There’s no scientific formula for predicting whether or not something will go viral on the Internet.

But a monolithic social network like Twitter certainly has the massive data pool from which to at least glean insights into the path to virality.

In the below three videos, Twitter’s UK Research team tracks how three popular videos all very different in nature went viral on Twitter.

The videos are: the Ryan Gosling “won’t eat cereal” videos; Commander Hadfield’s “Space Oddity”; and Dove’s Real Beauty campaign.

Each of the dynamic visualization videos shows a mixture of blue and yellow: blue nodes represent tweets (the bigger they are, the larger the potential reach), and yellow dots represent retweets.

The bottom line is that tweets containing videos have strong engagement rates. 42% of Twitter users likely to retweet, reply, or mention brand tweets that contain a fun or interesting video.

(Source: Twitter.)