Thought leadership content out often goes viral because it contains valuable information that others find useful. Examples include trend articles, product reviews, and reports on specific industry issues. These are portable and easily shared across multiple types of social media. You can choose to do written content or frame the information as video content. It also gives you the ability to post it on more social media channels and reach different types of people who will willingly share that content for you.

Thought leadership content out often goes viral because it contains valuable information that others find useful. Examples include trend articles, product reviews, and reports on specific industry issues. These are portable and easily shared across multiple types of social media.

Second, smaller online businesses without tons of social media followers should look for ways to leverage the power of social media influencers, ideally without paying them for their services. Look for ways to interact naturally with influencers on social media — for example, by tagging them in your content — without coming on too strong.

Don’t hesitate to offer free products or services to influencers, either. The worst that happens is they ignore your request and block you. If even one responds positively, whether by posting about their experience or even just sharing content, they’re tagged into thousands or millions of followers, the effort will have paid off.

When it comes to your social media campaigns, you need to think creatively to ensure your campaign stands out from your competitors. Many factors play critical roles in making a campaign go viral. When creating your campaign, it’s important to remember you’ll need to pull out some emotion from the viewer.

Second, smaller online businesses without tons of social media followers should look for ways to leverage the power of social media influencers, ideally without paying them for their services. Look for ways to interact naturally with influencers on social media — for example, by tagging them in your content — without coming on too strong.

My best tip for going viral on social media is to deliver information and advice that no one has already done or rehashed. You could do your research or generate a survey to create insightful data to share and then add your thought leadership for solutions to those findings and needs.

If you want to succeed in content marketing, you have to ensure that your best content should be pushed out and repurposed repeatedly. Milk it as much as possible. If it was a blog that went immensely successful, relaunch it on other platforms such as social media or even run social media ads. Push it across your social media channels, including messenger.

You can even chat blast (https://mobilemonkey.com/chatbots/facebook-messenger-marketing) your top-performing content to your followers!

It’s difficult to go viral on social media, but I had a friend who was able to get several LinkedIn posts to take off virally. We studied what he was doing so we could uncover the secret. Was it his subject matter? His headlines? His graphics? Nope.

It all came down to quantity — he churned out so much stuff that every so often, one of them would go viral. So, keep that in mind. If you want to go viral, you have to churn out lots and lots of high-quality content on a consistent basis.

Create content that would resonate with your targeted audience.

3 principles of viral content

Great content makes people take action because they show one of the following:

• Social currency
• Practical value
• Threat

The most significant piece of advice I can give business owners is to know your strengths and weaknesses and ask for help when you don’t know something. The average business owner doesn’t know how to make things go viral online, or else they already would have, and they wouldn’t be reading this for tips.

It’s ok to reach out for help when it comes to promoting your business, and especially when your business is just getting started, it’s essential to do so. This is what NowSourcing specializes in – our tagline is “We make things simple, visual, and influential.” Media campaigns can help your business gain visibility far outside of what you can do for yourself.”

1. Say something new that we haven’t heard before. I’d say over 90% of what’s online recycles tips we’ve already seen 1000 times. Snooze! Get an interview, or put up a video that shows something going on behind the scenes at your business. The internet is always hungry for freshness.

2. Be controversial. Take on an uncomfortable issue in your niche. For instance, this post about whether ESL writers should consider freelance writing in English a viable career — a hot topic in my space — continues to get traffic and comments and has over 200 words: https://www.makealivingwriting.com/open-letter-esl-writers/ Being controversial is also a way to build authority, which makes people want to follow you — if you have no opinion, people are less interested. And if everybody loves all your posts and no one is ever upset by them, you’re not doing online content right. Polarize your loyal customers and attract more like them by taking a stand.

Share original content that educates your audience. Too often, companies just promotional info about their product or service. Instead, create educational content that provides VALUE to your audience and shares that. People are a lot more likely to share a piece of educational content than a sales pitch disguised as a blog post.

Make sure that your content is professionally written and edited so that when you go viral, you won’t be embarrassed by a silly grammatical error.

Produce as much content as you can. You can’t predict what will take off and what won’t, so the more you produce, the more opportunities you get to create something that will go viral. There are all kinds of studies and formulas that marketers look to when trying to create viral content.

Still, they’re all lagging indicators, and the procedure for going viral changes as it happens because people become used to and disinterested in formulaic content quickly. So, by the time you understand how they work, they don’t work anymore. It’s good to study viral content and let it inform how you create, but the real opportunity is in making as much as possible so that you have as many pieces as possible with a chance to go viral. And that content needs to be truly unique.

To truly go viral, you need a compelling story that resonates with your audience. The story should explain how you solve a problem/challenge that your customer faces and do it better than anyone else in the market.

There are several examples of how you could communicate your story. Dollar Shave Club did this with its viral video (https://youtu.be/ZUG9qYTJMsI), and most recently, Wistia did this for a new product, SoapBox (https://youtu.be/ZhHbgMkneP4). While most of us spend time thinking about what we have to say, it is equally important to think about how you say it. Nothing beats content that infuses humor and wit while making sure that the core message isn’t diluted.

Start small, experiment with a bunch of assets, and see what works for your brand. The format can vary based on what works for your brand. It can be a short video, a carousel ad, or a long blog-post. But always focus on what is the story that you want to narrate with every piece of content.

Telling a relatable story through content is one of the most effective ways for an online business to go viral on social media. Your targeted audience is more likely to engage with a post if they can connect on a personal level.

Depending on the platform you are targeting, this can be with a series of videos, slides, short clips, or stories – as long as it resonates with your audience. Make use of analytic tools (3rd party or in-built) to decide what kind of content your audience likes the most.

For example, Facebook has an Insights feature that most people overlook. It allows you to track the performance of different types of content – posts, videos, or stories. So, take some time to analyze the stats, then decide which type of content is likely to go viral. Another thing you can do is allocate a budget to boost the reach of the post and catch the attention of a wider audience.

The most effective way to go viral on social media is to simply post content that your audience wants to see on a regular basis. It’s about quality, not quantity. To facilitate going viral, you should also include a story or message that people actually want to share with their friends. Posting your lunch or pictures of your daily life generally isn’t shareable.

Our agency’s objective has never been a quick burst of social media virality for our clients; instead, we focus on a slow, steady build of authentic engagement that converts and grows a following that aligns with the company’s mission.

With that said, if you’re being paid to create viral content, there’s no sure bet, yet the following best practices are more likely to help you get there:

• Create fun, unique content that puts each user at the center of the experience. Anomalies like the Ice Bucket Challenge didn’t become viral only because people felt generous about raising awareness, there was an element of exhibitionism in those posts where each user got to show off a bit while still letting folks know that they were down for the greater good of a worthy cause.
• Partner with social influencers who’ve already got the built-in clout and following to quickly blow your message up. This may fall under the guide of paid advertising in some cases.
• Create and/or own a hashtag that influencers will want to share. When we managed social media for Fairtrade America we were able to get #FairtradeChat trending on Twitter multiple times by creating valuable Twitter chats around relevant social topics and inviting many partner organizations to share in the conversation as well as the pre-made branded content that aligned with their organization’s ethics and objectives. You’d be surprised how one share from a socially-driven brand with millions of loyal followers can instantly boost your social media outreach.
• Get the press involved. Since we’re first and foremost public relations experts we know that the most important influencers are often those folks whose names grace the bylines of influential outlets. If your social post is generating some significant organic buzz or could in any way be deemed newsworthy, loop the press in with some well-placed social tags or simple pitches letting them know how your content might be of interest to their audience.
• Boost your posts. While we’re not proponents of throwing money at every single social post, if you’ve got one that’s starting to spark, throw some fuel at it by promoting it with some of your ad budget. Often that extra kick of sponsorship is the key to creating more comments and shares which will contribute to the potential virality.

I always like to say that if you want to go viral, do something that you’d never want anyone to see — ever. That is the easiest way. While certain people are skilled at creating viral content, the best you can hope for is to create content that touches, moves, inspires, and entertains your audience.

One thing that makes virality in the range is its unassuming quality, its rawness, vulnerability, and sheer organic authenticity with zero BS. Viral videos can connect with something deep inside an audience. So for that, the first tip is (as always) to know your audience and what matters to them. With that in mind, your content has to have the following:

1. A relatable story: Like all things worth sharing, it has to start with a relatable story that happened to a person “”just like me”” and could happen to me too.

2. The core of the content is frequently discussed: Right now, anything having to do with COVID or Politics is discussed.

3. Provides “”insider”” info””: Your goal is to make the audience feel like this is something no one knows about — only you and you are on the inside.

4. Focus on feelings: Your content has to trigger some raw emotion, humor, connection, fear, anger, awe, surprise, etc.

5. Publicly visible: I’m specifically thinking of No-Shave November, Lance Armstrong wrist bands, Ice Bucket Challenge – these are all ways that your message can advertise itself and be visible to others.

6. Information is useful: Thinking back to being on the “”inside”” of having information, the information you have must be helpful to and perhaps help people do something previously tricky very quickly – or help someone in terms of staying safe, etc.

Even if you follow these steps, there’s no guarantee your content will become viral — that’s why viral content is so fun. You may NOT want your content to become viral. Why? Because viral content is here today and gone tomorrow. And that’s not good for your content. You want your content to be relevant, evergreen, and be referenced often. The good news is that even if your content doesn’t go viral — it will still be great shareable content.

The formula for going viral depends on the platform. For example, Facebook favors memes and videos; Twitter likes threads and witticisms, and with LinkedIn, you’ll get good exposure by publishing business-savvy articles directly on the platform.

But it’s also a moving target, and try as you may create a viral post, it may just never happen for you. More than shooing to go viral, I suggest using social media to engage with and inspire your audience. Raving fans will create more business for you than a stranger who saw your meme and clicked “like” without even looking at your profile. In short, be authentic. Represent your brand. Engage. The rest will follow.

I recommend that every online business owner, blogger, or even an agency representative, hires a social media manager. Hiring someone to manage your social media will save you money and time on testing different methods to get your social accounts running.

If you cannot afford an SMM, then exploring social media management tools is the next best thing. These apps and services will let you automate and schedule your posts and help you keep track of trends and competitor activity. This, in turn, will help you establish your social media presence without spending more than an hour each day e-socializing.

Break people’s schemas of how things work. Virality happens because someone changes the way we think about something. Psy challenged our paradigm of music videos with Gangnam style. Taco Bell reverse engineered marketing by blacking out every image on their social media, saying they “”turned it off”” because it was on their app.

The Old Spice man sold us deodorant as we’d never been sold it before. The common theme among all these and any viral marketing campaign is they break the unwritten rules of how things are “”supposed”” to be done.

It’s smart to hyper-target your messaging for specific segments of your audience. It’s harder to shape a single post that will resonate with three different demographics UNLESS you can find a strong enough common ground for all three (like the social action vibe that permeates Ben & Jerry’s Instagram posts).

If you can’t find that common ground, narrow your focus for each social media post. For example, a baby monitor brand may have one post targeting young moms with messaging that alleviates their fears around their new baby being safe overnight in her own room. But the same company may target “second act” moms who are in their 40s with older kids, and who suddenly find themselves with a newborn with messaging around making sure baby is safe WHILE they’re doing a million other things. So, while it’s smart to target a wide range of potential customers, you have to message them separately, crafting the visuals, words, and tags to appeal to the different segments of your audience.

