and each product reflects the strong elements of the Forbidden City, such as bookmarks with flowers of the four seasons, gel pens with names on the list of successful candidates, and ink-colored pencils for inscriptions.

After joining Pinduoduo, it launched a group buying event for Forbidden City stationery by 10,000 people. Both the price and the practicality of the products were sought after by the new generation of young people. The data of group buying by 10,000 people shows that young users account for 60% of the purchases of domestic trend products. The younger generation is the future's responsible party, consumers, and enthusiastic forwarders. If we let them understand the origins of cultural and creative products and historical culture and develop a sense of awe, they will be more willing to protect China's ancient culture.

Whether it is the Forbidden City or other producers and content creators, as long as they understand the four secrets of fission communication: social currency, fun, practicality, and positive emotions , they will be able to create more popular products.

Author: Chen Huiming

Source: Chen Huiming Study Club