The anatomy of a post that got over 500,000 likes

Between the Joel.is posts and this latest "Buffer" blog posting I have to say the majority of material coming out of these folks just reeks of "Quick-Fix" (Steven Covey term) superficiality and marketing spam. It's highly individualized reflection that gets generalized back into principles and platitudes for success and looks great on the surface, but there's no depth.

They spout off a few "lessons" -- really just post-success reflections/rationalizations -- all of which may or may not truly be principles that lead to success, and then slather their posts with some filler remarks. Top it off with a few random EXTRA-BOLD / italicized points to pass it off as "fact" and then slap a ton of social media, newsletters, etc. around it.

I can just imagine the folks at Buffer discovering the words of Jesus...

"Here at Buffer, we like to love your neighbor as yourself, for in loving others we spread compassion and grace. Our phenomenal work in spreading compassion to one man, who we found nearly dead at the side of the road, has helped us all understand love better. The key is this: if you want to love, you need to stop on the side of the road for all people. Also, get BufferApp. PS, sign up for our newsletter. Buffer."

I went through the blog (the last 3 pages of articles) they all have quite consistent share ratios (Facebook likes are almost always 6 - 7x the number of Tweets) and the number of likes seems to hover around 4k for the "average" post (so it's plausible they have a regular audience liking most posts).

Every blog post on their site follows the formula talked about in this blog post (explaining "why" it went viral) so why haven't these posts gone viral?

The one, and most important thing that will most likely make a blog post go viral is to say what people like to hear.

So, stop having an opining, stop being yourself, and write a blog post about 'being yourself'. They will share it like crazy!

Um, one thing that is critical is time and place. You can do all of these things, but with content that isn't for the right people at the right time and it goes nowhere. It's like the idea of the tablet. 10 years ago the tech was too expensive. Idea was great, execution was not totally horrible, but at $1000+ who cares? At $200-500 with even better execution it's a phenomenon.