What Makes "Tasty" Videos Viral?

## Virality

An important question in the idea of the participatory culture is, "What makes Tasty videos so viral?" Before one can answer this question, they must consider the idea of virality. According to Iris Mohr, the attributes that make something viral are:

1. Content is easily memorable
2. The structure of the underlying digital social network
3. Word of mouth pressure--described as the behavioral characteristics of those influenced and willingness to spread message
4. The seeding strategy
> Refer to "Viral Videos" and Participatory Culture: Digital Food Videos
>
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## How Does BuzzFeed Do It?

BuzzFeed is the sole creator of Tasty Videos, and an expert on making videos viral. BuzzFeed's content strategy is built on obsessive measurement. With a data-science team that uses machine learning to predict which stories might spread and a design team that keeps everything flawless, BuzzFeed has become unstoppable in the realm of social media and viral videos. Every item of content has its own

dashboard that shows how it spreads from "seed views" on the site to the scalable "social views". Currently the site has a "viral lift" of three; meaning three times as many people come to stories via social media. Social media has allowed BuzzFeed to make every single video go viral. With out utilizing multiple social media , Buzz feed would not be the success they are today.

### BuzzFeed's Top Social Media Sites:

1. **Facebook**
2. Pinterest
3. YouTube
4. Snapchat

**BuzzFeed is Tasty**

## From a Marketers Standpoint

Connecting to part 8 of the reading, “The Value of Spreadable Media,” spreadable media that has truly spread will “[…] generate active commitment from the audience,” (Jenkins) which Tasty has done accumulating 5,595,916 likes and more importantly, over 9 million subscribers and counting. Jenkins then expands to “viral” marketing strategies through a consumer market. These “viral” mar­ket­ing strate­gies are becom­ing a game changer for many companies in a society that relies so heav­ily on tech­nol­ogy, espe­cially the inter­net. If Tasty ever decides to take an advertising route, they would already have over 5 million consumers at they finger tips.

### There's only one problem:

Although the huge success of content sites like BuzzFeed, drive the most traffic from social media, with extremely clickable headlines. BuzzFeed has business models that relies on traffic, not sales. Content marketers need to do far more than just persuade people to click. Traffic from social media only gets the reader to your content. After that, your content still has to be persuasive enough to achieve your broader marketing goals. The success of your strategy relies on the content being informative, memorable, and persuasive enough to convince the reader to do something else*.*

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Mohr, Iris. "Going Viral: An Analysis of YouTube Videos." *Journal of Marketing Development and Competitiveness* 8.3 (2014): 43-48. *ProQuest*. Web. 16 Oct. 2015.
2. ↑ Jenkins, Henry. “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead (Part Eight): The Value
of Spreadable Media.” *Confessions of an*
Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins *(2009): n.pag. Web. 15 Oct*