Apart from the usual tactics of being consistent with your social media posts, having compelling images and understanding your audience well enough to build your messages accordingly, my top 5 tips for an e-business to create viral posts on social media nowadays include the following:

1. Be bold! State your opinion, but don’t be obvious.
2. Tell relatable stories.
3. Make interactive content (quizzes, polls).
4. Use short videos.
5. Keep it short and sweet because people have a low attention span considering the flood of information shared.

If you were the owner of your company or a manager, would you pay any attention to social media posts created otherwise?

In 2020, video content has significantly outperformed other content formats, especially in terms of shareability. If your goal is virality, the first thing I would highly recommend is to work with the video format. What 2020 and all its circumstances have also taught us is that you don’t need a Hollywood-level production to make a video that hits big.

The success of a viral video marketing campaign is based on two main components: content and distribution. The impression your video makes on viewers mostly depends on the courage of your inner creator. Some brands, such as Dollar Shave Club with their well-known video marketing campaigns, succeeded in this by demonstrating a powerful combo of sense of humor and low-price video production back in 2012. Another effective way to get viral on social media is to imbue with your audience’s main issue and offer just what your clients need as Casper did when launching their meditation videos across IGTV, YouTube, and Spotify to help people fall asleep.

Embed: https://www.instagram.com/tv/BzHSUPQj5PU/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Consider these simple advice to enhance the chances for your video to turn into the center of people’s attention:

• Plan the benefit for people to share: they can seem smart, funny, supportive of the global issues, or up-to-date when sharing your video;
• Alternatively, they can simply get a valuable product benefit from it;
• Limit your video up to two 2 min so it doesn’t seem too tiresome even before people click on it;
• Explicitly describe the reason to watch your video in the headline, don’t be afraid to uncover the main teasing component to intrigue viewers.

Another essential thing you want to plan is the first flow of likes and shares. To do that, you need to:

• Allocate a PPC budget proportionate to the reach you want to achieve;
• Repurpose and publish your video across all the social media networks;
• Send it to your most loyal part of the community first and openly ask them to share it;
• Reach out directly to micro- and macro-influencers from your industry who might be willing to be associated with your content.

Competitions are a great way to drive more traffic, brand awareness, and engagement. They’re especially useful if you don’t have a broad audience already.

The key is to ensure you have a compelling offer, which in turn makes it much easier to go viral on social media—leveraging a tool like a Gleam to help you manage the process and creating incentives so that people like/share and refer to their friends really, can make a big difference. People naturally love competitions, and the right one can provide a great return!

Create a mix of content formats that include video, audio, and long-form content. Create excerpts of the content into social media posts. Use a combination of broad hashtags for exposure and niche hashtags. Schedule the posts to publish seven days a week.

Invite your employees and business partners to share the content using an employee sharing tool, so it’s easy for everyone to access the social posts and schedule them out throughout the week. Make the posts available for at least three social media channels.

With 24 years in digital marketing experience, I’ve seen dozens of effective viral marketing campaigns over the years: BlendTec (Will it Blend), Burger King (Subservient Chicken), and Dollar Shave Club (intro video).

In all three examples, the brand indicated a meaningful uptick in sales. The campaigns all shared common best practices, which have also proven successful for many other brands and products as well:

1. Relevance: BlendTec did this better than most brands – when the head of marketing walked by a basement lab at the company many years ago and noticed the CEO was dropped odd items into the blender, he was intrigued. He encouraged the CEO to tape himself blending products (like iPhones) and posting them to YouTube. It was authentic, simple and yet impressively displayed the blender’s power.

2. Humor: Dollar Shave generated $14M in revenue its first year in business based on their viral video. While humor was the underlying theme of the video, it did communicate the problem/solution effectively and was authentic. The CEO was an actor and pulled his friends together to create the video affordably, and it went viral in a big way. The follow-on ads and other copycats did not have the same success. Perhaps the best ROI of all time, the original video (estimated to cost between $20-100K), set a trajectory leading to the sale to Gillette for $1B.

3. The third element, which Burger King delivered best, is engagement. The Subservient Chicken, however strange, required interactivity. It was one of the first semi-intelligent “”apps”” in 2001, allowing users to “”command”” a man dressed as a chicken to perform random acts (you could type in any statement). Targeted at the 18-34 age group, it apparently resonated and helped increase product sales.

Leverage Zeitgeists: Try to capture the zeitgeists of the times in your content. Whether it is the Coronavirus, technologies like AI and ML, remote proctoring, online exams, and education taking over the world, a post-apocalyptic world, or working from home- you could connect such trends to the messaging of your content.

You can also use popular songs or series and use their tropes in your post to instantly notch up the awareness and brand resonance. Remember that when you try to create some trending content, it can sometimes be perceived as negative by the audience. If you want to avoid such kind of reception, you should be extremely cautious in designing the content. It’s alright if you fall into the kind of business that believes any publicity is good and can do with negative virality too.

Memes: An excellent way to grab maximum eyeballs is to leverage humor and sarcasm in the form of memes. If the sarcasm is based on the latest news, trends, and idiosyncrasies we all relate to as humans, it’s bound to get viral. Virality is the sign of how much people share the content, and sharing in return is the sign of how much people relate to it. Also, as a practice, don’t lose sight of tying back the meme’s message to your business.

Social Experiment: Another great way to create a viral social media post is to conduct a social experiment and create a video post out of it. You could ask the audience to answer a few funny questions you want to raise awareness about or even your industry. You could invite a few guests from the audience to your office/store and record them testing your product and services.

Here are some best tips to create content that goes viral on social media.

1. Understand your target audience.
2. Select the best social media platforms.
3. Focus on high quality content.
4. Partnering with top Influencers for the same topic.
5. Tell a relatable story.
6. Provide a clear call to action.
7. Get media attention.
8. Improved Conversion Rate.
9. Try social media ads.
10. Create content that worth sharing.
11. Make it visual.
12. Develop a relationship of trust.
13. Find a catchy headline.

Jayzel Florendo, Social Media Strategist from Spiralytics

Each platform is unique, so it’s best to have different strategies to get attention depending on the social platform. Always start by going back to your target audience; don’t just create content that talks about your brand, relate your post to their values and lifestyle.

If you’re offering a product, don’t just sell the product. Sell the experience of owning it.

Social media is about connecting with users and talking about everyone’s collective interests. Find some common ground and of course, keep your brand’s personality and product/service offering in mind. Emotion is also a powerful element to drive viral engagement. Liking your post is one thing, but making them comment and share your post? That’s what makes algorithms promote your post to the top of social media feeds.

Social media users are also getting wiser these days, so it pays to be genuine, engaging, and transparent to give you a more humanized persona. Talk like a human being. Interact like a human. Indulge in a bit of humor even (if it’s consistent with your branding). The more “human” your brand is, the more users want to engage, which is paramount to gaining any sort of virality.

Social media giveaways and contests are viral content. Brands that host giveaways on social media achieve massive amounts of engagement on their giveaway content. This is because social media users who discover an enticing giveaway will immediately be inclined to like, comment, or share that content.

The more people that like, comment, tag, and share your giveaway post, the more discoverable it will become on the social media platform. Hence, turning the giveaway post (with your brand name attached to it) viral.

1. After experimenting with various social media platforms, use your analytics data and focus your energy on the social media channel which your customers are on and which drives the most traffic to your website. For us, it’s Instagram

2. Define your niche. Although we sell Hollywood Mirrors (Makeup Mirrors with Lights around them), we decided to focus on the Home Interiors niche rather than the Beauty niche. It’s easier for us to go viral in Home Interiors as there’s too much competition within the Beauty niche.

3. Keep up to date with relevant social media trends and try and be one of the early adopters of this trend. For example, Instagram Reels is really hot right now (at the time of writing this). So if you’re posting Instagram Reels and your competitors and people in your niche aren’t, you’re more likely to viral!

4. Utilise the power of UGC (User Generated Content) to help you go viral. Just make sure you have permission to re-share their content and credit them.

5. Collaborate with influencers. We regularly work with Reality TV Stars and Instagram Influencers such as Mrs. Hinch Home.

First, you can’t merely Tweet about things that you’re doing at work. As an example, if you are an accountant, I don’t think there’s any chance that you’re going viral for a Tweet talking about a new deduction you found for a client in the tax code.

But, if you speak about more comprehensive topics, or topics in the news, you have a chance. Specifically, break down Trump’s taxes. How is he cheating? What are his accountants doing that you usually do or wouldn’t think of doing? The key to going viral is finding topics sufficiently broad enough to interest tens of thousands of users.

1. Know how to engage with your target audience on digital platforms. First and foremost, you have to know your target audience so that you’re able to post with confidence. If something isn’t perfect, you pivot and test another way.

2. Differentiate your voice based on the social platform. That being said, some social media platforms evoke a more casual or professional voice. A good rule of thumb is by looking at your analytics, see which age group likes and comments on your posts.

3. Concise and Compelling Content. Keep it short and relatable to your target audience(s). The average human attention span, according to Oracle, is now 8 seconds. So when a user is scrolling on their device, think what would make them stop.

4. Make sure the content uploads at the highest quality. Thus leading to our last tip. Smartphones are highly used more than desktop computers for social media usage now. Although that made it very accessible, it also makes it very easy for users to pinpoint flaws in your content. Make sure to follow the optimal image size guidelines and pixels/resolution for each differentiating social media platform.

The best thing to do is to be very active on your social media platforms of choice if you want to increase your chances of getting viral traction. ‘Going viral’ is just people sharing your content with their friends.

This means the more you can get comfortable publishing your ideas, stories, and tips, the more people will get to know you, and therefore the more likely they are to share. The critical thing to realize is that you can never be sure which content you will get the immense traction, but when you show up consistently and add value, you give yourself a better chance. Finally, remember you only need the ‘right people’ for your business, not everybody!

Be authentic and consistent with your content. There are two ways you can be viral on social media:

1. When you create one significant awesome and creative content, publish it and wait to get the attention you want (0.1% of the content can make it), and there is the second one.

2. When you create consistent content, listen to your audience, and adjust to give them the kind of content that will make them happy. You can’t have viral content if you don’t have an engaged community to amplify it. So focus on your community and make sure you take care of them, and they will take care of you.

I believe in hashtag use. At Twitter, go to the Explore section to see what’s trending. Make content with those hashtags.

On Instagram, you will find Popular hashtags this way:

Go to the search bar and type #yourniche. Go to Top Content. Use the hashtags in the Top Content. This post has a list of popular hashtags that always boost my social media success: https://www.mostlyblogging.com/blogger-hashtags/. #Beautiful and #happy are two of them.

Social media and technology are 24/7, so it is easy to get sucked into it, but you do not have to let it run your life! My advice is to pick a few things you enjoy doing and do them really well. You cannot be everywhere all the time, so choose high impact activities that work for you and play to your strengths.

