Viral media refers to marketing techniques that encourage audiences to pass on a marketing message by sharing the content with their friends over social platforms, potentially leading to exponential growth in the content’s visibility. Creating viral content is hard, but when a piece of content, whether it’s a blog post, a YouTube video or any other format, becomes so popular due to sharing and re-sharing, it is often said to have gone viral. Sometimes, viral content becomes so widely known that it gets seen by hundreds of millions of people to the extent that it even becomes a meme. While such lofty goals might not be easy to reach, the following will help you make your content more shareable:
#1. Use Numbers
When it comes to getting attention in the first place, the most important element of all is the title, since it’s usually the first thing that people will see. Since Internet audiences typically prefer scannable content in the form of short, concise snippets of information, list-type articles are among the most popular content formats of all. In fact, a study carried out by content marketing firm Conductor found that headlines featuring numbers are around 36% more likely to generate clicks. Strangely, headlines starting with odd numbers enjoyed a 20% higher click-through rate than those starting with even numbers
#2. Use Short URLs
Short URLs are easier to remember and to type, particularly now that most online traffic now comes from the small screen. URLs should also make sense, both for the sake of SEO and to make them easier for your visitors to understand. URLs that feature nothing more than a jumble of automatically generated numbers and letters just look confusing, so you should always include the main words of the article heading in the title. However, no matter how short your URLs, you should consider using a URL shortener to make your links more manageable and more suitable for sharing on social media platforms, particularly Twitter with its strict character limits.
#3. Use Eye-catching Imagery
Almost all viral content becomes popular in the first place because it makes use of eye-catching visuals. While written content is also important in viral marketing, it tends to be great visuals that help to foster engagement and encourage sharing. For articles, the most important image is the header, since it’s always kept above the fold. This image will also accompany social media shares, making it as important as the headline for representing your content and giving people a reason to click it. Further images also add credibility to the content, even if they are only relevant to it in an abstract kind of way. Just make sure you avoid the clichéd stock images.
#4. Promote Sharing
Many marketers will tell you that great content markets itself and, to an extent, this is true. However, there’s certainly nothing wrong with giving it a head start by actively encouraging people to share it. The easiest way to promote sharing is to simply integrate social sharing buttons, which you should be doing anyway with every blog post and other types of content you have online. Sharing buttons allow people to quickly share content they like on their favourite networks or forward them to a friend via email with just a couple of clicks. However, including too many sharing buttons can confuse people and put them off, so be sure to only use the most relevant ones.
#5. Make It Scannable
When someone carries out a search on Google, they’re usually looking for quick, concise and relevant answers to their questions. When someone opens up their favourite blog, they’re usually looking for some quick entertainment. As such, scannable articles that satisfies the short attention spans and constant craving for easily digestible content tends to do much better online. Authors might not be too happy about the fact that most people will simply skim through their work to pick out the points and answers that are most interesting to them, but that is how online audiences work. Writing for the Web is different to writing for print in this respect.
#6. Keep It Accessible
The last thing you want to do is go to the trouble of creating excellent content only to have people abandon it because it’s not suitably presented. All content should be easily accessible across all Internet-enabled platforms but, if you’re going to prioritize any one platform in particular, then make sure it’s mobile. Mobile online traffic has already overtaken desktop traffic, so it’s imperative that your content is easy to read and your website easily navigable on the small screen. To make your content more accessible, be sure to use responsive themes, large text sizes, clear typography and simple layouts with plenty of whitespace to draw attention to your content.
#7. Inspire Emotion
To succeed with viral marketing, you’ll need to understand the psychology of viral content. Raising recognition and encouraging shares requires content that pushes people’s buttons and provokes emotional reactions. In other words, you need to be publishing content that people react to strongly enough that they’ll share it on their favourite social networks without a second thought. Topics that people are most likely to share and talk about are either remarkable, hilarious, outrageous, controversial or just plain unusual. Reactions to viral content won’t always be positive, but this kind of marketing is all about provoking an emotional response.
#8. Link to Influencers
It shouldn’t come as any surprise that there’s a lot of rubbish online, including things like blogs masquerading as news websites but publishing nothing more than wild fantasies that are completely disconnected from reality. Although people enjoy viral content primarily as a way to be entertained, that doesn’t mean that credibility isn’t still important. One of the most effective ways to enhance credibility is to mention your main influencers and cite your sources. Don’t be afraid to link to influential people and content elsewhere on the Internet in order to start building up a reputation as an authority figure.
#9. Publish Long-Form Content
Although shorter articles ranging from 300-500 words do still have their place, a lot of lazy marketers rely on short-form content for little more than increasing their standing in the search engines. However, unless accompanied by lots of great images in the form of a slideshow-type article, such content is often too short to truly offer anything of value. Studies have shown that longer pieces are around 50% more likely to be heavily shared, so you should be aiming for at least 1000 words per post. At the same time, it’s important to present your work in such a way that it’s easy to scan and follow, since you don’t want readers getting bogged down and distracted.
#10. Get the Timing Right
Crafting excellent content only represents half of the battle. There’s also the right time and place to think about. Turn up too late to the game, and your content will never take first place, so it’s important to pounce on trends and new ideas as soon as they become apparent. You can follow the latest trends by exploring websites such as Google Trends or Buzz Zumo if you’re looking for ideas on what’s popular right now in certain niches. However, it’s also important to publish your content at the right time. Although the rules vary by industry, a good guideline in most situations is to publish between 8 and 12 PM when social shares tend to be at their highest.
Final Words
Viral media is what builds the world’s most successful blogs and digital marketing campaigns, but it’s rarely easy to stand out among the competition on such a level. Sometimes it happens by chance but, by challenging people’s assumptions about a particular topic and capitalizing on the latest trends and elements of surprise, you’ll be much better equipped to craft and publish content that has viral potential.
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