Viral. It’s been been the goal of marketers and website owners since the days of “RE:FW:FW:RE:You gotta watch this” emails, which made videos and images spread across the globe. Today, email is the last place to try to “go viral,” but there are plenty of new venues in social media that do the trick in a more controllable manner than ever before.
Here, we will look at three aspects of viral marketing: the why, where, and how. It’s the most challenging aspect of social media marketing. Few are able to take content and make it go truly viral, in fact you can count on 5 or 6 hands the number of companies who can go viral on a consistent basis.
If you know what you’re doing and focus on quality, you caould be on hand number 6 or 7 of that exclusive list.
Why Go Viral?
Those of us who have been working in social media for a while have probably experienced that moment when we learned one important message – viral social media traffic rarely converts. Whether your website is used to generate leads, make sales, or bring in ad revenue, going viral on any of the 5 major traffic generators (detailed below) is not a way to convert visitors.
Social media is a venue of enjoyment and interaction. Few go to social media sites to buy things, find services, or read ads. The revenue-generation aspect of social media is minimal when you look directly at the traffic itself. Compared to search traffic, it’s downright awful as a conversion tool.
With that being the case, why would anyone want to go viral?
The answers are many, but here are the highlights:
- New Branding – This is particularly important for startups and smaller websites. People don’t know you. They don’t recognize your brand and they’ve probably never heard of your company or website before. Getting new people to your site seeing your logo and hopefully wanting to learn more about you is gold when you’re an “internet unknown.”
- Extended Branding – For larger companies and websites that already have a brand, going viral on social media is an excellent way to extend a brand and change an image. Prior to the Old Spice Guy, the product was generally perceived as something used by grandpas in coal mining towns. Now, thanks to excellent television ads and a tremendous viral push on social media, the entire perception of the product has changed. It’s been reborn, and the numbers clearly demonstrate this.
- Search Authority – Google and Bing have stated that they are looking at “social signals” in their search ranking algorithms to help determine how how a website can rank. The inbound links associated with going viral can also have a dramatic effect on search authority. If a company wanted to use social media for this reason alone, it would be worth it. It’s completely “white hat” and it’s really what the search engines want – content that pops.
- Analytics – While most who understand and track the traffic at websites realize that social media pops are short-lived and not indicative of normal traffic, a consistent flow of viral pieces can sustain long-term traffic.
There are dozens of other benefits from going viral, but these four simple and easily justifiable reasons are enough to help skeptics make the right decisions. For most businesses and websites out there, yes, you should be creating viral content.
Where To Go Viral
Every day, there are an estimated 740 trillion new social media sites created (or so it seems). As a result, it’s often difficult to know which ones are real, which ones will be out of business in a month, and which ones will send true viral traffic to your websites. Here is a breakdown of the 5 best at “going viral”.
- Twitter – The noise level on Twitter has made it diminish over the last 2 years in total traffic sent. A Tweet from Demi Moore in 2009 would send tens of thousands of visitors to wherever she pointed them. Today, that number is greatly diminished. Instead, going viral on Twitter is in the form of retweets. With Google paying very close attention to how well a story or page does on Twitter, it’s important to try to get high-quality retweets. The challenge is fighting against the tremendous amounts of spam that filter through the site. The good news – if it’s good quality and the right people Tweet it, the masses will follow. A strong Tweet and subsequent retweets can send over 2,000 visitors to a site in a day.
- Facebook – Similar to Twitter, Facebook is a victim of bulk. There are so many updates and links posted to Facebook at any given time that fighting through and getting noticed can be a challenge. Luckily, Facebook has the ability to continuously send a strong flow of traffic to viral content. It isn’t quite up to par with Twitter as far as quick viral – 1,000 visitors is a strong day – but it does have the ability to sustain for longer. Getting an extra thousand visitors a day can recur for several days, even weeks. Also, pickup by major Facebook pages can make this number jump dramatically. If somehow you can get Ford or Lady Gaga to post a link on their page, you can easily approach 10,000 referrals in a day.
- Digg – Two years ago, Digg was the biggest gun in anyone’s viral marketing arsenal. While it was the most challenging and selective of the 5 major viral marketing tools with only around 120 stories selected per day, a single Digg front page story could send tens of thousands of visitors to a single story in a matter of hours. The power of the site has diminished since its disastrous launch of version 4 in 2010, but the site is showing signs of rebounding and a strong piece of content can still see 40,000+ visitors in a 48-hour period.
- StumbleUpon – SU is the social media site that keeps on giving. It has the highest “grand slam” potential of all the sites – those who get the full light of StumbleUpon shining upon them can see over 2 million visitors sent to a single piece of content over a couple of months. These moments are rare, but very strong content can still see hundreds of thousands of visitors. Consistently, StumbleUpon sends tens of thousands of visitors a day to a wide variety of content on a single site. The only drawback – the content has to fit within a particular niche. Images do very well on the site, leaving long, comprehensive stories out of the mix at times.
- Reddit – This is a point of contention for several reasons, but Reddit is the ultimate viral traffic sending site out there. Several pieces of content receive hundreds of thousands of visitors per day from the site. The challenge with Reddit is that the community is extremely watchful. They do not tolerate spam for more than a split second and their retribution against spammers is swift and harsh. If your content is truly the best quality available, Reddit may like it. Then again, they may not. Tread carefully and never, ever spam them. If you put something on Reddit, it better be the best the Internet has to offer.
Where’s YouTube? Normally, when people think of “going viral” they think of YouTube. It has been intentionally excluded from this list because it’s not a true viral marketing tool in and of itself. It can be a component of viral marketing campaigns and has a tremendous appeal for branding (see “Old Spice Guy”). It does not send viral traffic to websites. Good traffic, yes. Consistent traffic, sometimes. Viral traffic – almost never. Even if you put your website link in the description and include the URL in the video itself, a viral video that gets 10 million hits might only send a hundred visitors a day for a few days. When people are on YouTube, they don’t want to be bothered.
