You do not need your content to have this 10 characteristics, but the more you could get the better are the chances your content will spread like wildfire.

These characteristics are:

-Social Currency: This is quite easy to understand and very intuitive. It is as simple as “people like to share things that make them look good”. If by sharing your content they seem smart, cool or in the hype they will do it. Just think what part of your content is more socially interesting and try to maximize it. Try to make content that make the people that share it look good.

This has a few components to it, you could:

-Find the inner remarkability: This is the core of what makes your content interesting. Specially how it changes people way of thinking. Mystery and controversy play an important part in this. They are to good ways of making your content more interesting.

-Leverage games mechanics: This is quite hard if you just write content on a blog, but if you find a way to do it, it could be very powerful. But what is this? Have you seen that more and more sites now a days give you points, badges or rankings for doing things on their site? This is not just for fun. Studies have shown that for some reason if someone is giving us points for something we want more, despite the fact that this points are quite useless. And the most important part is, What is the point of achieving a badge if you are not going to brag about it? That’s the whole point you achieve something on their site, and you run to tell other people, telling them about the site in the process.

As I’ve said, this is difficult on a blog, but you could get creative.

-Make people feel like insiders: we all want to be part of the “cool kids”. If you make people feel special for being part of your community they will talk about it. Everyone wants to be the first one of their groups in the next cool thing. If you make them feel as they are in something cool and exclusive, they won’t be able to resists talking about it.

-Triggers: A trigger is something that makes you think of some other thing. The reality about our lives is that we are not usually talking about great and important topics, usually we talk about the things that surround us. This is why triggers are so important. You need to associate your idea with a powerful trigger that is going to make your customer think about you and potentially talk to other people about you. Two important factors of a trigger are frequency and accessibility:

-Frequency: It is obvious that you want a trigger that show up frequently, if not it is useless. If your trigger only shows up in new years eve it is worthless. You need something at which your user is going to be exposed frequently.

-Access: Other less obvious characteristics is accessibility, is not enough that your user is exposed frequently to a trigger, he or she also has to have the capacity to take action. For example, a trigger that shows up in the shower is frequent (at least for most people), but it is worthless because someone that is in the shower at 7 am in the morning has little potential to purchase something or tell anybody about it and by the time they can they’ll probably have already forgot. You need a trigger that show up either when the person can purchase something or when he can tell other people about it.

As I have already said it is important that the trigger show up in small talk because most of our conversations are small talk.

Other powerful and trickier strategy with triggers is infecting other messages with your “virus”. What I mean by infecting is creating a message in a way that when any other, more prevalent message, shows up people automatically think about your message. This goes great with competitors messages, but it could be done with any message that could remind the public of your message.

The most important thing about triggers is to understand what Jonah Berger says “Top of mind is tip of tongue”, that means that if something comes to our mind we are probably going to share it.