The dream of all marketers is to know how to drive engagement, what do you need to keep your fans and consumers interested on your brand? Well there’s still no specific answer for this but there is a recipe that one can follow and it’s through emotional engagement, Martin Jones says that one of the most viral messages spreads are when one is felling happy, sad, angry, disgusted or surprised; its becomes almost impulsive to share content.

According to Social media today Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman found that “there is a strong relationship between emotion and virality regardless of whether is positive or negative” including some takeaways like:

• Positive content is more viral than negative one
• Inspiring and surprising content gets a higher probability of shares
• Sad content can generate shares, however is less likely to happen
• Finally the strongest forecast of virality was how much anger did the message evoke

So how can we create a more effective engagement through these emotions? Well here are some recommendations

1. Surprise- Anything unexpected
   1. One method is through showing people a new method to do something, like the lacost commercial, which teaches you a new way to fold clothes.
   2. Fear- is a great motivator but one must use it with careful and its recommend it to use a solution at the end to end it.
   3. Joy- as mention before these will have a greater impact than the negative one, on e can use inspirational messages like BMW commercial, therefore if it generates more laughs chances are it gets more shares.
   4. Anger- here it doesn’t mean hostile anger but that emotion that gets to you when you are do not agree with what is being stated, as an example the Loewe commercial, that was highly criticized by the young Spaniards since it depict them as lame, therefore they created a lot of viral content ruining the brand image.
   5. Sadness- has a low probability of going viral, except catastrophe events, natural disasters like hurricane sandy
   6. Disgust- tend to be really delicate subject so it’s proper to avoid it

So people tend to share more content when they are emotionally engaged; therefore, one can use these tips to perform more effectively. For me one of my latest shares was about the app of Yog, which caused me surprise, since one can actually race with someone else in the network and compete with them, so I found this really motivating.