For example, Content Marketing and Thought Leadership are great ways to build your brand, increase your visibility more broadly, raise your profile, and attract more clients/customers. Activities like writing articles, hosting webinars, podcasts, and building your following on social media contribute to increasing your awareness with potential customers and building your credibility with a larger community. Instead of trying to start your own blog or newsletter, try regularly contributing to existing well-trafficked blogs in your industry or newsletters of like-minded organizations reaching the same target audience as you. Make sure you put your URL or contact info on it so they can find you and follow up. When your articles become available online, make sure to send them out via social media to all your friends, followers, and contacts. Don’t let social media drive you crazy; you do not need to be everywhere. It does not matter which platform you choose to pick one or two that are authentic to you. It should look and sound like you and the brand you have built. Whether yours is polished or more informal, chatty or academic, humorous or snarky, it is a way for your personality to come through. Everyone is not going to like you or hire you, but for the ones who would be a great fit for you, make sure they feel and keep a connection and give them a reason to remember you so that when they need your help, they think of you first. Start small and build as you go. For me, I started with small publications then moved up the food chain to reach bigger audiences. People need to be on LinkedIn so that they can be found too. It adds credibility and transparency when you know the people you are meeting or working with knowledgeable people in common. LinkedIn has become more than an online resume or Rolodex; it is the foundation for building trusted relationships in the digital economy. You do not need to blog or be on all social media platforms but make sure you are active on the ones you are. If your customers do not use Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram to find you, you do not need to prioritize. For many professional service businesses like mine, LinkedIn matters the most. These ideas do not require big budgets, but they are productive ways to stay connected during a crisis.

One of the best tips to go viral is to develop your unique research and create engaging content to promote it. For example, we do our research every year and create something called a Proposal Report. We compile data on all the proposals sent through our platform, and we come up with conclusions.

For example, we tell our readers how many requests get opened and signed on mobile devices. When you create research based on 100k proposals, you get attention. We then create posts to showcase our findings, and we always get lots of attention from current and potential customers because this data can help them win more business and improve the way they write and send proposals. If you want to go viral, create something useful.

Be generous in helping people. Develop a viral online presence versus publishing viral posts by assisting people to freely on social media. Answer questions in groups related to your niche. Be helpful. Follow relevant keywords. Be useful by sharing your knowledge.

Make friends with top pros in your niche. Help them freely. Expect nothing in return. As more pros befriend you, these authorities promote your content, expanding your presence, and growing your business. Overnight success is impossible. Be patient. Good things take time and generous effort.

Educate & Entertain thru video. Viral content is 99% video; social media platforms prefer video because it keeps the user longer on the social platform; therefore, the algorithms make video a preference. Also, 15-60 second videos were filmed in high quality.

If a video is performing well organically, add on a paid approach for a viral effect. Make sure your content is relevant to the season and times, so it is easily relatable to the viewer.

Viral content is first and foremost valuable, original, and unique. Though advertising is an excellent way of reaching a massive audience, it won’t benefit if the content is bland. Besides high-quality, the content should evoke strong emotions and be relevant and relatable to your audience.

However, always maintain an objective and unbiased manner of writing. Proper audience targeting can make content go viral effortlessly, so use social media platforms suited to your business profile and partner with influencers from your industry. A content type can play a significant role in its virality, so opt for short, simple, and engaging content such as videos, infographics, specific and popular blogging topics, and memes. Also, don’t forget to use the social media power tool – hashtags. Ultimately, it’s all about setting the trends, not following them.

Going viral on social media is a mix of luck & preparation. There’s not a lot that you can do about luck. But you can do 3 things to prepare.

First, you should specialize in a single platform. Every social network is slightly different. There’s no benefit to spreading yourself thin. Viral content will make leaps across social networks for you. Specializing in a single platform helps you master the tone, format, and timing.

Second, you should think less about putting a twist on existing trends and think more about noticing really interesting, original content from your own business. For example, creating cat memes from stock footage will go nowhere. But observing a stray cat living in your office building might go somewhere.

Third, you should be consistent. Consistency not only helps you develop your skills, but it also increases your odds of going viral. Consistency also removes some of the downside of investing time. Even if you don’t land a viral hit, you will develop a strong, useful social profile over time.

After that, all you can do is wait for luck / opportunity.

Virality is all about the emotional triggers built into your content. You have to create content that makes your audience say, “Holy Smokes! That’s _______(insert adjective here)!!!!” If they do, they’ll share it. If their friends have the same reaction, virality happens.

Your content can be unbelievable, outlandish, funny, sad, spark feelings of anger or disbelief, or just be clever enough to make people think, “I did not know that! I should tell others.” If your content doesn’t do that — doesn’t spark an emotional response — then the only way to get eyeballs on it is to put paid spend behind it. True virality doesn’t need a budget. It just needs to be great content.

As someone who has been advising online businesses on social media for over ten years, some things for going viral stay the same. These activities are Blogger outreach and placement, targeted online media interviews, including podcasts and general media, paid relevant Influencer marketing, cross-promotions with related brands through social media.

What has changed, or would say multiplied and has to be taken into consideration as I do in my day job managing my internal social media design team for my social clients is the critical importance of creating quality on-brand content at a high frequency. This content then needs to be placed in a way with a strong copy to influence again and again in the right channels for that particular brand.

Here are some of the strategies that we use to generate sales from major social networks like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Respond To Every Single Comment For Better Engagement:

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn value a comment more than a like that you get for your posts. Every time your post gets a comment, it shows these social sites that your content is good. So, always respond to every comment that you receive. And make sure you ask questions in your response rather than directly answering to the comment. Doing this helps get you more comments which eventually results in getting your content viral on these social sites.

Don’t Just Promote Your Business But Socialize:

Let’s not forget that the purpose of these social sites is to be social and to engage with people. So, make sure you’re not just promoting your products and services because if you keep doing that, your reach will tank, and people will not be interested in engaging with your content. So, make sure to also share content that doesn’t talk about your business and gives value to others like a quote or a picture or story, etc. Doing so also helps you to build your page authority and profile on these social sites.

Cross-Promote Your Social Profiles:

Since you’re active in various social media platforms it’s important to tell your Facebook followers to follow you on Instagram and vice-versa. The same holds true for all the other social media platforms that you’re a part of. Cross promoting increases the chances of your followers seeing your content.

Post Stories Consistently On Instagram And Facebook:

It’s always a good idea to post stories multiple times a day. And the best thing about posting stories is the swipe up feature that comes with it as this could lead to more conversions and sales.

On LinkedIn, something that you can do for better engagement is to limit your content description to one or two sentences provide a ‘see more’ link on your posts.

Monitoring sees trees; listening sees the forest.

I recommend performing accurate social listening, which translates as what is beyond receiving notifications about your brand mentions, what you should do with those, what the next steps would be, or how you should use that information to benefit your brand the most.

Statistics reveal that about 59% of Americans who use social media consider that social customer service has facilitated a faster and more efficient customer complaint management.

Social media overflows with consumer information – this is a huge opportunity. You need to listen and deliver what they need and want the most. Social listening goes beyond monitoring and replying to incoming questions or comments about your brand. It’s about extracting key insights from social conversations that you can apply to your overall strategy.

As with most things online marketing, it depends on the niche; in some industries (puppies, babies, technology), it is a lot easier to go viral than with other sectors, especially in b2b, service industries, etc. My biggest tip is to spend 70% on media production and 30% on marketing.

E.g., it doesn’t matter if you have the best marketing strategy on the planet; if you have a potato on your hands, it will be impossible to promote.

1. First, You Need to Know Your Audience. If you don’t understand your target, it’ll be easy to miss the opportunity that resonates with them. You’ll need to understand what’s deeply important to them and write high-quality content that they can relate to.

2. Partner With Influencers and other Popular social media accounts to repost and spread the news. These relationships can help spread the news and give you access to an audience that your business may not usually have. Make sure the account followers are a part of your target audience.

3. Keep It Short And To The Point.

Virality is often poorly understood. Many people think that all you need is a funny meme or a catchy TikTok dance to go viral. But that’s just scratching the surface. What you need to understand is why people share your content in the first place.

Why do people stay in line for hours on end to get their hands on the new iPhone? Is it because it is a superior phone compared to its competitors? Maybe yes, maybe not. But, the real reason has to do with how it makes them feel. Taking a picture with the new phone and sharing it on social media makes them feel good. The same goes for sharing exciting content online – people share it because it makes them look funny or smart or interesting. At the root of social media, virality lies in social currency.

People share content to define themselves and give their network a better sense of who they are and care about. So, online businesses that want to go viral on social media have first to understand who their audience is, what they care about, and what makes them click before elaborating sophisticated marketing campaigns. It all boils down to the very fundamentals of marketing: know your audience, inside and out.

The absolute best thing you can do to make your content go viral on social media is evoking emotion. As humans, we naturally relate and connect to emotions.

So whether it’s in your headline, picture, or text makes it captivating and makes it evoke emotions when someone sees it. Humor, love, shock, sadness, etc. are all emotions you can tap into to help your content go viral. For every article we publish on our blog, The Savvy Couple, we brainstorm 10-20 headlines to use. A great article without a good headline is dead in the water before you even publish. Your headline is the key to getting people to take action and click to consume your content.

When promoting your online business on social media, you need to make the difference between getting viral and growing gradually. If you want your business to be successful on social media, it’s essential to consistently post high-quality content.

Engaging, insightful content that resonates with your audience. If you want to get viral, you need to think out of the box, and you want your content to be shocking. Content that will make people talk. It could be hilarious content, sarcastic or ironic content, controversial content, or just amazing (Never seen before) content.

You’ll definitely need more than luck to get your video blow up across social media. When it comes to social media viral marketing, there at least three essential tips that business owners should know:

1. Tap into emotions
2. Choose the right platform
3. Utilize influencer marketing

First, they should create content that can evoke the viewers’ emotions. This way, viewers can easily remember and relate to the content. This, as a result, will tempt them to share it with others. This starts the path to virality.

Second, you need to choose which platform you should post it on. Choose platforms where your target audience (those ones that can resonate with your content the most) hang out. You can also consider starting to spread the content about your online business on popular social media platforms like Instagram or even TikTok.

Third, you might also need to work with an influencer to spread your online business visibility like wildfire. Customers trust opinions they find on social media, including those from influencers. With the massive followings that influencers usually have, you can seamlessly gain more exposure in no time.

The best way is to partner with others. It’s nearly impossible to do it alone. Too many people make that mistake. They think they can do it alone.

Instead, it is an affiliate partner where they share your content on social media and receive a commission or trading posts on each others’ platforms. THAT is the #1 way to go viral and get more attention! You can have 100s of people sharing in a matter of hours, which brings the ball rolling and starts a flood of others sharing as a result.

Make an effort to build content that creates high engagement. All the most important social media websites have an algorithm used to rank content based on user engagement.

If you have content that will likely engage followers, it will be placed on the top of the page, while content that is likely to be less engaging will be ranked at the bottom. Plus, engaging content is rewarded with amplification by other users. Marketers should always try to build content with high engagement because they will receive more shares and reach a broader audience.

Going viral isn’t just about getting social posts out in front of people, it is about getting the right content in front of the right people at the right time. It is all about creating a social media strategy. Here are a few tips on how you can do that.

1. Get to know your target audience

You want to make sure you are talking to the right people that want to know more about your products or services. Do your research on your current audience and your target audience. Know who they are and what they like. If you don’t talk to your target audience you will just be creating noise in a person’s feed, which can hurt you in the algorithm.

2. Post on the right social media platforms, where your audience is

After you understand your audience, where do they consume their content? Are they on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram? Understanding the platforms where your audience spends their time will help you make smarter decisions on where to post your content and will get your content seen by more people.

3. Create a content strategy

A content strategy is one of the most important tips on how to go viral on social media. This strategy should be focused around how you can make your content engaging to your target audience. When creating your content, you should always think about the following:

• Create a hook – How are you going to get someone’s attention?
• Make an emotional connection and solve their problem – Emotion will compel people to take action.
• Make it shareable – Make them want to share with their followers.
• Create a CTA – Tell your audience what do you want them to do?

