How to Find the Photo that Will Make Your Facebook Post Go Viral

There’s a whole science behind picking the right photo on Facebook in order to get the most engagement from viewers. The right photos, with a combination of other important elements, can get you 10 times to 100 times the number of likes than what you’re getting now.

To break it down briefly, here’s what you want to piece together in your Facebook posts to make them go viral… the following three ingredients:

1. The integral effect
2. The valence effect
3. A positive quote from a famous person

Let’s dive in with a little more detail…

The Science Behind Viral Facebook Posts

A professor of marketing at the Wharton School of Business came up with the following concepts.  Her name is Professor Cathleen Milkman and she discovered something called the integral effect and positive valance. Milkman studied 7,000 New York Times posts and discovered these were to two key ingredients that cause certain Facebook posts to rack up likes, shares, and comments. In other words, she studied what makes some posts go viral while others do not.

Her studies revealed the integral effect, which is the correlation between how highly emotionally charged the content is and how virally it spreads.

Underneath the integral effect is valance, which is how positively or negatively charged the content is. The most viral content is highly emotionally charged and has a positive valance.  Then stories of selfless acts of kindness and courage are consistently the most viral.

After these two ingredients, there’s just one more thing you need to add, which is a positive quote from a famous person.  These three elements are what it really boils down to.

Learn More, Attract More

For further training on how to find the most viral photos, I share more of this information in Session 7 of the Member Portal, “How to Use Social Proof.” Check it out and watch your Facebook posts skyrocket with engagement!