Last week, I sat down at my desk to write a quick story for Entrepreneur.com just before I went to bed. When I woke up the next morning, the article had been viewed 150,000 times. To date, it has 250k views and 6k reactions on Facebook.
The story is titled: 'Quiet Firing' Is Taking the Workplace by Storm. What Is It Exactly? It wasn't an original idea – HuffPost, The Washington Post, and The Hill had already written about quiet firing a few days earlier. It wasn't a great piece of journalism—the story has no original reporting, no real point of view, and it clocked in at a rather unimpressive 300 words.
But somehow, someway, the Viral Gods decided to smile upon it. Now, readers will forever associate my byline with a trendy term I only learned a few days ago.
How did this happen?
Trying to understand why something goes viral on the internet is sort of like trying to dissect a joke—it loses that something something in translation. Can we really distill and replicate what amounts to lightning in a bottle? Probably not. But since virality is the goal of so many writers, social media influencers, and media companies, I thought I'd dig into my tiny patch of virality and try to understand exactly how this happened.
It has a catchy title
Call it clickbait, call it churnalism, call it sensationalist, but the number one secret sauce behind a viral story is a clickable headline.
Seventy-two percent of the traffic for this story came from a Facebook post, which tells me that something about the title made people want to tap their little thumbs or mouses on the link and read more.
So what could have made this headline compelling? I think it has something to do with what an editor at Entrepreneur Media calls the 'curiosity gap.' This is the space between the information we're given (what we know) and the information that's initially withheld (what we don't know).
We know because the headline told you that a thing called "quiet firing" has taken over the workplace, but we don't know what it is (at least, most of us don't—including me). And neither the headline nor the deck will reveal it to you. You'll have to click on the story and read it to find out.
This practice is an old marketing trick known by Madison Ave for years. It's the same practice I was schooled in back in my print magazine days. We would spend hours writing catchy headlines whose sole purpose was to get you to take the magazine off the rack and buy it.
It delivered on the promise
Ok, I take back my original comment about this being clickbait. By definition, that term refers to a misleading headline designed to get clicks that doesn’t deliver an accurate or honest portrayal of the story.
A bad clickbait headline might read something like, "Baby Ducks See Water For The First Time — Can You BELIEVE What They Do? Then you click on the headline (as I did) and learn that they sipped the water. How shocking! I can't BELIEVE it!
In the case of my little story (humble brag alert), the headline made a promise— to explain what quiet firing is—and the story delivered on that promise by defining the term and giving some examples. Readers appreciate that. And more importantly, google appreciates that, which is why the story ranks #1 under the search term "quiet firing." A term I didn't even invent!
It explained something people have questions about.
I'm going to let you in on another little secret weapon here that you may not know about. Google Trends. This site gives you insight not only on the trending stories as measured by google search but also on keywords associated with those trending stories.
Before I wrote the story, I typed the term "quiet firing" into google trends and found that most people searching for it also typed in words like "what is" and "work" and "quiet quitting." This told me that these are all questions and topics potential readers had that needed to be answered.
Because I didn't have time to do any original reporting on the story, I positioned it into explainer journalism. This is when you give the reader background information on a popular topic.
It had good timing
Nobody would have noticed this story if the term "quiet quitting" hadn't been so zeitgeisty. Mainstream and social media has had a field day in the last few weeks covering quiet quitting from every angle possible. If I had written another story on quiet quitting, crickets would ensue. There was nothing else to say about it.
But the terminology is still interesting, so some brilliant mind (not mine) came up with a new twist on it. Quiet firing is not new, but the phrase is. And people love new phrases. Look at "adorkable," "subvariant," and "the Great Resignation." All buzzwords that were once popular at a certain time. I happened upon a buzzword at the right time. Two weeks from now, nobody will care about quiet firing. In fact, there are already stories being written about "quiet hiring."
It played on fear
Ok, I hate to admit this, but there was a little bit of fear at play in this story. Most people worry about getting fired, especially these days when filling your tank is as expensive as dinner for four at a restaurant. So the idea of getting fired in a weird new way that you've never heard of makes you want to learn more about it.
There's also the FOMO factor of not knowing a term everyone else knows. Fear is a mighty tool writers have access to. Use it sparingly.
Those are some reasons I think the story took off, but I definitely overlooked a few. Let me know in the comments what I missed, and I'll add them to this story (giving you credit, of course).
Who knows? Maybe we can make this story behind a viral story go viral.
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