4. Make the post visual

If you are making a still graphic, make sure the image speaks 1000 words and stops the audience from scrolling. Always use hi-res images in the correct social media platform specs.

Video continues to be the most engaging content in social media. Make sure your video resolution is not blurry and there are no distractions from what story you want to tell the audience. Video length can be different on each platform, but if you make your video compelling, your audience will watch.

5. Utilize your audience by encouraging user generated content

Your engagement is key for making your social posts go viral. User generated content can help you increase your engagement by reaching the user’s audience. More and more we look to our peers for product or service reviews, and we consume what they have to say. User generated content is authentic, and so powerful.

6. Work with influencers

Social media influencers have the ability to provide brands with a larger reach and can add more authenticity to a campaign. Their followers consume all their content and trust in the brands they promote. Influencer marketing is a great way to share your content and to get your content to go viral.

The one strategy has helped us gain momentum, and growth for Plausible Analytics’s presence on Twitter is taking a stand and having an opinion. We share what we believe in as a brand, what we are for, and what we are against, and what makes us different from other brands in our market. This is refreshing for people to see and engage with.

Going viral on social media mostly comes down to creating a great resource that people need and then showcasing it to the correct people. When I am trying to engineer a viral campaign, I like to do two things.

1. I’ll connect to Facebook groups of people who could use the resource I’ve created. I then ask permission to share the piece, and if they give it, I do so. In the post I share, I always make sure to put a call to action to encourage them to share themselves. They often do it if prompted to do so.

2. If I see success there, I’ll also take out a few Facebook ads, all pointing to one post I’m looking to have gone viral, and ask the people to see the ad to share as well.

When these efforts are combined with great content, it can lead to a viral post.

Two tips for online businesses to get viral. First is Trendjacking, which is using the latest trends to get attention for your brand.

There are a lot of different ways how you can get about this depending on the trend that you are trying to ride, but in my experience, trends that are funny are easier to get along with, while social issues can be effective but should be treated with caution. Online businesses should be careful because they should still match it with their overall branding and not force it too much because a simple mistake can have a negative effect.

Another would be creating a slice of life content. People tend to share stuff that they can relate to, and it’s a great way of capturing the emotions of social media users. Once customers are able to attach your brand with an emotion, experience, or moment, it is easier for them to remember your brand, thus creating brand loyalty.

Any good content promotes itself through the audience. The best way to start creating content is with audience research. Once the research is done, the marketing team will be able to sketch an idea of what kind of content resonates well with their target folks, and this provides good clarity.

With the attained clarity, the team can now go ahead and create unique content. The next phase is the promotion. Partner with the right set of influencers to share your content to create a buzz in your niche.

To get viral on social media, you need to provide value and must have a sharing intent. If you post/ image/ video doesn’t solve or address people problem, then you cant viral. And at the same time, you must have some technical skills as well.

For example, you are creating a story for Instagram; wheater it is an image or video; you must know your follower’s interest and must have knowledge about hashtags. I use for “lee hashtags” app for my clients to get the best hashtags. It always helps us to get more reach for stories or posts. You see, you need to club technical skills with your audience problem, and you are good to go.

1. Use Killer Headlines: First impressions do matter. According to a statistic by Copyblogger, “On average, 8 out of 10 people will read the headline, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest of your content.” So a catchy headline is important for anything to go viral.

2. Make the reader FEEL something: Humans are emotional, and we are more prone to share something if we feel any sort of emotion as we read. It can be a controversy that evokes anger or a wholesome piece of positive content. And in the long run, your audience will build an emotional connection with your brand if you manage to evoke emotions.

3. Partner with Influencers: Influencers are your best bet for going viral. And they don’t have to be a celebrity. You can get your brand endorsed by micro or nano influencers. These influencers have a stronger connection with your target audience, and their way of positioning your brand in their content can be subtle yet effective.

Social Media is one of the most effective tools to use when marketing your business as it has become one of the most popular platforms today. Because social media has become so popular, using these platforms to promote your business will increase your shares and improve your conversion rates.

It is important that you engage with your followers so that you catch the user’s attention, resulting in a high social media presence, which will increase your chances of going viral. Below are some effective tips to help you do so:

1. Know your followers- It is very important that you focus on a specific target audience. If your audience is too broad, you might be wasting time and money sharing posts to users who have no interest in what you are promoting. The internet and social media are huge in the world today. Having great content won’t matter if it is not reaching the correct audience. Pay attention to who follows you on social media sites. What time of the day do they engage, how old are they, where are they located, are they men or women, etc. This can help you see what kind of audience is interested in your posts, making it easier to target a smaller group and resulting in a higher engagement from your audience. This includes liking, commenting, and/or sharing your posts, increasing your chances of going viral.

2. Make your posts more engaging- Although Social Media is one of the best platforms to use to promote your brand, it is difficult to catch users’ attention in the midst of many other companies trying to do the same thing. This is why it is important to get your post to stand out and make it more engaging. It is common nowadays for users to scroll right past posts that require a lot of reading, as they don’t have the patience or time to get interested. However, adding the popular choice of memes, gifs, videos, etc. that are grabbing user’s attention all over these social platforms will give your post a higher chance of users engaging and sharing, increasing your chances of going viral.

3. Keep up with your data- Make sure that you are tracking the data of your posts and its progress over time. There are many SEO tools that you can use on the internet that will help you see how well your company is doing on these social platforms and what needs to be improved. Did your site gain more followers after your latest Instagram post? Was your ROI negative on your Facebook ad? If you don’t track your data, then you won’t know what you need to fix to keep your followers engaged. This is a common mistake many companies make because they don’t know if their marketing strategies are helping or hurting them. Knowing this can help you eliminate those that don’t work and continue using those that do—eventually leading to a higher following and viral posts.

To go viral on social media you need a great hook, highly engaging content and a little luck! Even the most well planned strategies and plans can hit a wall without the right combination of users, influencers and journalists sharing it with their audiences.

So start by finding a great hook. A compelling headline with a great outcome promise or unbelievable stat are great starting points. Anything that stops people in their tracks so they want to find out more. The promise of an emotional outcome is one major way of driving those viral clicks and shares.

Next up, create authentic and engaging content that delivers on what you promised in your hook headline. Make your content stand out above the noise by investing in both the graphics or video production work. You want to deliver real value to people so they feel compelled to share it with their audience.

And finally, be sure to tag in the right influencers, promote to journalists and editors in your market, and even put a little paid social promotion behind it to get it in front of the right audience. This little push can do wonders in helping build some social proof so people feel comfortable resharing.

Business to Business is my specialism. The key to robust social media marketing return on investment is persistence, diligence and flashes of genius!

Building authority and demonstrating empathy are the messaging goals.

LinkedIn updates need to take a balance of product/service information against industry discussions. I set up Google Alerts for key words which are triggers for my client’s industry. One is “Tax” and so we can track that against mainstream news. Here in New Zealand we are having an election and so adding “Tax + election” we can either start discussion threads about this OR answer other people’s threads.

Another is “Health & Safety” and we can look at newsworthy situations where failures happened and start a discussion about lessons and learnings.

The key for businesses who sell advice is not to give advice on social media. They should ONLY demonstrate expertise.

The key for businesses who sell products is not to push their products – only to demonstrate the key features of good products (which of course they supply).

The inference is that you are experts and prospective customers should seek you out.

It’s no secret that the most important factor in going coral on social media is how good our content is. Yet, creating viral content is obviously easier said than done.

In general, there are two things that most often cause content to get viral: curiosity and freshness. A content that is really fresh and brand new trends to get viral a lot (i.e. if there’s a post about a cure for cancer or COVID-19 vaccine, it might go viral quickly). Similarly, content that drives curiosity also often go viral.

The next factor is that the content should reach the right people at the right time. Some people tend to share social media posts more than the others, while obviously, some people have more influence/clout than others. If you can target the right people that often share content related to your niche, there’s a high chance to get viral.

Last but not least, is timing, which to be exact is your content should reach the right people when they are clustered in a certain way. For example, if a post was being shared around by the time a lot of influencers are active, the higher the chance it will go viral. This one can be engineered, but most of the time it will be down to luck.

To summarize, make sure to create fresh content that also drives curiosity, and target the right people (i.e. tag them) at the right time.

Viral content isn’t created overnight! You need to create epic content that’s well-researched and relevant to your target audience. Most importantly, it needs to have a hook that elicits an action!

Here are some and tested practices to build a buzz for your content on social media. – Know your audience Understand your audience’s psychology. What platforms are they active on? Why will they share your content? –

Deliver click and share-worthy content. Run a contest, share visually-appealing content (like infographics), and share topical or current content with humor.

Take a stand on a controversial topic.

• Tell a story Evoke emotions! Be entertaining! Inspire them! Surprise them!
• Use a social platform that best suits your business. Engage your audience on the channel they spend most of their time.
• Partner with influencers, micro-influencers, and nano-influencers can work as your brand ambassadors and help drive more engagement and interactions.

First and foremost, you need to create awesome content that is worth sharing. Target this content to the right audience based on the personas of your ideal customer, using emotional hooks where possible to grab their attention.

Magnify the reach of your content using paid social ads – just be sure to measure the effectiveness of each channel and allocate the budget to the ones that actually deliver results. You should also try to build relationships with influencers within your industry, once these relationships are formed the influencer will share your content with their social community. That’s how you go viral!

The most effective tips are

1. Getting to know your audience,
2. Create content for them,
3. Repeat many times and keep learning.

We’ve ended up on the front page of Reddit and received 17,000+ visitors in one day, but there is no magic formula to replicate. You need to learn what works best for your audience, engage and create quality content. Preferably, create content together with your audience. Work on User Generated Content that your audience would love to participate in creating and have fun while reaching your goals.

Focus On High-Quality Content or Inspirational Content – People likely to have a positive attitude towards inspirational content, which is why those contents enjoy more chances of getting shared than any other type of content.

This might break some hearts, but the first priority on social media should not be to “go viral.” You should prioritize offering value. That means:

• Understanding your customers needs and pain points
• Knowing where they hang out online and have a presence there
• Connecting with their interests – related to your business and not
• Creating content that your fans and followers are likely to engage with
• Be social, reply and show appreciation

To gain traction for anything to go viral, the above must come first. Then, understanding how the platforms work is key. Each works differently and has a different ‘lingo’.

• Develop content appropriate for the individual platforms
• Post when your audiences are online
• Compose posts that people WANT to share and that triggers engagement

Going right in to “go viral” is a short-term plan. Social media is a long-term game. Your goal should be to play for the long-term while being as credibly entertaining at each and every turn. That will increase your probability of being a viral creator consistently into the future.

The mistake that every business makes is they think people are interested in the company or its products. We are not. Companies focus on “brand” and all say the same thing “buy my product because it’s great”. Nobody is interested. But we are interested in people.

Our research shows that to go viral on social media requires humanised content. Each individual should say something about themselves that everybody can understand and form a connection with.

The effective tips for geting your business viral on social media are:

1. Publish somehting unique.
2. Provide Giveaways.
3. Create good graphics.
4. Go for banners on Faceebook and instagram.

The desire to go viral can often be detrimental to actually going viral. Go small to go big. Instead of trying to reach everyone with a post, craft content that speaks to ONE dream person. Craft a specific message that hits on the emotional triggers that make people FEEL something.

Anger, joy, feel-good – you need to make people feel something that is worthy of likes, comments, and shares. One of my favorite ways to do this is to begin documenting what speaks to me deeply, and turn those feelings into content for social media.

