Conclave 2025: how a sacred ritual went viral on social media
What happens when a thousand-year-old event meets an algorithm? Extra omnes becomes a keyword, cardinals are fanfiction characters, and white smoke is awaited like a championship trophy. This is what came to life with Conclave 2025, the first to be completely immersed in digital culture—or rather, to create it.
Habemus Post: the 2025 conclave is the Church’s first social media event
What is so fascinating and paradoxical about the fact that an event designed to remain hidden from the eyes of the world has become a global digital topic?
In addition to electing Pope Leo XIV, the 2025 conclave has produced a predictable but surprising side effect: it is the most social Church event ever.
Until 2013, with the election of Pope Francis, the Conclave ritual was shrouded in an impenetrable liturgy.
This time, however, it lit up social media timelines like a real reality show.
The location is the Vatican, the protagonists are potentially everyone, and the suspense, so much suspense, has produced a succulent narrative void.
The dynamics are textbook semiotics: the less we know, the more we want to imagine.
Memes about the Conclave
The 2025 Conclave was a real social media event. Some welcomed it as a modernization of the Church, while others saw it as vulgarization. When in doubt, let’s remain human and joke around, enjoying some of the most ingenious memes on the web.
On the other hand, if some cardinals really did watch the film Conclave before participating in order to get an idea of the event, it is clear that marketing can also learn a lot from this experience.
We tried searching for the keyword “conclave” on SEOZoom and found that the SERP is dominated by authoritative sites such as Wikipedia and YouTube, but also leaves room for the latest news from generalist portals such as la7.it and ilsole24ore.com. Which content performs best? Content that responds to the informative and narrative intent, from historical significance to the dynamics of voting.
Related keywords, such as “how the conclave works,” “Pope Francis conclave,” or “conclave poll,” indicate widespread and cross-cutting curiosity, combining faith, news, and entertainment. In practice, users want to know, participate, and comment.
That’s why many blogs have created content that responds to users’ intentions, including on social media with videos and posts explaining the details of what was happening in the Vatican.
We are grateful to the new SEOZoom tools previewed for you, which allow you to monitor trends on various social channels, so you can see how, for example, on TikTok, the hashtag #conclave reached second place, surpassing even #badbunny.
Content related to the event totaled over 296 million views, with related hashtags such as #nuovopapa (36 million views) and #fumatabianca (33 million views) establishing themselves among the most followed trends, with clear peaks on the days of the vote.
Will you be able to anticipate the next big trend?
All this data was collected thanks to the new “Social Trends” feature, already available in beta for participants in SEOZoom day 2025 and soon to be available for all users of the platform. This tool allows you to monitor the most popular hashtags and other content on social media in real time, for those who want to catch the wave before it becomes a tsunami.
Why did the Conclave work so well?
We are faced with a communication paradox: the more silent an event is, the more noise it makes. Here are at least three reasons why the Conclave was perfect narrative material for the web:
- Narrative gap
Silence, secrecy, and a ban on images: everything that cannot be seen creates engagement. Here, the absence of information sparked creativity because no one knew what was going on inside, so we all tried to imagine it.
- Powerful visual symbolism
Catholic liturgy is a feast for the eyes: red cloaks, white robes, incense, and ancient codes.
Everything is in palette, in harmony with the mood.
- Archetype of the leader
The anticipation of the new pontiff, like the oracle, the king, or the chosen one, are all tropes that work in films, novels, and now even in stories.
In an age where everything is reported in real time, the wait for the new Pope has broken the compulsive rhythm of notifications and brought attention back to something rare: desire. The desire to know, to participate, to imagine.
Gamification and participation
#conclave25 was not only memed and followed, but also played. The web reacted to the information vacuum with spontaneous gamification.
Gamification consists of applying typical game elements, such as points, challenges, rewards, and rankings, to non-playful contexts. It is a neuromarketing and communication strategy that exploits the human need for active engagement (participation), progress, and recognition.
According to Deci and Ryan‘s 1985 self-determination theory, people are more involved when they can feel:
- Competent—for example, by predicting who the future pope would be.
- Autonomous—by creating memes, giving opinions, and participating in conversations.
- Connected—by becoming part of a community united globally by an event.
During the days of the Conclave, Cardinal Tagle was trending, with POVs telling you which cardinal you “would have been,” and other similar dynamics that turned the Conclave into a collective game.
When an event becomes a game, the way it is perceived and remembered also changes. This conclave will remain etched in our minds not only for the name of the new pope, but also for the way in which digital humanity experienced the event.
The Conclave: a case study for your strategy
The digital success of the 2025 Conclave is a triumph of communication by absence. By maintaining its silent rituality, the Vatican has unwittingly generated one of the most widely shared narratives of the digital age.
An event that does not actively communicate communicates more strongly. Because it offers users the opportunity to fill in the gaps.
In this sense, the Conclave was a case of “unintentional brand storytelling” that bypassed every institutional communication manual.
It is a lesson for marketers: sometimes, you don’t need to talk. You need to create contexts so strong that they go viral on their own.
The most powerful message that the Conclave leaves us in terms of marketing is this:
You don’t need to force virality to go viral. Instead, you need to create (or preserve) a narratively compelling ritual.
This Conclave has taught us that well-measured hype is pure gold, and that brands too eager to show everything right away forget that teasing is the most underrated art of digital marketing.
Furthermore, often the content that works is not the perfect one, but the archetypal one, and no matter how sacred or profane an event is, if the web becomes attached to it, it will rework it in an ironic way.
A smart brand does not fear irony; on the contrary, it embraces it.
An event that proved to be a hotbed of communication and marketing, where the sacred and the digital came together in perfect harmony.
The final lesson we can learn from Conclave 2025 is that success in marketing stems from the ability to stir emotions, generate anticipation and, above all, leave room for users’ creativity.
