Why Spotify Wrapped Keeps You Engaged and Goes Viral (Every Year)
It’s that time of the year again when we see colorful summaries of our Spotify activity wrapped up (no pun intended). Every year we see the same dynamic and colorful screenshots with beautiful data presentation. And we can’t stop ourselves from sharing our activity on the platform and getting curious about how our friends did this year.
Let’s dive into the details of this trend to talk more about why it always keeps you engaged and goes viral.
1. It’s repeatable
Since 2016, we get the same campaign with different results. It’s repeatable in a way that drives engagement around its user base. It does the same thing every year but as users, we get curious to see how we did this year and how our listening habits change along with our music taste (and podcasts). Its design is based on a template so whenever we see one of our friend’s Wrapped results, we know where to look and how to follow the information.
2. It’s personalized
Everything we see around Spotify’s Wrapped campaign is personalized. We get more info on which genres we discovered more and got addicted to. We see how many minutes we spent staying on the platform. We get a glimpse of artists we listened to for the first time. We see the winner tracks for our top 5. Personalization makes this a unique dynamic around virality. And it’s not just the listeners, it includes artists and advertisers.
3. It’s presented in a beautiful way
As a data visualization fan, I love the way how it’s presented. It’s colorful, clean, easy to understand, and full of simple information. It’s way more complicated on the back-end but keeping the front-end so simple and clean needs a lot of hard work.
4. It’s easy and fun to share
It’s easy to share with 1-click among your social sphere. Each year the way we see how data is presented evolves around the trends of how we consume content. For example, in previous years, we didn’t have a button to share on Instagram as a story. But in recent years, we were able to share it as an Instagram Story right away. Making this adaptable to other platforms is crucial for cross-promotion and organic traffic. Spotify achieved this with that kind of solution so other users were aware of the campaign. This also made it easier to go viral.
5. It’s creating an urgency to share
Seeing this on your Twitter feed or friend’s Instagram Story creates an urge to check it out as soon as possible. With this urgency, you want to see how you did last year and be part of that trend so you can share it with your friends. That was also another important leverage around engagement and virality.
Let’s see what next year will bring!
Did you know? I published my fiction book Realm of Light: The Darkest Night. Click here to learn more about it.
