Lessons About Going Viral Learned From A Pin On Pinterest [Chart]

Going viral is always exciting. It was about three and a half years ago when my first article here on Bit Rebels went viral. It happened on Digg (back when Digg was huge), and it was an article about how to eat a chicken wing. Back then, we weren’t on a big daddy server like we are today, and I remember the site could barely withstand the beating it got that day. You might think you have to have a lot of followers or fans to go viral, but that isn’t always the case.

This chart below called The Family Tree Of A Viral Pin (by PinLeague) is one of the most interesting charts about going viral that I’ve seen in a long time. There are so many lessons to be learned from this one viral pin.

These lessons about going viral can be applied to any social media site really. There are countless examples of this same type of thing happening on Twitter for example. As you see on this chart, sometimes going viral takes time. In some cases, it can take a lot of time. This pin didn’t go viral for over 6 months. I’ve had articles here on Bit Rebels that took a year to go viral. It just happens like that. You never know. It just takes the right person seeing that piece of content at the right time.

Also, it’s as important, or more important, that influential people catch your pin (or tweet or status update or whatever) than it is how many followers or fans you have. Another important lesson to learn is that it’s always important to check your links. The person who created this image in the first place never got proper credit since the link was broken in the original pin. You can click over to PinLeague (linked above) to read more about this.