BUSINESS
Big exposure that doesn’t cost a penny: How to ‘go viral’. Learn the tricks of the trade for getting your content to go viral on social media.
G
oing viral is the holy grail of marketing. What we mean by ‘viral’ content is that you create something on social media which gets the attention of the public, people then share it to their network and, in turn, those people do too. Before you know it, and in the same way bacteria multiply in a dish, hundreds of thousands to millions of people have seen your content and it hasn’t cost you anything! Viral content creates success Many successful businesses and careers have been created off the back of one piece of viral content. Yes, one! If you look at your Facebook or Linkedin feed you may notice the same few people cropping up time and time again. From modern marketing gurus such as Gary Vaynerchuk, Stephen Bartlett and Neil Patel to Internet celebrities like Logan Paul, The Smithy Family and The Bald Builders, they were all catapulted to success by viral content. In today’s connected world, all it takes is for a single, popular piece of content to create notoriety for you or your brand and the rest can be built from there. What makes content go viral? Any old content does not simply go viral – it takes a perfect storm of factors for this to happen. Of these factors, you can control only one and that is the content itself. The rest is down to influence. You need to pitch it the right way then what happens next is almost entirely out of your hands, down to the public’s response and the platforms’ algorithms (e.g. Facebook). Just like a fire, in order to achieve an inferno of attention you need fuel, a spark and a catalyst. The spark is your content, the fuel is the platform (e.g. Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, TikTok) and the catalyst is the public response. The most critical part here, as you can probably gather, is what content you create and then where and how you pitch it to get traction. How does some (rubbish) content go viral and other (great) content not? If you are even vaguely familiar with content on social media you will have noticed that not everything of brilliance goes viral and not everything viral is brilliant. Far from it, in fact. More often than not, the content that gets the most impressions/reach (people seeing it) and interactions, is pretty dull. You will have seen a basic quiz or personal questions that rack up hundreds of thousands of comments, shares and likes or someone’s
random cat video… but why is this? Well, it all comes down to engagement. Whatever the platform, they all work fundamentally the same way. People create and post content, some of the people in their immediate network see that, the more people interact with it, the more other people then see it. This works on two levels; first, if you have say 1,000 followers and post something most of them are not actually going to see it. This varies from platform to platform but 100% of your followers will never be exposed to 100% of your content and this is intentional. If you create good content that people interact with then more of your immediate network will see it, simple as that. And ‘good’ does not mean the content is good, just that people seem to respond well to it, whatever it is, it has their interest. Second, the more your immediate network interacts with your content by liking it, commenting, sharing, tagging their friends or hash-tagging groups, the more people outside of your network, who you do not know, will see it. Then if they do the same, their connections do and you end up with an exponential growth in exposure all the way through the six degrees of separation. Where this really can also take off is, on some platforms like Linkedin, this “trending” content is then shown to selected people that the algorithm believes may also like to see it. These are people you have no connection with whatsoever. You can see the fundamentals of how it works; everyone else is doing the work for you and it works in a similar way to spreading a rumour. How are you going to create that spark that gets the public behind you? There are actually some fairly simple base mechanics to creating content that is primed to go viral. If we keep in mind that the goal is public interaction then we want to create something which the public wants to interact with, whether they know you or not. We can do that one of two ways: 1) Create content that asks them to interact in some way or 2) Create content that they feel compelled to express an opinion on. Believe it or not, there does not have to be any reward mechanism at all. You do not need to give away something for free (though that can be hugely effective) you simply need to get a response. The most effective way to do this is by creating something that is both visual and emotive. By visual, I mean it should be noticed, be clear and draw people to it. Whether this is a giant personal question in text format or a cute kitten, it works the same way.
By emotive, I mean your content should resonate with people in some way emotionally. It can be silly or it can be serious, it can be happy or it can be sad, it can evoke anger or it can bring laughter. Positive content (eg. good news stories) will always outperform negative content (e.g. criticism of bad traits in business) so you are better concentrating on emotions that provide a human serotonin or joyful response. This said, both can work well but be careful with the negative stuff and steer well clear of anything deeply sensitive or political, as you do not want to polarise your audience. You then want to make sure you post it on all your social channels and use appropriate hashtags to push it into groups you think are most likely to respond to it. Get creative. Think outside the box. How will I know if my content is going viral? There is a fairly simple rule of thumb that we look for to have a good idea if a piece of content is going to go viral. When you post it, you want to keep a watch of the number of impressions/views primarily, and also the number of likes, reactions and comments. If these numbers are roughly doubling in a 24hr period, two days in a row, then they could well be on track to go viral. You will know it’s ‘gone viral’ once you start getting into the thousands. If you want to see a current example of a viral piece of content in action, go to the following link. I shared a personal story about our newborn son on Linkedin and, at time of writing on 19th January, it had approaching 400,000 views and 7,300 comments: bit.ly/3rwF4n1. I hasten to add, this was not shared with the intention of self-promotion, it just happens that a 6-week old baby is now more famous on Linkedin than the 44year old man who created him. Follow TFA’s Linkedin page here to see the exciting viral content campaign we have coming up: bit.ly/3AkSCGf If you need help with your business marketing, feel free to get in touch with me at TFA: darren.isaac@t-f-a.co.uk 01908 263650 www.t-f-a.co.uk
Darren Isaac is the owner of TFA, a multi-award-winning brand, marketing and creative agency. 56 The Triangle, The Coachworks, Wolverton Park Rd MK12 5FJ www.t-f-a.co.uk | 01908 263650 24
February 2022 | NN Pulse Magazine | 22,000 Copies delivered every month door to door across Northamptonshire