Businesses that want to create viral content on social media need to fully research and understand what their audience wants and who that audience consists of. Many online business owners try to replicate what they perceive as successful from other companies.

First, they don’t really know how well any campaign that they don’t own or have control of performs. You can’t speculate this kind of data purely from the number of shares that something receives online. Second, it’s difficult to replicate a strategy that’s already been used on your audience.

Creating viral content means knowing what most excites your audience and sometimes taking chances to learn what might work better. It means not replicating the same strategy and hoping for a different result, but varying the strategy slightly, doing A/B testing, and really measuring results. Is the goal to create viral content for the sake of viral content? Is it more exposure? Is it more sales? Not only do you need to know your audience, but the measurable outcome needs to be clear.

Outbound engagement tends to work well for helping increase the reach of a post. Your content must also be great because if you dont have great content you have a very small chance of actually going viral. Virality in its nature is something that is naturally occurring.

I believe it’s hard to force something to go viral. One tactic I have seen some brands use is getting a whole bunch of influencers to post about the content or campaign. Some things also naturally go viral and this serves an opportunity for the brand to jump into that conversation.

Ask a question. Include a picture or graphic. Tie it to something topical, or food, or pets. Say something different than what others are saying (as an example, I talk about green/social change businesses being more profitable than conventional ones–and it shocks people enough to get interested).

Double down on what is already working! If you have a pin that is starting to get some traction, make a dozen, yes a dozen, additional pins for that post and get them out there on Pinterest.

Change up the wording, the style and the colour palette, so that it appeals to a broader audience. Giving things a big old nudge can mean the difference between a successful post or a fizzling flame.

Social media is an essential platform for businesses to market their brand digitally. Their brand can be easily accessible to customers on their desktops and smartphones, reaching customers globally. Thus, your online business must be promoted on social media.

Select the right social media platform; for instance, content created on LinkedIn should be professional and creative with relevant hashtags for greater reach. Posting engaging content which is relatable for your target audience at the right time, is the key to earn success on social media platforms. This way, it will have a positive impact on your startup.

Additionally, create ads targeting a group of influential users as these influencer users re-share the ad, and ultimately the ads will be broadcasted to a wider audience efficiently and cost-effectively. Businesses can use social media tools like Google Analytics, to measure performance. The data collected can help with changes required for campaigns or ads. One of the effective ways is to create a viral marketing campaign with a clear call to action which directs the viewers to the company’s profile or website. You can offer free trials or make a discounted purchase. Keeping all these tips in mind and implementing them will fetch some great results for your business.

My general opinion is that, instead of focusing on trying to go viral, which is very hard to do, business owners should be focused on running paid social media campaigns.

About three years ago, the trend was to get as many followers as possible because each time you posted on your business page, all of your followers would see it. That changed dramatically when most social platforms changed their algorithm so that only about 3% to 5% of your followers ever get to see what you post. Partnering with a well-versed marketing firm in how to run paid ads is the way to go. If you know how to use an excellent Artificial Intelligence platform (AI) is the key to reaching thousands of potential customers wherever they are online, at whatever time they are online.

Match your message to your market. This comes down to knowing your audience. Of course the big aim of a business going viral on social media is to get exposure to millions and millions of people.

However, if we’re talking strictly business getting your business in front of 1000… even just 100 highly qualified prospects will be much more profitable than millions of people that will never buy from you…

That isn’t to say there’s not a way to make your business to go viral in front of millions of qualified prospects. The key to making this happen however, and to make your venture much more profitable is to make sure your message is on point and relevant to what’s going on in your prospects mind. That’s when your content will instantly connect with viewers. Then put a news spin and curiosity to you message and that’s when shares, likes and views start to happen.

There is no recipe for virality. It happens in the confluence of time, place and cyberspace. There are some common themes that can help guide content creators who are trying to go viral.

First, create content that plays to peoples’ emotions. Anger, fear, empathy are powerful emotions that encourage user engagement and content sharing.

Second, create content that is visual. People first interact with their eyes and you need to grab a visitor’s attention quickly, which is why a strong image will cause someone to stop, read and share with others.

Third, create content that is not all about you and your brand, develop content that would be of interest to and useful for others. Fourth, identify influencers or groups who would be responsive to the social media content and encourage these influencers to share your content.

If you desire to go viral on social media, you cannot publish random content. Here are a few expert tips that my team utilizes when working with our clients:

Understand your audience

One of the most important steps to publishing on social media is to understand your audience. You must conduct extensive research to know who your audience is, how your product and services will benefit them, the type of content they wish to read, the common questions they ask, etc.

Write for the Platform

Not only should you understand who your audience is, but you must write to your audience as well. You need to write copy specifically for social media. This means you need to generate content that is easy-to-read, that has a strong call-to-action, and the headline grabs your attention. Remember that you aren’t writing a scientific paper, but you are writing to individuals who tend to scroll, want information fast, and are looking to be “wowed.”

Publish a variety of content types

If you are publishing the same type of content over and over again, you are going to lose your audience and your engagement levels are going to drop. You must add variety to your social media channels. For example, publish links to your company’s blog post, create videos, share infographics, publish polls and surveys, etc. This is going to keep your followers excited to follow your channels and they are more likely to share if your content is unique and engaging.

First, your goal shouldn’t be to go viral it should be to remain consistent and deliver value. Consistency is key not just in producing content, but capturing engagement from your audience.

Content goes viral after others engage with it, which then tells the algorithm of the platform that your content is valuable so it shares it with other people in your network and so on. That’s how “things go viral.” But you’re not going to know what captures your audiences attention and makes them engage (like, share, comment) without showing up for them regularly with high-value content.

Running ads and boosting posts to your target market to gain engagement, utilizing video content (video is key to going viral), researching content trends on Google so that you know what your audience wants!

The best way to go viral is to make sure you pitch your campaign to local or industry journalists. While your social media strategy may be based around regular people sharing and talking about your content, it’s the journalists and their publications who will help amplify your results.

First, identify the top publishers who cover your vertical and create a list of at least 100. Then, put together a list of journalists who passionately write about the content you’re looking to make viral. If you want the best results, write a great customized pitch to each journalist that gets straight to the point in a manner that mirrors the journalist’s own writing style (ie, humorous, professional, etc). Make sure to have a catchy subject line that makes your email a “must read”.

You don’t always need to be ahead of the game in terms of what’s trending and what’s going to be the next big thing. Sometimes clearly researched quality content can rapidly move across the internet and fulfill your target markets needs by answering a question they might have.

Platform’s make a huge difference too. You can use already trending hashtags on Twitter, or make thousands of people laugh on TikTok, but it might not help your brand as a medical supply company. Know your market, know their platform.

Every online business aspires to go viral at some point; and while the process of going viral isn’t an exact science, there are some basic ground rules to follow to increase your chances of going viral.

One, get to know your target audience and tailor your content towards your niche. Find out what social channels your audience is on and focus on creating engaging content, tailored to those channels.

Two, make sure your content is relevant to your niche and engaging. Content that offers value and is engaging will always generate engagement, even if that particular piece of content doesn’t go viral.

Finally, make sure you promote your content. Share it on social media, share it with influencers. While there is no sure fire way to go viral, by following these steps you can increase your odds and create compelling content that leads to consistent engagement.

As we all know that the content is the king of any business communication. The social media fraternity wants content precise and crispy in a short format. To keep in pace with the audience’s interests, it is always needed to blend the content as per the on-going trends.

A business should always remember its goals of the content to be posted on social media while keeping it up in the camouflage of internet trends.

Rather than revolving around technicalities, let me discuss the psychology of virality.

You need to first study the science of virality.

Understanding human psychology and why people do what they do is important.

Serving content that serves audience’s primitive desires and hierarchy of needs is the way by which you can let more and more share your content.

Most of the viral content play by human instinct to appear intelligent, increase status quo, be the first reporter, so on.

Especially understand the mental models of critical mass and tipping points.

Just go to BuzzFeed and ViralNova and analyze their top shared content/videos with the perspectives I shared, I’ll tell ya’.

Also, while creating the content make it understandable by wide range of audience. You can consider having some elements like subtitles, visuals, music, so on to promote cognitive ease and also frame people into right emotions you wish.

One of the most effective tips I can offer for online businesses that are looking to “”go viral”” on social media is to focus on creating something unique and exciting that captures the attention of not only the target audience, but of the culture in the moment.

Most of the successful “”viral marketing”” campaigns were campaigns that didn’t set out to achieve virality, but instead, simply disrupted the status quo by thinking outside the box and creating a unique brand experience. Trying to “”go viral”” is a lot like trying to shoot. a. moving target, but creating and telling unique stories that are true to your brand while unique and bespoke is the best and most authentic way to “”go viral””. All of the aforementioned is assuming, of course, that it’s the good kind of virality that your business is looking to achieve. 🙂

Whether it’s Marketing , publishing a blog or making YouTube videos always content is king. If you are creating unique and helpful content for public definitely audience will appreciate you.

For me these are some important points which I follow to promote any product or Biz on Social media :

• Know your audience first (Age group & interest )
• Of course High Quality Content – create something unique and make sure your representation also matters a lot on social media.
• Your content must express a single type of feeling – Emotional , Happy or trustworthy.
• Follow your competitor to fill the gap which audience is not getting from them.
• Videos are more demanding compare to Image content.

If you want your business to go viral on social media the first thing to think about is where your audience flocks to.

For example, Millennials moms flock to Pinterest. Second, this audience is on Pinterest looking for ideas that are; new, relevant, useful, helpful, and inspiring that will help them create the life they’ve always dreamed of. So you have to ask yourself does all your content meet that criteria?

One of the biggest mistake businesses make is not leveraging content that appeals to the trend seekers on Pinterest. I recommend you leverage the Pinterest Trends tool and the Pinterest top 100 data. In that way you can create the right content at the right time so you get in front of new shoppers when they’re most open-minded.

Third, once you’ve determined the right content to publish make sure your images and videos are the right size, branded, of high-quality with high resolution. The starting point of connecting with the Pinterest audience is your images and videos so if they lack a wow factor you can’t expect them to go viral on Pinterest or social media in general.

You can build a large customer base for your online business and also grow your conversation rate with viral content on social media. First things first, build your goal for your social media campaign. And then drive your social media strategy that stands out in the crowd.

Below mentioned are smart hacks that will help you to plot your viral content.

• Create fresh content that will portray your business personality and speak to your target audience.
• Prominent and interactive visuals are always eye-catching. You can use GIPHY and infographics to make your content engaging and interesting.
• Partner with a social media influencer; a recognized face in your market.
• Captivating content in a short story format is always pleasing for social media users.
• Enhance your visibility with paid advertising for your target customers.
• Craft an emotional connection in your post to take your content to a higher dimension.
• Offer a strong call to action with free trials or discounted purchase that leads the viewer to your eCommerce store.
• Pick the right time to release your social media content for maximum reach.
• Engage with your followers by asking questions and encouraging comments.
• Respond ASAP whenever your target user mentions your business.

Understand Your Audience – It’s so important when creating content for your social media channels that you think about the audience you are trying to reach.

The best way to increase your chances of going viral on social media is to create content that your audience will resonate with. When I think about all of the content pieces that I see day to day on Facebook that’s getting thousands of interactions, it’s often relatable content that people share with friends and family.

Thanks a lot for inviting me on your blog. Social media is one of the best places to get a genuine audience for online business. Depending on the type of business, one can really utilize social media to drive a very good amount of targeted traffic.

