Do you ever look at all the tweets of MoonPie and wonder how do they go viral like crazy? Viral marketing does seem like an art.
If you’re an entrepreneur in this digital era, you must have attempted at least once to create a campaign that could go viral on social media. Creating a viral marketing campaign is a great way to create brand awareness using the power of social media.
Think of virality as an exponential curve. Just like hashtags help your content reach more people who follow those hashtags, viral content gains traction by thousands of users sharing the content with their followers.
“The first step in creating viral content is having the courage, strength and self confidence to get in touch with your own feelings , thinking about what profoundly affects you.”
Viral marketing is a powerful tool for businesses. Campaigns that go viral have been helping brands and small businesses quickly acquired new customers. You can create a viral social media campaign by following the viral-marketing principles practiced by some of the world’s best brands.
1. Master the Art of Knowing your Target Audience
In order to create a viral content, you must first understand your target audience. People will share the content only if the content resonates with their social image and it’s something they truly enjoy, believe in, or find valuable.
2. Create Content with High Engagement
Most social media platforms use an algorithm that ranks content based on the likelihood that the user will engage. Content that is expected to engage followers is usually ranked at the top of the page while the content that is less engaging is ranked toward the bottom.
Viral marketers should focus on creating content that has high engagement, since it will have greater reach and is thus more likely to be re-shared. Content that creates engagement is rewarded by being amplified to other users; content that does not create engagement is buried.
3. Make an Emotional Connection
Emotion is what compels people to take action. Integrating emotions to your content will leave a long term impact on your audience and will trigger them to act accordingly. An excellent example of the use of emotion to fuel behavior is Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches Campaign.
The feelings that you get after seeing, hearing or reading something that strikes an emotional chord influences your behavior. And there’s science to back it.
4. Select the appropriate social media platform
Every social media platform is different. Before creating content, choose a platform on which to specialize. Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are all good platforms on which to start a viral marketing campaign; however, the content you create will differ depending on the platform you choose.
5. Measure Performance to Create better campaigns in the future
Sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter offer in-house analytics to monitor your content performance and ad campaigns. You can also use Twitter Analytics tool of Circlebloom to measure the performance of your campaign and gain control of all the activities taking place respective of your content, campaign, tweets, or other activities for promotion, virality, etc.
Going Viral Summarised:
Looking at the anatomy of viral marketing, the content itself should be worthy of being shared. It has to solve a particular problem, enhance your reader’s knowledge base or make something better. Therefore, keep these on mind before creating any content for going viral!
I would also like to hear your opinion and examples of viral marketing. Please go ahead and share your experiences in the comments below.
