A new research from Unruly published today reveals that the pace of social video sharing has nearly doubled in the past one year. The Social Diffusion Curve here measures the lifecycle of a viral video.
And it takes into account the social diffusion for the top 4,000 videos in the social world. First launched in April last year, back then the tool revealed that quarter of the average branded video shares occurred in the first three days of a particular video going live.
Skip forward 12 months, and this figure has reached 42%. Unruly states that:
“A year later, that percentage has almost doubled to 42%, making the first few days even more crucial for marketers hoping to make their ads the talk of the web.
The average percentage of shares on the day following launch, when the most shares usually happen, has also almost doubled from 10% to 18% over the last 12 months, while shares in the first week have also risen from 37% to 65%.”
What this means is that the first few days are absolutely vital if you want to drive engagement and shares. And although impossible to predict whether a video will go viral or not, there are examples aplenty where the intention was there but a clip failed to pick up traction.
It primarily comes down to the distribution strategy and audience priming — two elements that are far more difficult in the digital landscape than in, say, traditional broadcast.