It is time for social media to move past mythology and into measurable outcomes, according to Dan Zarrella in his book Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness: The Science, Design, and Engineering of Contagious Ideas. The Web allows interactions to be measured qualitatively and quantitatively, and yet the social media experts are giving us advice that is based only on assumptions, clichés and truisms.
So what is it that causes ideas to spread? Simply being good ideas is not enough: plenty of good ideas do not catch on, and plenty of bad ideas go viral. Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness is a framework that specifies three criteria which must be met before someone will spread your idea:
- Exposure: The person must be exposed to your content
- Attention: Your specific idea must attract the person’s attention
- Motivation: There must be something about the idea which makes the person want to share it
The science of success in social media involves increasing the number of people exposed to your content, increasing the attention-grabbing ability of your content, and increasing the power of your calls to action.
While the author’s advice may be disappointing to those readers who were looking for an easier answer to social media success, preferably involving funny pictures of cats, the book does contain a number of interesting observations, including the time of the week when the most retweets occur, the day of the week when most Facebook shares occur, the hour of blog posting most likely to attract links, and the time of day for sending email messages to attract the maximum number of click-throughs.
In summary, the book is short, entertaining, and one of the very few books on social media that is well worth reading.