Making a post go viral on social media is what any self respecting digital marketer is striving for. Social media platforms remain an incredibly powerful and influential means of accessing millions of people. Whoever your market they are bound to exist on social media, if for no other reason than to get their daily fix of gossip and news. This makes it a great place to build an audience and raise brand awareness.
However, going viral on social media isn’t easy, its an art that takes time and energy to get right. Taking account of all the variables to decide which message or photo will resonate with your audience may take trial and error. Ultimately you need to ensure the post interests or entertains your audience sufficiently for them to share.
Understand your market
The first place to start with any marketing initiative is with your marketing persona. Your marketing persona is an imagined customer, based on market research. This means your persona will represent your typical customer in terms of personality, likes and dislikes, demographic, etc. This should paint a picture of where and why your customer buys your product or service. The more deeply you understand your marketing persona the better you will be able to tailor messages to them and stand out from the competition.
What makes a post go viral
Emotion
If a post makes you laugh, cry or inspires you, you are more likely to share it with your network. Providing you understand your typical customer well enough you should be able to appreciate the boundaries of emotional posts. For instance you wouldn’t come up with a post intended to inspire that results instead in ridicule and laughter.
Relateability
Any post would need to be designed for your marketing persona. The more deeply you understand your typical customer, the more successful you will be in creating a viral post. The more relatable a post the more likely a person is to share it.
There are many marketing tools that can be used to help you understand your marketing persona, right down to the shows they watch and the kind of issues that matter to them. If you can tap in to subjects that already have their attention then you will be on the right track.
Originality
Make sure your post is your own work. Don’t copy the posts of others and ensure whatever you produce is of high quality. This is particularly important when building a brand.
Eye catching visuals
Bold colours and high quality images or videos will help your post stand out and capture attention. Visuals can help keep a message simple and easily understood, to the point messages are more likely to go viral.
Maximising the opportunity
Timing
Understanding when your marketing persona users social media will help you understand when to post and how often. Posting when your market is most active on social media platforms will increase the chances of your post going viral.
Hashtags
Using relavent and popular hashtags may increase how discoverable your post is by a broader but related audience.
Engagement
Content with an interactive element such as questions, polls or calls to action are a way of keeping your audience’s attention and may encourage sharing.
Encourage and respond to comments as quickly as possible. This illustrates you care and can build a sense of community. People are more likely to share a post from a source they trust.
Collaborations
Speaking of trust, influencers, if you can afford them, can make a decent impact on your credibility and reach. There is usually a cost attached to collaborating with influencers so choose yours carefully and make sure you have a clear path to profit from their involvement.
Analyisis
Set useful metrics to evaluate the performance of your posts and adjust your strategy accordingly. You’ll set you metrics according to the intended outcome of the marketing strategy. Likes and shares are key metrics. So for instance, if the target outcome was to raise awareness of your brand you would measure how many of your target market liked, shared and possibly explored your website as a result of your post. Or if you your outcome was to sell, your metric would be how many of those who interacted with your post converted to sales.
As your target outcome is for the post to go viral the key metrics might be the demographic your posts are attracting and the number of shares. You would look for patterns to see if the post is attracting shares from some and not others and drill down to understand why.
Once you get a grip on the performance of your post you might want to adjust it until you achieve your aims.
And finally…
Going viral on social media is the ultimate word of mouth marketing. Providing the message is right you can reach your intended market and even grow that market. It can help you grow your brand and establish your place in the market, which is vital for a new business. You need to put the work in to get the results, so providing you are up for the task you should the rewards are there for the taking.