What is the recipe for virality?

Perhaps it's chocolate covered strawberries?

A video of a bowl of chocolate-covered strawberries set to Bobby Caldwell’s 1978 song “What You Won’t Do for Love” has swept over social media. It currently has over 276 million views and 36.1 million likes at the time of this publication. It’s a simple video; there are no words on the screen and the caption consists of the hashtags #fy, #foryou, #strawberry, #chocolate and #chocolatecoveredstrawberries. With tens of millions of others using those hashtags, one may wonder why this particular video went viral? What is the recipe for virality?

To begin, virality (and the whole Tiktok algorithm as a whole) is essentially a lottery. It is almost impossible to predict whether or not something will go viral. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s completely unpredictable; we can still pick out certain traits that viral videos have.

First off, it likely first gained traction because of luck. The TikTok algorithm can choose to push something at the beginning to see how well it does and if it has good engagement early on, it will begin to exponentially grow. The early engagement that this video got was mainly from its uniqueness. As one user mentioned, this video isn’t like the others that you may be getting on your for you page: it’s unexpected. This ultimately led to more confused comments, wondering why a video of chocolate-covered strawberries was getting so popular and that in turn, kept driving its popularity.

Once the video became more and more popular, users began generating content around it, funnel their audiences to the video as well, whether through tags or tiktok’s search bar, Either way, the video garnered even more traffic—so much so that it began its own trend. People started imitating the video, filming their fruits with the flash on and set to the song. There were even parody videos of different people making fun of those filming this video from different perspectives. Its virality continued to increase and people began taking note of it. Users began to compare it to the most liked video of all time, Bella Poarch’s video, lip-syncing to the song “M to the B”. One thing about many TikTok users is that they thrive on community and exclusivity. They love the fact that they are a part of this inside joke and potential new record and are generating all sorts of content to pit the two videos against each other. It’s not that they care about the video or even the content itself—it’s more about beating the competition, being a part of a new world record.

Takeaways

The feeling of exclusivity is important in marketing (see:
Virality is based on luck but things like a consistent schedule, keeping the first ten seconds engaging, and taking risks with your content to stand out, are all things that can help boost your engagement and raise your chances.