Viral Stories

Facebook is the social media heart of viral videos and stories. A few have caught my eye recently – in this blog post I will highlight the differences between them.

Firstly, the heart-warming and inspirational ‘Stephen’s Story’ has most likely been on everyone’s social media pages around the world. Stephen Sutton was an inspirational teenager living with terminal cancer, yet he still made the most of every second of his life, even in the hardest of times.

By sharing his story through his Facebook page he quickly started to gain a following of people that wanted to support him and follow his progress. Through this page he raised money for the Teenage Cancer Trust because he wanted to “spend as much time as possible raising funds for a charity very close to my heart.” The story was shared and spread through social media very quickly and the donations came flooding in. To date nearly £4,000,000 has been donated to his Just Giving page, which was generated largely through telling his story on Facebook. This use of social media meant he also got the support of many celebrities, such as Jason Manford and Prime Minister David Cameron, who wanted to help him raise money.

Another inspirational story which went viral on social media was of a cat saving a little boy from being attacked from a dog. If you haven’t seen it yet then you should watch it! When I arrived at work one day, everyone was talking about this cat.

I asked myself: “Why did this spread so quickly?” One reason could be because this cat went against the stereotype of not being a loyal pet as it ran to the rescue to save its owner’s little boy. Moreover, I think it gives an uplifting emotion because the situation could have ended quite badly if the cat hadn’t acted as it did.