Getting viral on social media is not a step by step follow process, rather people decide a piece of content whether to go viral or not. But you can make sure that you can create good quality content which actually increases the possibility of going viral. Let me share some of the tips to write such amazing content.

Focus on the content that people are looking for. Most people look for solutions to their problems or some amazing content to get entertained. If you can create something in your niche, then your content will definitely go viral.

Trending topics always work best and they got the best chance to go viral. If you can explain any trending content in a proper way, then definitely you can bring a lot of traffic and then get them to your business as well. But make sure to do it properly, otherwise it may hurt your brand also.

Make sure to focus on one social platform at a time. Yes, there are many social platforms and if you try to focus on multiple platforms at the same time you will end up spending more money and effort without getting much. Make sure to win one platform and then spread on others.

In order to get your business noticed on social media, you need to make sure you have active profiles on ALL major platforms. Update these regularly with exciting content such as promotions, competitions and top tips.

Make tutorial videos and podcasts on topics related to your business and upload these to YouTube and other platforms. Check what keywords your target market are searching for online and include these in your company’s social media bios and updates to boost your search engine ranking. Networking is also essential. Follow and add other businesses and pages similar to your own (especially those with a strong following), reach out and offer to contribute to/collaborate with them on any of their blogs or video channels. This gets you back-links and is a win-win for everyone!

Sharing your media, video or other contents with influencers of your own industry is a great way to go viral and grow your presence on social media.

This will not only allow you to reach key customers and other people in your industry, as well as acquire new followers, but it will also give you authority when compared to other industry players, and most importantly, your prospects and potential clients will be able to see you. Contents created, shared or published by influencers are more likely to go viral and will not only generate qualified visitors to your site, but also valuable backlinks that will increase the domain authority. Influencer marketing is a truly powerful technique when properly used.

One of the best ways to make your business get traction on social is with the use of superb visuals. You’re competing for user attention so the graphics you include with your posts must be unique, high-quality, and eye-catching.

There are many tools like Canva, Visme, and Snappa that can help you create professional-looking graphics. And don’t limit your posts to static images. Use other types of visual content including video, infographics, and animated gifs to ensure your brand gets noticed.

Having stunning visuals might not guarantee your business will go viral but it will definitely improve the chances of your content getting noticed.

Getting viral on social media in 2020 means you have to become meme-worthy. To be a meme, you have to be exciting and, ideally, lucky enough to be picked up by the collective powers of Reddit, 4chan, Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook.

While luck is a significant part of content virality, we can break down the characteristics of a meme. An online business can replicate these attributes in their marketing campaigns and ads to win the world over.

Some materials incubate for longer (shared around in a niche) before exploding in virality, and some take over the world right out of conception. A meme relating to current events will spread faster than others, but would also have the highest probability of dying soon.

The common denominators for viral content, however, are that they are frequently funny, self-aware (meta and referential), and, most importantly, pattern-interrupt (remarkably unique) but remixable (accessible for people to make it their own or repurpose), which makes the content extremely shareable (viral).

For content to be viral, it has to be smart, appealing to emotions, relatable, and multipurpose. People value memes by these attributes, which determine the longevity of the content’s shelf-life (the time it takes before the expiration of a meme).

The most important of these characteristics, when it comes to shareability and lifespan, is relatability. Relatability fuels a meme’s relevance – whether the content is relatable to individuals, their friends, and ethnic group, and touches upon specific mutual knowledge.

While a fast spread is ideal, longevity will benefit a business more.

You can prime your content for virality by ensuring that your audience and the community they thrive in can relate to it at a personal level. The best memes have high relevance to the audience and intelligent, and often humanising, humour.

Use allusion to all kinds of irony: verbal, dramatic, situational, romantic, Socratic, cosmic, and post irony. Relate your content to current events and outstanding persons or situations, and don’t be afraid of self-deprecating humour.

Do research into past videos that have gone viral in your vertical. Create a few pieces of content that are in line with the other viral content. Boost content with FB / IG / TikTok ads to your target audience.

Review your campaign data based on engagement metrics (views, comments, shares, likes, etc) and scale up ad spend for the top performers. Most viral content happens organically, meaning they weren’t planning on it to go viral. If you’re trying to recreate viral content, you’ll need the extra boost from paid ad spend. Otherwise this will be a complete waste of your time.

There are many ways to improve and boost your social media reach and engagement. But, if you want to get viral quickly, you must consider two things: hashtag strategy and influencer outreach.

Follow a winning hashtag strategy. You can easily double your reach by using the correct hashtags on your posts. Each platform has its own rules and algorithms, so make sure you do some research and plan ahead of your hashtag strategy.

By reaching out to micro-influencers on social media, you can get your account tagged in their posts. This will immediately drive a massive amount of visits to your profile page. If you have a well-optimized profile page, you will start getting followers in no time. This is the first step into virality.

The first thing that a business needs to do is to determine which social media channels are its customers/prospects at. A lot of this requires defining who your audience is, what resonates most with them, etc. My biggest advice is start small and grow from there.

And remember each channel is different and requires a guiding hand to grow and nurture the audience there.

Then, brands need to adopt this balance of posts: (1) 1/3 can be broadcast posts about the company, what it is doing, etc. (2) 1/3 be curated content, content the business shares by other people/organizations. The point is multi-fold — provide things people feel are of value while being on brand and on message, if people aren’t finding what you are providing is of value and resonates with them, they won’t trust you and thus, share your content with their networks and (3) engage your social media audience through asking questions, polls, visual content like images and videos, using hashtags (but keep to key ones that represent your audience and your brand), encourage sharing – not only sharing what you put up but solicit your audience sharing content they have found useful.

As a brand, participate on others’ social media accounts – listen, engage and share – this is the best way to build trust. When you earn their trust, they will reward you. Listening to them and engaging with them to build trust will result in them listening to and trusting in you.

Consider tone of voice. When in doubt, always opt for a friendly, conversational tone which is more inviting and engaging.

I’d say the last piece is listening and being responsive. I put it last but really it is the most important. Listen to what your audience wants and if questions are asked, engage, when your content is shared or other types of engagement, thank the person and then engage them. All and all, be responsive. Responsiveness on social is the #1 thing customers care about.

First, you have to know the platform. Going viral on Facebook will look like very different from TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram – the content has to be uniquely adapted to each channel and its audience.

What’s consistent, however, is that all viral content pieces provide the most powerful emotional jolts, leaving the consumers either positively or negatively shocked. The person will be so bewildered that he or she will feel the need to spread the message and share the content with others. However, I think the pursuit of going viral is not very effective – even if a business does go viral, it does not mean that it will positively contribute to their business goals. Instead of aiming for one-shot magical viral successes, businesses should develop long-term social media strategies and consistently provide value to their followers.

First of all, be interesting and engaging. Viral content always arises emotions, it talks to people on a deep level. It should also be relatable so that most people will find it easy to understand and thus engage.

And there is one more important thing I wanted to highlight: most viral posts, videos were not created for the sake of getting viral. They had a meaning behind them which then resonated with a large audience. So I think it’s important to have this ‘Why’ behind your content instead of trying to get viral.

Creating and promoting a viral piece of content on social media requires lots of forward planning. Your first attempt might not go viral but give yourself the best chance of executing a successful campaign by following three simple steps.

Firstly, know your audience. Secondly, partner with influencers, and last but not least, jump on trends to give your content as an extra push. There are lots of great tools out there to support the planning process, such as BuzzSumo.

Creating and promoting a viral piece of content on social media requires lots of forward planning. Your first attempt might not go viral but give yourself the best chance of executing a successful campaign by following three simple steps. Firstly, know your audience. Secondly, partner with influencers, and last but not least, jump on trends to give your content as an extra push. There are lots of great tools out there to support the planning process, such as BuzzSumo.

1. Motivate

It is highly unlikely that you have never seen a motivational quote or saying on your Facebook newsfeed or Instagram account.

2. Amaze

People like to be the first to share something amazing with their friends.

3. Zombify

People are currently fascinated by anything to do with zombies. Any post that discusses zombies tends to get a lot of attention

4. Amuse

Making people laugh is always a good way to get a foot in the door and a share on social media. Studies show that humorous content outperforms any other kind of content when it comes to shares.

5. Promote

Guess what? You have to share your post if you want others to do it as well. Promoting your post is the first step in going viral. Pinterest, for example, is a good platform to promote your products.

6. Quizzes

Say what you will, but very few people can resist taking a quiz, especially one that provides (or claims to) a glimpse into your personality.

7. Emote

Just because you’re in business doesn’t mean you are emotionless. Showing your emotional side is always a good way to trigger a response from your audience

First is to know your audience. If I am looking to create a viral campaign that targets boomers, I am going to hit up Facebook and probably going to make a video or an image. Targeting teens or tweens you want to be hitting up Tik-Tok with a 10 second or less video.

My second tip is more of a statement to online businesses: unless you have the newest / hippest / coolest product you probably aren’t going to go viral with your company, you need to think of other ways to promote what you are doing and go from there.

Lastly is to know how to leverage your demographic. If you don’t know how to whittle down your audience you are going to end up wasting your entire budget and all of your efforts will be lost on people who do not care about who you are or what your project is.

Thank you for asking! This is a great topic 🙂

The keys to great content are to be 1) educational, 2) actionable, and 3) entertaining. At a bare minimum, you need to be at least one of those things. Aim for two. But if you want a shot at making people love you, ya gotta go for all three.

1. Take a Stand If you want people to read your content, you need to make a claim or take a stand on an issue. Informative content isn’t good enough to go viral because it is solely educational. Instead, you need to create content that not everyone will agree with.

Let’s say you are comparing fast-food burger chains. Just a comparison isn’t going to be enough to get people talking or start any kind of conversation because your article will just state facts. Instead, rank the fast-food burger chains. People either agree or disagree with passionately, which will spark a conversation on social media.

2. Be Different A quick search of your topic in Google will yield you a few ideas of things you could write about. However, if you are just regurgitating what other people are reporting, you aren’t going to become a viral sensation. Instead, focus on creating content that is different–and better! The best way to do this is to provide a more comprehensive range. Try to answer all the relevant questions about your topic and offer a unique spin or angle that readers haven’t seen before.

Master the target audience – Understanding your target audience is very important before launching any of your product or service.

Select the appropriate social media – Before creating a content choose a platform in which you want to specialize.

Boost visibility with advertising – It can difficult for start-ups to create a viral content.

• Focus On High Quality Content Before Investing In Advertising.
• Know Your Audience.
• Partnering With Influencers.
• Get Your Content Reposted On Popular Accounts.
• Tell A Relatable Story Through Your Content.
• Keep It Short And To The Point.
• Utilize Interactive Content.

The most essential element to get viral on social media is to create consistent high quality content. Most brands spend more time on advertising and branding than to direct their efforts towards effective content creation as the first priority.

In reality, it should be the other way around. By posting useful content, you can bring more engagement from audience than through any other means, because at the end of the day all the matters to your audience is where they are getting the most value; which can only be attained through regular content marketing efforts.

The whole social media today is about creating content. So, if you’re planning to engage more customers with your startup it’s better to concentrate on creating more text and video content that will help you:

• Delight your prospects
• Make your startup more sociable
• Get more traffic
• Keep you more entertained with your audience
• Make your startup more recognizable in the industry etc.

This list goes on and if you don’t want your startup to stay behind the curve, you should plan on this seriously.

