This is one of those questions that every single one of us on this listserv has asked ourselves — and probably multiple times today.
How do I tell stories that more people want to share?
I bet you can name a bunch of sources on the web — both storytellers and websites —that seem to pop up on Twitter and on Facebook more often than any others. Those places just seem to have their fingers on exactly what we want — and what we want to share.
So what do they know that the rest of us don’t?
A lot, it turns out.
“Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness”: Your Roadmap to Discovering Better Ways to Share.
Dan Zarrella is a social media expert. And I have a healthy disregard for most social media experts.
But Zarrella’s the real deal. He’s got the experience and the data to back up his title.
His new book, “Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness: The Science, Design, and Engineering of Contagious Ideas,” is absurdly useful. I plowed through it in about 90 minutes last week — the entire book is only 64 pages long — and annotated the margins beyond recognition.
In it, Zarrella explains the science and the data behind social sharing. The short version: To understand sharing, you need to understand:
1. A little bit about the history of reproduction. (Seriously.)
2. A lot about the psychology behind sharing.
Zarrella explains it all. They should make this required reading for anyone who wants to have a Twitter account or open a Facebook fan page.
It’s an incredibly short read, but there’s great stuff in here. If you’re looking to understand more about how and why content gets shared online, I highly recommend it.
You can buy “Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness” in hardcover via this link. (FWIW: If you’re an Amazon Prime member, you can rent the book for free on your Kindle.)