“Make it go VIRAL!” Screams the CEO at the top of his lunges. The Marketing Manager quivers. She knows full well that there is no ‘switch’ to make it go viral. “Who do we have to pay to make this viral?” A cold sweat breaks out on the Marketing Managers forehead. There is no one you ‘pay’ to make things go viral.

It’s everyone’s dream for their content to go viral. The scene from above is all too familiar when it comes to those who don’t necessarily understand social media but know that this thing can ‘go viral’ and they want it to do just that. Understanding the nuances for each platform and leveraging them accordingly really is the best method.

Why is it that people want their content to go viral? Well that’s quite simple. Sales, Leads, Traffic, Fame, Fortune, all of the above! Being seen by more people really is key to achieving success in business and viral content can help do exactly that.

The bad part is, there’s no exact science on how to do this. There’s no method you can apply to have your content go from zero to 10 thousand views in an hour. To have a good shot at it though there are a few things you should keep in mind.

Here are some of our top tips on how to make your social media content go viral

Know your audience

This should come as no surprise, but the best content comes out of a comprehensive social media strategy. Once that properly defines your voice, your tone, language and your target audience. (See here for an example of how you can do that).

Whilst you’re planning your content it’s important to remember that you’re not just in the market to talk to everyone, it’s more important to remember to talk to the right people, the people who will actually listen to what you have to say. The people who want your stuff.

Clearly this means that you’ll need to have defined your target audience properly at the start. Know who they are and what their key interests are. Then you’ll know what content to create to meet their needs, to match them to the messages that you’ll be sharing. Doing this will help ensure your content is shared by the right people, presumably TO the right people. Hence the start of going viral.

User Generated Content

User Generated Content, the virtual ‘holy grail’ of social media content. Content that people make that matches your message and includes something about your brand, preferably directly supporting your brand story. Sounds great, right? Yes well it’s not quite THAT easy.

Getting user generated content into your marketing campaign and your social content really will help your spread and increase your chances of going viral. It’ll create a buzz that you can’t get elsewhere. The catch here is, you must provide some incentive to do this. Once upon a time the incentive was considered to be some sort of give-away, a product, some ebooks, exclusive content, stuff like that. These days it’s not so simple anymore. People see past that stuff.

These days what you want to do is appeal the users ego, or to their sense of self. If by contributing to your campaign with their own content they achieve some sort of special status or some sort of user perk. Making your followers feel important or more specifically feel like they have an elevated social status will do wonders for your campaign contribution levels.

The reality is, the more user generated content that you have in your campaign, the more spread you’re going to have and the more chance you have of it going viral.

Emotional connections

Emotions are at the center of social media. I mean, by definition it’s all about emotions – the concept of social is emotions at it’s very basic level. Having friends, having connections and feeling good – it’s all about emotions.

So, when you’re creating your content you must remember how much emotion it evokes and what that emotion is. Do you want people to feel sad and engage? Or happy and engage? Or just feel reactive in some way? Perhaps anger is the emotion you want. There’s so many options.

Capturing the emotions of your target audience will increase the potential for your content to go viral immensely. It’ll evoke your audience to share the content because of how they feel about it, not because of what it says.

Tap into trends

We’ve all heard it before. It trended on Twitter. What does trending really mean? In the simplest of fashions it means that people were interested in it and shared it a lot. Maybe they commented on it or they used the same topic in their own conversations.

Knowing what is trending will help your content to go viral. If people are already talking about it and you decide to start talking about it too then you never know who might see your stuff. It could suddenly jump up out of nowhere and you’ll have people seeing your content left right and center!

This extends to hash-tags. Knowing what hash-tags will get the greatest reach will give you a huge jump. Using the larger hash tags will mean your content will be seen by a larger audience and therefore has a higher chance of being promoted.

If you’d like to have some content done for you or perhaps get some training on how, contact Aston Social today on 1300 29 77 16!