{"id":3456,"date":"2011-12-30T09:00:06","date_gmt":"2011-12-30T14:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.shareaholic.com\/?p=3456"},"modified":"2014-05-09T12:57:13","modified_gmt":"2014-05-09T16:57:13","slug":"viral-content-lessons-from-facebooks-most-shared-articles-of-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shareaholic.com\/blog\/viral-content-lessons-from-facebooks-most-shared-articles-of-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"Viral Content Lessons from Facebook’s Most Shared Articles of 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"

Courtney Seiter is the Community Manager at Raven Internet Marketing Tools, a platform of\u00a0Internet marketing tools<\/a>\u00a0for managing SEO, social media, PPC and more. She has only read 15 of Facebook\u2019s 40 most shared articles of 2011, which is a little disappointing. Want to guest post for the Shareaholic blog? Email janet@shareaholic.com<\/em><\/p>\n

Facebook has released the social network’s 40 most shared stories of 2011<\/a>, and besides proving the world is way more into astrology than I thought (really, three entries about changing Zodiac signs?), the stories also let marketers in on some secrets about creating more shareable content.<\/p>\n

While Facebook isn’t the only place people are sharing content, it’s by far the biggest player for most of us, with more than 4 million items shared every day<\/a>. That makes this list a nice little Petri dish to take a closer look at.<\/p>\n

I overlaid these 40 much-shared articles with a recent New York Times’ study focusing on the psychology of sharing<\/a>, which identified five distinct types of social sharers (plus a sixth group that only shares infrequently). Let’s see if we can draw some conclusions about which groups share which kinds of content \u2013 and how we can replicate this effect.<\/p>\n

Altruists<\/h3>\n

Who they are:<\/strong> Valuable and\/or entertaining content is like a gift for altruists, to be thoughtfully distributed to the right people or group. Their reason for sharing is often based on emotion, whether it’s positive (a funny video) or negative (a warning about bad weather)<\/p>\n

Stories they might have shared:<\/strong><\/p>\n