Researchers have looked at what makes social media activism work.

Social media players feed on the phenomenon of ‘going viral’, but it is difficult to tell how this actually happens.

A new study from the UK has found that in order for social activism to go viral, it requires a strong consensus on what to do, moral conviction, a cause that stokes empathy and a way to convert this momentum into real-world actions.

Social campaigns that use the influence of social networks like Facebook tend to do better, as encouraging others to join in makes the campaign part of the social norm.

However, due to their nature, viral campaigns – like the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge – tend to be shortlived.

While the 2014 campaign involved 28 million people and raised US$115 million dollars for the national ALS Association, in 2015 they only raised 0.9 per cent of this amount.

The ‘act now’ consensus of these campaigns is what gets them the numbers, for viral altruism to stick (like the Movember movement) people need to feel a deeper, personal engagement with the issue.

Although each cause is different in its focus, some of the initial success of popular viral social cause campaigns can be explained by what they have in common: their implicit reliance on a number of well-established psychological levers, which researchers refer to as the SMART criteria.

SMART is an acronym for campaigns that successfully leverage social (S) influence processes, establish a moral (M) imperative to act, inspire (positive) affective reactions (AR), and are able to translate (T) and convert social momentum into sustained real-world contributions.

The full study is accessible here.