Viral content: what you need to know

What is viral content?

Viral content is what you get by doing viral marketing. Viral marketing you can use social media (i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter…)among others to try to make your company/content known and thus make it go viral. When a post goes viral, an awful lot of people see it. The biggest advantage to viral marketing is that it is inexpensive. If you post a tweet on Twitter and it gets shared several thousand times, it has cost you nothing. You became much better known as a company/brand because so many people shared or retweeted your tweet.

Some tips that can help you create viral content:

• Trigger your readers
  You could associate your product with something for your readers. This can be done with many everyday things. If you have a business that produces evening snacks, you could advertise in a way so that people are inclined to eat your evening snack. You can link this with the sunset or with a time of day or with getting into bed. Then, if you post something on social media at that time, the people who see the post will crave your evening snack. They can then start sharing it.
• Emotion
  It’s always a plus if you can respond to your readers’ emotions. If they agree emotionally with your post, it will automatically be shared or liked more already.
• Useful content
  If you post something that is useful, there will be people who will share your post. They do this because they want to share this useful information with their friends or family.
• Story creation
  Try to create a narrative to your post. If people see that your post has a deeper or more far-reaching meaning, they will also share or like your post more. For example, just a picture of a bar of fair trade chocolate doesn’t say much. If you include how the farmers themselves can also earn something from this chocolate and you also put a picture of them, people will find this much more interesting because they empathize with the story.
• Post regularly
  If you only post something once and it did not reach many people, this is absolutely no reason to stop posting. When people are reading something for the first time, they are more likely to scroll past it. If they have seen something pass like a lot, they will usually wonder what this post is right. If you regularly post things on social media, you will become more and more well-known. You should not overdo this by posting something every minute, but definitely try to have posted something on social media every day. You must also, of course, always stay up to date.