You’ll probably find all sort of articles that will tell you to be creative, when to publish to beat the algorithm, follow trends, etc. Still, the simplest and easiest effective tips you can follow are these:

1. Be authentic! No matter what kind of online business you have, your authenticity needs to come across. Your ultimate goal shouldn’t be just a short viral success, you’ll want to become an established business. Thus, be genuine and make sure your audience knows you for your principles, not only what you have to offer as a product or service.

2. Communicate with your audience! No matter the business, people want to be heard and listened to. Communication with your audience is key.

3. Take your time! Sometimes getting viral happens overnight, other times – you”ll have to wait. Be patient and prepare for the long run. If you know what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it, getting there is just a matter of time.

Understand What Your Audience is Looking For

An absolutely crucial step if you want your content to go viral is understanding the audience you’re trying to gain traction with.

It sounds blatantly obvious, but you’d be surprised how often this step isn’t taken.

Before you even create and share your content across social media, take the time to understand who is going to love what you’re putting out there. A couple of shares and likes isn’t enough for going viral; you need your audience to share it with their friends, who will then share it with their friends.

We live in a world where a complete stream of data is just at the end of our fingertips, so there’s really no excuse for not understanding your audience.

Give value as early and often as possible that doesn’t involve what you are selling. This shows that you are a trustworthy thought leader that will help someone instead of prying open their wallet. Give value as early and often as possible that doesn’t involve what you are selling.

This shows that you are a trustworthy thought leader that will help someone instead of prying open their wallet.

There is a direct shortcut to going viral – that no one will talk about. They all say you need to: horrify, inspire, educate, etc. – but all of these are entirely unpredictable. Instead, it would help if you had something that will work reliably. And it’s simple.

You need someone with a BIG audience to share. If you do that, you guaranteed some virality. And how do you do this? Simple, you incentivize them. Either by paying them or making them look good in the content. That’s it – make sure people with big audiences are incentivized to share, and you will go viral 😉

Keep in mind that the more you overthink of getting viral on social media, the more you may stray from the message your brand needs to convey. Always stick to your objective and don’t overdo it.

Do you want to get viral on social media? Here are 3 simple tips that may help you out:

1. Engage

Always include a CTA (Call to Action) message on your posts to encourage your audience to engage. Samples are, “What are your thoughts? Share it on the comments below!” or “We’d love to see your photo with (Product name)!”

2. Connect

Stimulate a strong emotional response, and you’ll more likely engage with your audience. Choose the emotion— do you want them to laugh, cry, or feel a rush of nostalgia? Now, how do YOU feel these emotions? Perhaps, you find a meme funny, or you find a memory from your childhood that you miss. Before you send your message to others, make sure your message hits you the most.

3. Limit

Creativity’s limitless, but you should be limiting the approach you’ll take on executing that creative marketing plan. Limit your copies to simple terms and concise sentences. Ideally, keep your videos to a maximum of 1 minute and your copies to 1 paragraph—just enough to get your message across.

First thing, make sure you are writing about something that people are currently interested in. BuzzSumo/Google Trends is great for finding trending topics. Then, make sure you focus on making High-Quality and Unique Content before moving on to anything else.

After this, promotion of that High-Quality Content focusing on Trending Topics is key. Engagement ads that generate discussions or an alternative call to action plus using relevant influencers to promote your content is a near perfect recipe for creating viral content.

Follow influencers in your field, on the platform of your choice, and reply quickly and frequently when they post. The key is to provide value or be engaging and entertaining; just laughing along or agreeing isn’t going to get you more traction.

Keep up this habit, and people will take notice of your account and the other things that you post. This works best if you have a fun voice for your brand.

In my experience, the recipe for “going viral” on social media is a cup of consistency, a 1/2 cup of timeliness, a tablespoon of understanding your audience and a dash of luck. Most often, viral posts catch the poster completely by surprise.

If you analyse viral tweets from businesses on Twitter you notice that most of them are not related their advertisements or planned marketing activities. Usually it is just normal behavior that people can relate to.

Something that people think is funny, something that show kindness in action or something that is unusual.

It is best to make the whole company part of your marketing strategy. Train your people in customer service and make sure that they know the tone of voice of your company. Social media is a team sport!

Build up a regular readership by posting the kind of content they want to read. So many bloggers write for themselves, and then wonder why nobody reads their stuff.

Find out the latest trending topics. What are people reading about? Which subject has an instant rapport? What instantly attracts people to read a post?

People need to have an affinity with what they read. Think carefully about what you are going to write about. Would it instantly attractive to the kind of public you want to engage with?

• Focus totally on your readers. Adapt what you say to their point of view.
• Write in a conversational style, it’s all about communicating with your readers.
• Transcribe a conversation with your readers in your head into your post.

Ask your readers to comment, if you don’t ask, you won’t get. Actually asking your readers to leave a comment after reading your post will have a much better result, especially if used as a call to action providing suggestions your readers could comment about.

Getting comments is the first step to making your posts go viral. The more comments you get, the more popular your posts become. This is social proof what you are writing about is worth reading, which makes it more plausible to become viral.

Instantly double the amount of comments you have on your post by replying to each one. Show your appreciation by thanking each commenter. Try to continue the conversation stated by the comment, to encourage another reply.

Aim for a regular and lively audience. The comments should show other readers this is a cool place to comment. Focus on making your blog a more comfortable place for people to have their say.

A full and lively commenting area is certainly an indication your posts have gone viral. Remember usually only 10% of readers bother to comment, so if you have touched a nerve or woken a sleeping giant with your post, pat yourself on the back for a job well done.

A well-populated blog with a huge amount of comments is every blogger’s dream. Popularity breeds more popularity. People cannot resist following a crowd, and viral blogs is a prime example of this kind of event.

Maintain this popularity through writing suitable posts, regular replying to comments and encouraging as much discussion as possible. You need to cultivate your own loyal fanbase to continue your viral blog’s success.

It is your loyal fans that will keep your viral blog going. You need to work on them to make them feel special. Essentially you are building a community of vibrant commenters, and they will need a constant interest level to keep them on board.

Your fans will become your advocates by spreading the word, suggesting new topics, making you aware of the latest events you should be writing about in your blog.

Keep your fans sweet, and they will maintain your viral blog by bringing more readers to it.

Keep up to date on algorithm changes, stay up to date on new trends, always actively engaging on social media and with followers, effective marketing strategy, influencer campaigns, establish your brand as a leader in the field!

It’s so essential to elicit some type of emotion if you’re hoping to go viral. People share things because they’re insanely engaging, hilarious, heartbreaking, or anger-inducing. Don’t be afraid to share controversial opinions.

If your content simply looks like what everyone else is posting, or your opinions are the same as everyone else, there’s a minimal chance of going viral. Companies should be open to being polarizing or taking a unique perspective. The other essential part of going viral is having a compelling headline and an exciting first 3-5 seconds. People scroll through their timelines quickly, so you only have a few seconds to get them to think, “wow, I have to see how this is going to end.” Get them hooked and make them wait until the end of the video for the payoff.

A viral post starts with an amazing offer or extraordinary, relevant message. If you’re posting about an amazing giveaway, and ask people to share or comment, you will likely get a great response. However, if you’re only sharing promotional posts that don’t interest your audience, it isn’t going to go far.

Timely messages that resonate with your audience is another way your content can go viral. When your social media followers read/watch/ listen to something that is happening in their lives or that truly matters with them, they are much more likely to like and share this content on their own because it matters to them.

Think like your audience and give them content that they would like. If you aren’t sure where to start check your analytics to see your most popular content, or simply ask them via a poll or post.

Tell a Story That Resonates

One of the characteristics of the modern social media user is their attraction to a relatable story they can sink their teeth into.

An audience is far more likely to share posts with their friends and family and engage with your content if you’re telling that a story that impacts them on a personal level.

The best way to do this is to create a fictional character that can act as a composite of your ideal audience. From here, you can create videos, take photographs and create written content which features your protagonist and their interactions with your product or service in their everyday life. If your audience sees glimpses of themselves in this character, they are far more likely to associate themselves with the brand.

Create content you know is bulletproof for your audience and then make some experimental content that you can throw in and test out. This is the best way to see if the value you give can become viral. Besides, no formula can validate that specific content can be viral.

But hoping on trends like the ones we see on Tik Tok could be useful for an online business. For instance, there is a #smallbusinesscheck hashtag on Tik Tok and a sound that goes along with it. This particular hashtag has helped many small online businesses grow and get exposure.

Tips:

1. Its all about your data.

Your target audience: you have to know who you want to target and what specifics are unique to them. I can not emphasize enough about data.

Data, when you think you have enough, your probably do not.

• all demographics available
• best dates and times to post to maximize exposure
• top social media platforms to reach them

2. Create post which are highly interactive, the more interactive they are, the better. Contests, if post acceptable, are tried and true winners. It used to be pictures, but mems and video are it now. VIDEO: nothing over 15 seconds

3. If you can connect this to the media, it’s a bonus. So keeping up with press releases, hot news, etc and possibly creating your own press releases will definitely be a bonus.

My best tip for an online business to get viral on social media is to share content that’s only goal is to give your audience something they want to look at, and consume and share.

Don’t share “salesy” or “marketing type” content on social media in the hope that it will go viral, because it will not. The type of content that gets seen is content that people emotionally connect with, want to view, and want to share with others. That means your focus has to be on providing highly shareable, highly valuable content to your audience if you want it to have a chance of going viral.

Anything that can evoke a strong reaction or emotional connection is almost sure to go viral. Humor can be a great one, especially if you have a way of using satire and making it related to your business or product somehow.

For instance, when ThinkGeek released their “Canned Unicorn Meat” product on April 1st, this made the rounds on social media and was picked up by various news publications. Not to mention the “National Pork Media” then issued a cease-and-desist letter telling ThinkGeek to stop using specific wording on the product (which was not even a real product!). This only generated more hilarity, publicity, and viral traffic when ThinkGeek then released a satirical apology letter for the work.

You’ve got to have some great content – but how you put it out, there is important too. You need to pick the post format that currently drives the most engagement on that platform.

Is it a text post without a link? A photo with lots of copy? A professionally edited video? A live rough around the edges video? How long should the video be? Each platform’s algorithm favors a specific format of the post, match your great viral content idea up to the right form, and you’re much more likely to go viral because you’ve enlisted the algorithm’s help to do so.

Businesses focus too much on “creating content” and not enough on “creating emotion”. I think about it like shopping for clothes. There are limitless options that I can chose from — I’ll pick some in my style to try on, but if I don’t absolutely love it, I’m not going to buy it.

The same is true for content. If I see a piece of content that I can relate to — something that makes me laugh, or cry, or yell, or something that helps me put words to what I already feel, I’m significantly more likely to comment on it and share it. You can do this for business content by thinking about who your ideal audience is as a human being, and the very real emotions and problems that they face every day. As an industry specialist on your product/service and the people who use it, you likely have more insider knowledge about these feelings than your target market, who may not even be able to describe those emotions or problems themselves.

Haley Nixon, Ecommerce Paid Social Strategist at Elumynt (elumynt.com).

Whether it’s a startup or a well-known brand, marketing is just like the icing on the cake. Most people get confused over two things here.

One is lead generation and the second is just marketing. Like, these two do fall under each other, but again, the difference is beyond to what we can expect to be as a result.

Every single marketer has his or her own way of P.R. campaigns and ads. It can either be SEO, SMM or even email marketing. But, what I’ve seen so far is that every marketer out there is confused.

