Why Love Hate Anger LOL & Vanity Are The Key To Shareable Content

For years smart people have reverse-engineered how and why things are shared on the internet.

A handful of years ago people even got it to a point they could make something go viral…

In recent years with the shift away from a monoculture to many algorithmically driven subcultures, we have seen the way we share go from public by default to semi-private (in chat app groups) to one-to-one sharing.

From my background in crowdfunding and fundraising, there were always 4 main reasons why people share, it was simple,

• Love 💜 - for the love of something or someone

• Hate 🤛 - for the hate of something

• Anger 😡 - something that causes anger

• Vanity 💅 - something that made you look great aka vanity.
  

The one element we missed was LOL (😂), we have always shared laughable moments, whether that is by storytelling together, sharing a joke on email (yes this used to be a thing as did chain emails), share a clip of your favourite comedian before they were all close to being cancelled to someone banging their head or slipping over.

We have gone from sharing moments we saw → to moments others captured and then — sharing on group chats.

All of these parts of the formula are driven by you, your points of connection (nodes) and the connection and emotion it triggers. If it were a movie it would be inside out.

• Love - I love this, you will love this, I love you (made me think of you), ‘this is love’ always works as it drives a deep feeling and connection.

• Hate - I hate this, you will hate this, this will make you hate me, this is hatred always works as it drives a negative feeling and connects you both around something (for good and for bad)

• Anger - this makes me angry, this will make you angry, look at this angry mob etc picks on what we can be driven by or are looking for

• LOL - this is funny, this will make you laugh, this is funny do you remember this - all are centre points based on laughing together or sparking a memory

• Vanity - look at what I did, look at what this person said about me, look at your post doing well - all is about making you or your friend/colleague feel good.

If you are building a Product or looking to build out product features, definitely consider how you leverage these 5 emotions to help make your product sticky and truly build features that gain shares with these 5 emotions front of your mind and the users mind.

I’ll leave you with the Pixar storytelling video that will help you understand storytelling and how to apply these to your work.