In the world of search engine optimization, content drives your digital marketing strategy. This content brings organic traffic to your website, expands your audience, and elevates your SERP rankings. But you must create engaging, interactive, and exciting content to get the response you desire. Moreover, your publications need to be massively shareable; they should have the potential to go viral. This article reveals how to create viral content. Read on!
It’s every marketer’s dream to produce viral content. But coming up with soon-to-be-famous stuff isn’t easy since it’s impossible to decide what will dominate the news and trends in the future. So, is there any magic formula to predict how your content can go viral? Well, we have some simple suggestions that might help.
Table of Contents
- Research your audience
- Promote its shareability
- Keep your content concise
- Publish entertaining content
- Always publish emotional content
- Publish informative content
- Rely more on visuals
- Collaborate with influencers
- Hone your storytelling
- Use attention-grabbing titles
1. Research your audience
The first thing to consider in order to create viral content is to understand your audience: you must create content that resonates with your audience’s expectations to make it go viral. Thus, knowing your audience constitutes the primary component of creating shareable content. You must understand why people follow your brand and which posts invoke their interest. You can’t expect your content to make it to the top unless you’re publishing stuff they’re interested in. So, it’s crucial to comprehend the space you occupy and the niche you’ve built. You can find many online tools that will help you research your audience and gain valuable insights into their interests. This research eventually enables marketers to produce highly engaging content.
2. Promote its shareability
Your content should sell itself, experts will tell you. But sometimes, even the most excellent of posts require external assistance to reach your niche. That’s why you should attach social sharing buttons to encourage more people to share the content. You should also contact a social media agency for consulting with experts to enhance your content’s shareability. These agencies will help your posts spread across social media, find the right audience, and reach as many users as possible.
3. Keep your content concise
Technology has significantly reduced our attention span in the 21st century. So, to create viral content, you must understand that people respond more actively to short-form content. Such content has higher chances of going viral since text-heavy, long-form posts tend to exhaust readers. Brands publish one-minute-long videos to promote their content, and even YouTube puts short clips in everyone’s recommendations. If the audience can’t digest your content in under ten seconds, it becomes difficult to go viral. Shareability depends on how short, concise, and to-the-point your content is. Extensive articles and lengthy videos have poor shareability, whereas memes possess great potential. So, focus on succinct content.
4. Publish entertaining content
Social media has become a source of entertainment for people. We can say that humor constitutes the chief ingredient of viral content. And it’s also the most challenging form of content to produce since humor must originate organically without tarnishing the brand’s professional image. Your audience likes refined comedy and polished witticism that makes them laugh. Just look at how Wendy’s used humor to connect with the customer. Quips and banter may contribute to your posts’ virality.
5. Publish emotional content
Let’s ponder over the psychology behind viral content. What sort of posts make people react to the message strongly and feel compelled to share it? Thus, to create viral content, you must evoke an emotion in your target audience. Some brands even market outrageous and controversial posts to make their followers respond energetically. You need people to engage with your content – in favor or against – to enhance its shareability. Create something people feel connected to with a powerful message, e.g., advertisements about drinking responsibly. When your content makes users feel something, they tend to share it on social media. So, elicit an emotional response to enhance your post’s virality.
6. Publish informative content
Your content doesn’t need to invoke laughs or serve as a tearjerker. Just make helpful content that educates people and conveys a piece of information. For instance, life hacks often go viral since the audience finds these tips useful. Information compels people to share something and promote it on social media. Brands publish “Know It All” guides because of their potential for massive shareability. So, if you have original research, repurpose it as an infographic and see it go viral.
7. Rely more on visuals
You can’t publish mere text-based content and then wish people to remember it since they need something tangible to connect with your message. Humans remember 10% of the information they have heard after three days. Combine a picture with it and they’ll remember 65% of the information thanks to added visuals. So, marketers include attention-grabbing images with their content to hone its shareability. No wonder most viral content you’ve seen is visual and not textual! People need to feel as if they’re observing an event when they engage with your content. Adding visuals & graphics give your posts 650% more engagement and increases the content’s shareability three times.
8. Collaborate with influencers
Collaborating with influencers is an important point to consider if you want to create viral content. Partnership constitutes an essential component of content marketing. You must find celebrities popular on social media and leverage their fame to promote your content. Your chances of virality increase when partnered with influencers and famous brands. The research into your target audience helps you realize which celebrities influence their purchase decision. You then reach out to these eminent individuals and arrange a collaborative campaign to cross-market each other’s content online.
9. Hone your storytelling
Your storytelling skills must be top-notch if you want to create viral content. But how to find the right story? Well, brands can use their customers as success stories. You may also narrate the chronicles of your achievements as a feel-good account. These stories must be entertaining and relevant to your audience’s interests. In fact, a good story triggers different emotions in people, and these emotions lead to some stories going viral. A relatable story can connect with your audience and contribute to your content’s shareability. We have seen marketers creating fictional characters whose stories they tell to engage their customers. Depicting events about that character will make people wish to associate with your brand.
10. Use attention-grabbing titles
Statistics show that only one-fifth of your audience reads your posts, while others stop after reading the headline. So, it would be best if you made headlines catchy and awe-inspiring. Also, putting numbers into the titles makes your content 36% more likely to generate clicks. In like fashion, using brackets also enhances your content’s readability. Just keep the heading short and concise, use the targeted keywords, and make it sound like a question if possible. An attention-grabbing title can make your posts popular in no time.
Conclusion
We can conclude now that there isn’t any secret formula to create viral content. Instead, your content becomes famous thanks to an accidental combination of some factors mentioned above. Perhaps, you published something relevant or posted a picture millions of people found hilarious. Maybe you worked with the right Instagram celebrity to gain momentum on behalf of your content. What matters is your content’s impact on the audience. If you’re inspiring/educating the people or helping them restore their faith in humanity, your content has the right ingredients. The shareability of your publications depends on how your content influences your audience and helps them find their lost identities.
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