Yeah, I know it sounds weird, but that’s the truth about it. Let Me Tell You the Why and How further along in this blog post.

However, my personal observation has confirmed one thing here. That the general-rule-of-thumb is not so general after all to become great marketer.

1. Scores Are Astonishing

For stating this I’ve collected certain scores through question-answer surveys. So, basically, my findings are totally based on the logic of the responses I received.

My conclusions are quite surprising after certain surveys that I did via the Typeform application. These surveys have helped me to gather certain useful conclusions.

I used this to prove certain effects of different marketing procedures. And, the answers will surprise you too. I used personalization as my testing question, and how marketers relate it with their procedures. About 32% of the said experts were confused about the process itself.

Then, a total of 40% were not so sure on how to personalize with their customers. Further, I got a mix response from we care to use social media platforms for personalization. Now, why us, the experts are confused with marketing in general? I’ll come to that in a bit.

2. Measure Your Brands Loyalty To Win Customers

A marketer has to be focused on developing a better approach towards finding the loyalty of his customers. Happy customers are your longtime revenue. It keeps growing only if you keep focusing. So, talk with your customers. Ask questions. Determine your failures based on the results.

Like, I tried the NPS survey about a certain brand – and will the millennials in my Facebook page recommend it. It is a simple method, where “”On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend the brand to a friend or colleague?”” was the survey question.

And, depending on the results I was able to understand how likely the product is going to be famous. Similarly, you’ll find how many of your customers promote your brand. And how many of them are passive or critics.

Thus, you’ve to be focused on your findings and invest energy in more actionable projects.

3. ASK If It Makes No Sense

Yes, please do ask. I know there are a lot of challenges when it comes to the ROI of your business. But, marketing is a great way to increase what you’re doing to how you’re doing it.

Things vary with each step. Lead generation is the second part of a great marketing method. And, it doesn’t matter how you reach your customers.

But, yes it does matter when you personalize your approach. So, calm down with the confusion in your sales funnel, as that’s directly hitting your marketing approach.

You can lose your potential and loyal customers with one small mistake. So, just stop right there, and let me tell you how not to do that.

4. What Is Your Challenge?

A step-by-step growth is better if you follow what your predecessors were doing. But, in a digitally fast marketing phase, this will not work. The out-of-the-box thinking and forecasting will work here, unless, of course, you do have a magic wand.

Your customers determine the success and failure of your brand, services or products. And, one unhappy customer might look like a big failure to you, but for me, they are my lessons.

Challenges:

I learn with every failure and grow with every positive feedback. This isn’t about being famous, it’s all based on my ideology of being successful.

So, don’t confuse lead generation with incoming traffic on your website or with the ROI of your marketing strategy.

5. My Two-Way Rule

Whenever it was something confusing for me during my college days, I used to determine what the team lead was doing. Or how someone else scored better grades than me.

Same happens, when you’re confused with what you’re doing with your marketing strategy. Either you can copy an idea, or borrow it. But, there may be some concerns here. Like, plagiarism or copyright issues or even stealing.

Yes, you did read the stealing part right over there. But these things can cause issues like:

• Legal action
• Spam website content
• Plagiarism detection
• Google penalties
• Shady or questionable brand repute
• So, all of these teach you what? That to be an original mimicker is better than being a thief. Or is the great marketer mindset based on stealing only? A tough choice by far, but great marketers do the smart stealing, and I’ll come to that next.

6. Steal Or Copy?

Another million dollar question. So, here is my tip. Don’t just copy and get penalized. Instead, steal the idea that is working, and make changes with giving due credits.

Yeah, but do be careful how you pitch my idea of stealing to your brain. The trick is to research your niche carefully. Do a bit-by-bit analysis of popular branding ideas.

Use the same approach in your marketing, and fix some different styles.

P.S. Don’t just steal modestly. Be inventive with your own scheming and set up things straight.

Your version of copying is quite comparative to my version of stealing. Because, if something is working for your competitors, then the chances are going to be bright for you too.

7. Is Creative Marketing Great?

Of course, greatness comes with time and experience. But, a great marketer comes with intelligence. If you’re a good marketer, chances are you’re still confused.

But, on the other hand, if you’re a great marketer, then by now, you’ve already read this post. And, will be writing your next article based on my theory.

Surely, you’ll mention what I am discussing here, and will pay the due credits too, if it’s a republished work. However, you’ll also be using your own words in my idea. And, that my friend is your answer.

Steal with the ingenious outcome!

8. Confused Consumer Issue?

With my online survey and a little help from Harvard Business School stats, I’ve also concluded something important for you. Most of the times, it’s a confused consumer who is causing difficulty. Let me tell you how that’s affecting your marketing next.

Nevertheless, a confused consumer is there because of certain branding after-effects. A consumer only gets confused if the service or product is available with different features.

For example, buy one get one free offer or subscribe today and win a gift voucher.

Now, even if I get both of these offers from two different brands and with different services, obviously I’ll get confused too.

Now, the customer gets confused and expects to get similar services or quality levels from other brands too.

Which, as a result, makes the sale difficult. And, thus, a confused customer goes beyond the norms of special marketing. Avoiding this situation is possible. You’ll need to add more quality to your customer service or product.

Building trust is the next ingredient to a loyal customer recipe. You can use it with awesome content. As content marketing is making progress daily and is the easiest tool for personalization too.

9. Great Content “Big Results“ Better Marketing?

Makes sense. All three of them deliver what you’re looking for. Your answers are here. Social media marketing, search engine optimization, ads etc. all are based on great content, big results and better market reach.

Within a few years only, content marketing results have skyrocketed and will continue to do so. Google ranks your websites based on awesome content. Rewrites or copied work is identified immediately based on effective content strategy.

Great Content:

So, stealing overcomes copying with more of an action plan method. A great marketer knows this and is using it to its best potential.

Content marketing is one heck of a tool for connecting with your customers, fruitful brand marketing, and effective lead generation.

10. Global Picture Is Based On Why It Works

Almost everything is better than what it was in previous years. Now people do need-based buying and are more focused on the value of the services or product.

More and more increase has been seen in smartphone sales, mobile data, 3G 4G, and social media platforms. Your customers are better equipped than the GEN-X customers. I’m talking about the age group of the 70’s and 80’s here.

These were just some day-to-day important things that you need to remember. Now, your consumer has already seen your reviews and ratings. GEN-Y consumers do everything smartly.

Don’t go any farther. Look at Nokia. One of the best brands of the 1990’s and 2010. But, they failed to create a different product with smart-touch ideology.

This in return, dropped their sales, and Apple got its initial break to thousands of customers. So, need-based marketing tactic survived the era of smart-touch with Apple. And, we rarely see any drop in the company’s sales.

In fact, now smart technology is the call of tomorrow.

11. Is There A Better Method To Do It?

Of course, there is. Never underestimate the power of your brain while being a marketer.

You already know many things about marketing. So, here is how you become great marketer with stealing others ideas and copying them into yours.

Now, let us talk about into making you, one-big-smart marketer. Here is the HOW part, which you need to learn and use:

• Create better leads with free resources
• Enhanced email subjects matter more
• Draft awesome blog headlines
• Get viral with more social media stories
• Use high-quality content marketing strategies

12. Creating Better Leads With Free Resources

A great marketer will use the free resource approach to generate better leads. Make something different in your niche absolutely free and eye-catching. Like free consultations or free eBooks or something similar.

Lead-generation:

This, as a result, will get you immediate leads along with word-of-mouth leads as well.

You’ve to be exceptionally crafty with this idea. Invest as little as you can but, do add quality in the free part.

You can also use countless online tools and webinars to generate leads, and mimic your competitor’s idea of free resource to do it better. You’re lucky, as Google helps in simplifying things for you. For example, you’re a growth hacking specialist.

There will be more within your city, area, and country. So, naturally, you do have a lot of competitors, and I bet that each one of them must be exceptionally great.

Now type Growth Hacking Specialist on Google. You’ll immediately see your rivalry results, and you can explore their websites, and mimic their resources to build your own in a similar manner.

TIP! This will get you, subscribed-and-free users, as well.

13. Enhanced Email Subjects Matter More

Email marketing has proved to be result-oriented for many years now. If you’re not trying it, you’re losing a major chunk of your business.

So, be creative with your email subjects. You’re investing in one of the top marketing strategies and are bound to get results with creativity.

Enhanced Email Subjects:

This will get people to actually open and read your emails. Don’t drag something generic or monotonous. Give an opening to initiate a conversation. See and learn about your customers.

Is it a coffee-break that makes sense to them or a healthy lifestyle? Pitch them on their likes, and make it sound need-based. Start your email with a personalized opening. Add a few drops of empathy.

Let your customer know that you CARE, and show them how you do care.

Tip! Subscribe to emails and newsletters from your competitors. And save the ones with awesome headlines to get inspired in your time of need.

This will help you plan your next email if your brain is not ringing any bell at any time.

14. Blogs, Viral Social Media Posts & Great Content Marketing All Help

This one is easy for smart marketers. You’re doing something you’re famous for – Marketing!

Now start drafting great blogs with an awesome and classy headline. Use hashtags, and viral them on social feeds through Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter etc.

Create a hype about your product and services. Mimic the strategy of your competitors to generate great content ideas. This will in return get you strong leads.

Digital-Marketing:

Use their idea of connecting with your customers in a unique method. Like I said above, if things are working for your rivals they will work for you too. Give credits wherever they’re due.

And, with this, you’ll become a great marketer, instead of being just good. But, once again, do the smart stealing, the smart way.

Tell me what idea of your competitors did you mimic to generate effective leads?

Today, Social Media has got an immense power attached to it. It can either make, or break a brand. Ideas exchange, new learnings, making connections, making friends – Social Media does it all.

Shared digital experiences have become fundamental in our lives. Over 2.5 billion people are on social networks now, and still counting!

So amidst all the chaos, how can your online business harness the zing of Social Media and go viral? Online success and virality are not tangible, but one can still measure them through the 4 key metrics below.

Buzz – Extensive coverage on popular sites, like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook.

Viewership – The number of views on YouTube, Vimeo and other online video streaming channels.

Parody – AKA, ‘Meme’. It’s a buzzing trend to create a meme out of anything viral!

Longevity – Some contents stay intact even after their buzz dies down.

E.g., the ALS Ice-Bucket Challenge.

So what is that common thread that binds all these metrics together?

Emotion!

Emotion is one true humane trait that connects us all. Any post you see, any video you upload, any ad campaign you stop by, we are attracted primarily by the emotional quotient they offer. That said, your online business must come up more and more with such quirky, unique content, that piques someone’s emotion. The moment your content trigger someone’s memory, it is bound to be viral!

And emotions can be many. We usually categorize the positive and negative emotions through our perceptions and act according to them.

1. Memory
2. Love
3. Fun
4. Patriotism
5. Hatred
6. Frustration
7. Family Bond
8. Fandom
9. Political Affinity
10. Rivalry

Piggybacking on these emotional sensations can bring you extra attention, extra admiration. Put your audience on an emotional roller-coaster, and enjoy the much- coveted virality!

One more essential tip I must mention, choose your Social Media channels wisely. Put up your post, Blog, ad campaign on channels where you expect a certain viewership. Upload your posts on platforms where they will be seen, liked, and most importantly, shared by your target audience. The more your post gets shared, the more viral your business becomes!

Well, there’s no sure-fire way or guarantee that every content you create, every ad campaign you run, will generate virality. But these time-tested hacks when followed religiously, can certainly propel your online business to viral status on Social Media.