As regular readers of the blog will know, I'm quite sceptical about claims made by agencies that they can send your content or product viral with any degree of certainty.  Research has revealed that our social network tends to consist primarily of people that are very much like us, and as such it is difficult for new ideas to spread when everyone we know already knows much of what we know.

A new piece of research the University of Indiana attempts to shed a bit more light on how things spread between social networks.  I'm afraid the findings are bad news for agencies who would have you believe something spreading is all down to them however.  The findings from the research suggest that viral success is more down to the structure of the social network and the attention span of the people within it than it ever is to do with either the content or the author.  So in other words it's pretty random.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers build a computer model of a system similar to Twitter.  Each software agent within the system had a limited attention span, again seeking to mimic Twitter.  So each 'user' would only remember a meme for a short period of time.  The researchers regularly input memes into the system and used some simple rules to pick virtual viral sensations.  Using this methodology they were quickly able to replicate how Twitter behaves based on their analysis of 120 million retweets from 12.5 million users.

"Our question was, can we look at these things to explain why some become very popular–why some YouTube videos go viral and others don't. There might be one dancing cat that gets a million views, but another dancing cat where only two people watch," the researchers said.

Whereas the natural world tends to pick its winners and losers based on a survival of the fittest process, it has proven harder to determine how information lives or dies.  Instead they found that the spread of an idea or piece of content was not really reliant upon the strength of that idea.  Less survival of the fittest as survival of the luckiest.

This does not really mean that there are no ideas more interesting or people more influential than others, only that the role of those factors is easy to overestimate.

"Of course, there are things that are more objectively interesting than others and if you write about them, probably yes, that will receive a bunch of following. However, even if you don't you might get lucky. And even if you do, someone else might be posting the same thing and get the attention instead of you," they said.

So just as Napolean wanted generals who were lucky rather than great, maybe the same should apply to your tweets.