Viral content can expand the reach of a company and generate increased interest in the intended topic. For example, a platform publishing statistics relating to the NBA playoffs tonight, the content has a high likelihood of “going viral” due to a systematic, exponential increase in search hits. Contrastingly, the response to less popular content will naturally vary and is dependent on quality and relevancy. Getting people to share your content and expand its reach can be challenging, and accommodating hype to some degree can be critical. Successful viral campaigns achieve a high amount of exposure in a short timeframe – this is particularly prominent on social media platforms where information can spread rapidly. Therefore, this article will give a brief overview of how to enable your content “go viral” on social media.
Know your audience
The most rudimentary means of ensuring your content goes viral is to cultivate a deeper understanding of your audience. Put simply, the more you know about them, the more effortless it will be to create content they might share with their friend list. Therefore, it is recommended to understand the demographics of your audience, their general interests and preferences, and their expectations – this will assist you to tailor content that resonates with the optimal number of individuals. Moreover, a simple point to acknowledge is that it is not always necessary to utilize content that directly relates to your products or services. Interesting content that relates to a popular or trending topic is typically sufficient to keep an audience engaged. Simply, keeping the “hype” at a high level is necessary to promote content that matters – audiences can be easily bored and are less likely to share on social media.
Time is of the essence
Inherently, each social media channel requires a specific approach. Despite ultimately targeting the same audience across multiple platforms, overall behavior and specific preferences change depending on the website. What to post, where to post it and when are critical considerations when maximizing exposure. For example, although daily routines hugely differ, the vast majority of people using Instagram and interested in music perhaps peaks on a Friday, after regular work hours in the early evening. This could also apply (with significant variation) to people interested in politics who frequent Twitter or people interested in films who typically check their Facebook – both with respective peak days and times. If you miss the optimal opportunity to maximize exposure for a given target audience, it is more profitable to wait for the next peak in activity before posting. Thus, it is recommended to plan ahead to determine how and when your audience is most active.
Focus on quality
Content that “goes viral” and remains trending must be high quality. Focusing on quality over quantity will ultimately pay dividends that your audience will deem worthy of sharing further. To illustrate this – amusing content holds the most potential to disseminate across the internet daily. However, generally speaking, this superficial type of material has a short shelf life in terms of endurance. In contrast, an article that delivers a message that deeply resonates with an optimal amount of people (e.g., how people can contribute towards mitigating climate change) can be sustained for prolonged periods. For example, this could take the form of an article, a video, or an online poll – regardless of the format, quality must be intrinsic.
To build quality, the more you know about an audience, the more effortless it will be to spread your message. This may involve creating content that is as useful as possible – in other words, focus on generating content that is educational, informative, and relevant to the core audience. Furthermore, be as general as possible to maximize relevancy, but cover multiple aspects to expand reach. The process may also involve partnering with an influencer or employing user-generated content to boost applicability. Overall, creativity and innovation are vital tools to boost your content.