Upworthy/ Viral Blogging System?

Its not the "platform" that is in question here.
Its their content.

They have interesting content with simple social buttons at the side easy for readers to share.
You can also easily integrate Facebook comments Facebook sharing Facebook pages with wordpress too.

For automated sharing NextScripts: Social network automatic poster shares your article to different social media sites.

I agree with the above comments- the Facebook for Wordpress plugin is a great little tool.

You need some Interesting headlines,content and a lot of hard work.

Upworthy is the fastest growing media company ever because of some very solid marketing and testing techniques. I don't like their clickbate headlines, but you can learn a ton from the success they've had.

As far as building a site that Looks similar to there's, you can easily do that with a simple Wordpress theme. But if you want a site that performs like there's, cancel any upcoming purchases, and get ready to hire a very good programmer. Their site is custom built from the ground up, thanks in large part to their millions in funding.

The front end is built with Jquery, Modernizr, Less (use Sass instead), parts of Twitter Bootstrap, and Varnish for caching. Plus a few other things. They also have a lot of plugins that help with their testing, content aggregation, and website speed. A few are Fastly, Pars.ly, and Optimizely.

The way they produce their headlines is by writing out 25 headlines for every story they create. They then run the best ones through custom software on the backend, test it using some facebook traffic, and publish the best one. I think they call their backend software, "the magic Unicorn box" or something ridiculous. But it obviously works, most of their posts get 10's of thousands of likes and shares.

A few smart things I've noticed from them is that:

1) They only show optin popups after the user finishes viewing their content. This is probably much more effective then throwing it in the users face, the second they land on your site, or using a generic countdown timer.


2) There's no ads, except for promoted stories. The entire site is designed solely to drive clicks and shares. There's nothing to distract the user from this.

3) No comment section. This might seem strange for a media company, but they know their market, and it exists on Facebook. That' why you have to leave the site and engage on their fan page for your voice to be heard. The additional comments and shares to their Facebook page means their traffic grows even faster.

Bonus : Upworthies number one source of traffic, likes, and shares are Moms. Not teenagers, highschool kids, or college students, but Moms, by far.