There are other emerging sites such as Tumblr and Buzzfeed that have the ability to send traffic. They may be included in this list in the future. Today, they aren’t quite as strong but there are several sites that are making a powerful case to be included.
How To Go Viral
There are three primary components to making a viral piece of content. It’s really that simple.
Doing it right can be extremely challenging. Once you master these three things, you have the ability to send thousands, even millions of visitors to your website over time that would never have been to your site otherwise.
- Build Strong Content – It seems simple enough, but it’s amazing how often companies put together content that simply has no chance of going viral. Content that pops is content that appeals to the communities, resonates with a message that people want to see/read/hear, and is put together in a way that is ultra-high-quality.Infographics are one way to do it. People want information quickly and they enjoy visually-stunning content. Using well-designed infographics that are meticulously researched can compel people to click to see what you say. Infographics also have a tendency to receive more inbound links, as they are often recycled and embedded on other sites and blogs. With over 21,000 Facebook shares, Evolution of the Geek is a excellent example of a successful infographic.Another popular method is using entertaining and/or informative resource lists. Often referred to as “Top 10 Lists,” these types of content are scorned at times simply because so many companies and blogs use them specifically to try to go viral. If you’re going to make a list, make sure it’s comprehensive and visually easy to comprehend.Breaking news works, but it’s the toughest one to get right. Unless you’re a press agency or news organization, it’s often challenging to put together the comprehensive stories in time ahead of other publications. If you can get it out there quickly enough, you can find tremendous benefits as people often share breaking news on Twitter and Facebook more than they share resource lists or infographics.The least-used and often most effective way to go viral is called perception-benders. These are often mashups of two or more topics that seem to have very little to do with one another. They stand out amongst the crowd as a result and have the ability to go viral on multiple sites very easily. For example, Social Media According to The Wire was a piece that combined a popular television show with the perceptions within our niche, in this case social media. It did very well on all 5 of the viral social media sites mentioned above.
- Make Your Titles Stand Out – This is both the quickest and often most difficult aspect of going viral. Your content is competing against billions of other pieces of content all buzzing around across the Internet. You have about 2 seconds to catch someone’s attention. The title is everything.Look at the story in the image above. It’s a story about “word of click” marketing that normally would have no chance of going viral. Discussing marketing is a tight niche and social media is often very general. For something to appeal to the masses, it needs to be high quality but it also has to stand out.Invoking the term “The New Hotness” gave the story the chance it needed to stand out against the millions of other stories talking about marketing. The content, thankfully, backed up the claim and the piece received tens of thousands of visitors and a good amount of comments.
- Engage with the Community – Unfortunately, you could have video of Elvis hiding out with JD Salinger after both faked their deaths but if you have no traction within the social media communities listed above, you probably won’t be able to go viral. There is a reason why so many companies hire social media marketing firms to push their content out there. If you spend the time and do it right, you don’t have to hire anyone.Every community has their own idiosyncrasies that make them special. If you have the time to get involved, learn what the community likes, and engage with them on their terms, you have an opportunity to be successful with your own content.As an example, Digg has been known as a community dominated by “power users.” These dedicated individuals and companies would spend a lot of time on the site making friends, “digging” up stories from their friends, and establishing relationships of trust that the content they posted was going to be strong. As a result, having a network became paramount for those wanting to get attention to their stories to give them a chance of hitting the coveted front page.Reddit, on the other hand, is often all about quality. A new user with no connections, no network, but awesome content could share on Reddit and see immediate success. Having a track-record of posting quality content and comments helped, as Reddit “Karma” is often an indicator of how trustworthy one’s submissions were, but even then Karma is never the end-all. It’s about the content on Reddit (again, only submit the best of the best).Learn the communities and you’ll be able to not only be successful, you might even have some fun doing it.
On a closing note, social media is still about fun. You may have content that you want to pop, but remember that the people on these sites are not interested in your marketing messages while on them. In other words, they may be interested in your services, products, or website, but while they’re in “social networking mode” they are really wanting to connect, engage, interact, and enjoy. Don’t try to force your message upon them. Quality is the key and it’s through quality that you’re going to have the greatest chance of success.
It can be a challenging road. Most who try to go viral fail. Here are the final 8 keys to viral marketing success.
- Justification – If people click on it, there better be a great reason for them to want to read what you’ve given them.
- Delivery – Presentation is key to delivery. Having strong content delivered in a way that isn’t appealing will tank your efforts.
- Respect – One of the biggest mistakes people make when trying to go viral is to disrespect the readers. Turn off popups. Don’t try to squeeze out page views by putting long, unnecessary slideshows. Show your readers respect.
- Uniqueness – If you’re going to try to simply copy other people’s work, you won’t be successful for long.
- Clarity – Confuse nobody. Be clear with your messages. Particularly in Infographics, you don’t want anything that might make them not understand what you’re trying to say.
- Klout – Including examples from people with high Klout scores can help you get a leg-up when you launch your content.
- Error-free – The easiest way to tank a good piece of content is to have grammatical or spelling errors.
- Respect – It’s worth repeating.
There are dozens of techniques out there that people attempt when trying to go viral. In the end, the content must resonate. It’s one thing to put out link-bait that is intended to get people to like it. It’s another thing altogether to create the best content you possibly can, put time and effort into crafting it for the various communities, and launch it strongly knowing that your audience will appreciate your efforts.
Have you had any luck getting something viral? Please share in the comments and feel free to ask questions as well.
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