Viral Trends in Christian Content

What are the characteristics of viral stories in the Christian space? At Zoecity, we attempt to answer this question by examining the how, what, where, when and why of sharing. Here’s a quick snapshot of the content we aggregated for January 2010.

There were 6 major stories shared that was significantly higher than everything else in January. Looking at the chart, you can see the sudden spikes in sharing activity and the corresponding stories. Our criteria for story inclusion is whether or not an article is relevant, influential or impacting to Christians.

We noticed that our top stories were broken to the following categories.

Spiritual Growth: Albert Mohler on evangelical discernment
Current Events: Brit Hume on Tiger Woods, Haiti earthquake and Tim Tebow
Law & Politics: President Obama says Interpol jurisdiction above US constitution
Leadership: Michael Hyatt on being indespensable

The biggest story of all was actually not about the Haiti earthquake itself. This story had already been covered ad nauseam by mainstream media. The actual story revolved around Pat Robertson’s statement that Haitians sold their soul to the devil and now reap God’s judgement.

Don Miller responds to Pat Robertson’s statements on Relevant magazine and this was our number one story of the month. It took in a total of 1,142 shares in January. The total share count has accumulated to an amazing 2,881 shares (2,587 on Facebook, 294 on Twitter) since then.

The other major noteworthy Haiti story was written by Jean Gelin, a pastor from a Haitian-American church. He researched and dispelled the Haiti devil worship myth. What was truly surprising about this article was not just its impact, but rather its relevance to the whole matter. Jean Gelin actually published his article 5 years ago. But it made the number two highest article of the month (728 shares) because it suddenly became relevant, influential and impacting to Christians on that month.

This is what we at Zoecity hope to achieve, every day, every week and every month with our top stories compilation. We pull the best (defined as most popular for now) and bring it to you, wherever you are, whether its on our homepage, by RSS feed, on our newsletter, on our Twitter feed or our Facebook feed.