Why do some photos go viral and others don't?

Friday 2 September 2022, 16:32 by Rob IJsselstein | 3,460 views | 0 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

I took a photo of a little flower called pasqueflower, or Pulsatilla Vulgaris. The photo went viral on Facebook and received more than 15,000 likes in total. Far more than the landscape photos I am proud of. Why that one photo?

Pasqueflower is mildly poisonous, but homeopaths use it in low concentrations for a number of conditions.

The photo was taken in the dunes behind a beach on the west coast of Scotland, near the village of Achmelvich. I took it with my iPhone.

Is it a special photo? I did make sure that the surroundings could be seen in the background. Apart from that, it is a solitary plant, the only one in the area.

The light is beautiful too, making all the hairs on the stems and the outside of the flowers stand out nicely.

You can look inside the flower on the left, and see the outside shape of the other one. There are also new buds coming through, and taken together you can see all the aspects of the flowers and the plant. But apart from that?

I enjoy showing my photos of Scotland in two Facebook groups about Scotland: Scotland's Scenery and Spirit of Scotland.

I get the impression that these groups mainly have members who live outside Scotland, sometimes of Scottish descent. Spirit of Scotland has 24,000 members, while Scotland's Scenery has 519,000. I posted the photo in both groups at the same time.

In Scotland's Scenery, the photo was shared by the administrator straight away. That gave it an immediate boost.

Yes, by now we know a little about Facebook's algorithms: the more extreme the praise is worded, the higher the photo appears in everyone's timeline, meaning the sooner people see it. And lots of likes strengthen that effect.

After a week, the storm had passed, and the counter now stands at 7,300 likes, 279 comments, and 264 people have shared it. In the smaller Spirit of Scotland group, it did much less well: 204 likes. A striking difference.

A month later, I posted the same photo in another group: Highland Scenery, with 59,000 members, one tenth of the number in Scotland's Scenery. But there too, the photo received more than 7,500 likes, with 212 comments, and it was shared 180 times.

The photo apparently has something special for many people.

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