The race to create viral content is a perpetual one. People consume a great deal of information and are always hungry for interesting, informative or innovative content.
As more and more consumers and potential consumers spend more and more time online, the race to get eyeballs takes myriad forms. One of the most effective ways to make an impression on customers is via great content.
Creating Great Content
Great content has a few essential qualities. It is authentic and useful and it is often generated by industry leaders and is actionable. Being a thought leader is obviously a dynamic process where your previous work makes you an authority as lots of people find it valuable and that translates into your work acquiring certain amount of intrinsic value.
Such content has a leg up when it comes to the race of viral content.
Creating Viral Content
There are many ways to create viral content. When it’s authored by a known expert, the chances of that content going viral based on the reputation and authority of the author are higher. However, it’s not a sure thing by any stretch of the imagination. Authorities can grow quickly outdated if they don’t keep up with the changes in their particular field where they are supposed to have expertise. Old experts can be quickly supplanted by new experts.
The Revolutionary or the Contrarian
Content that provides a new or fresh perspective often goes viral. Remember when a Wall St. wrote about why he quit his job at a famous Wall St. institution and how viral it became. Or the billionaire who write about how billionaires like him are out of touch with reality and living on borrowed time, as it were. Or, Russell Brand’s call to revolution.
People are looking for novelty and in a time of crisis, articles that provide new insights will get a lot of traction and make them go viral. But creating such content is a rare and unusual thing.
The Promise
There are more assured ways of creating viral content such as those that promise specific results. All those books and articles about “Four Hour Workout to a Great Body” and so on are testament to the effectiveness of this content strategy.
The Perennial Option
Lists of Top 10 and Top 100 books, leaders, influential persons, places to visit, recipes, things to do, cars, etc. have been there as long as magazines have been there. The old-fashioned magazine writers were writing them earlier and the online successors to those magazines continue to churn them out with predictable regularity. The popularity of lists never fades.
The “Best of” Content
Curated lists are immensely useful and immensely popular and they remain one sure shot way to create viral content. Who can resist a list of “50 Top Funny People on Twitter”? Variations on this theme include “List of 100 Greatest Books of All Time” or “50 Best CEO Blogs” and so on.
As the amount of information grows exponentially, people want to remain “in the know” without getting deluged by the avalanche of information.
Pop culture tie-ins improve the chances of such content going viral even more. Lists such as “50 Best Movies of All Time” or “20 Best Scenes From Bond Movies” will get guaranteed social shares.
Unusual Content
Content that is out of the ordinary is sure to grab eyeballs — when a chef dies from a snake bite or an animal saves another animal or baby. It could be about a “miraculous” escape such as a motorcyclist hitting a car and then landing on top of the car after somersaulting or it could be about a grieving elephant or one shedding tears of joy after being freed from captivity after 50 years.
Viral Videos
There are no formulas for creating viral videos. Many people try and only a few succeed in this endeavor. The successful viral videos tend to be clever — such as a mash up of Game of Thrones and House of Cards — or funny. A different take on a dour airline safety video or a video about the Toughest Job in The World or 20 Strangers Kissing designed to tug at the emotional cores of people are a few of the ways that people have gone to create viral videos.
These are just a few of the ways to create viral content and the above is certainly not an exhaustive list.
SEO Tips to Make Great Content Go Viral
In the age of social media, the best way to make content go viral as well as to earn SEO chops is to get it popular on social media. Once content becomes popular on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest and/or the other social media options, Google gives the content greater weight in search rankings.
While you cannot ensure that content shared on social media will surely go viral, there are a few tricks to remember.
Social Media Sharing Tricks
It’s important to have a plan regarding how and when you share content on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere. The timing is important — people tend to scroll through their Twitter TL in the morning or just after reaching office and then again during lunch hour. It makes sense to share content during those blocks of time when people are most likely to see their timelines.
With Facebook, people tend to log in frequently during the day. One difference between Facebook and Twitter is that while people may not log into Twitter during the weekend, they spend more time on Facebook during the weekend than during weekdays.
Now that hashtags — essentially, a Twitter creation/invention — are there in almost all the different social media, content should be accompanied by relevant hashtags.
To hold the attention of social media (SM) users, the posts will need to have emotional appeal, such as generating a sense of amazement, astonishment and so on. Humor is a perennial favorite sure to get the attention of SM users.
Social media posts on Facebook need to be accompanied by images (of the right size) as visual content easily attracts more attention than non-visual (or textual) content. Once the SM content has the emotional appeal and social currency (which will make the person who shares it look good), you can rest assured that your SM posts will be Liked, Shared and/or Retweeted.
Technical aspects such as your blog posts having semantic URLs will help the SEO character of the posts. With any modern content management system (CMS) or blogging platform such as WordPress and Blogger, that is essentially taken care of by the platform. Be sure to give a catchy title to your blog post and that will make it share-worthy as well as the URL of the post.
Conclusion
As long as you keep churning out interesting, valuable and fresh content and promote it on social media in a smart way, your target audience will flock to your content. The content game is a long-term game. It’s not about selling products but about creating brand awareness and pulling potential customers into the marketing funnel.
But content marketing with great content is free and has long-term SEO value to boot making it a key marketing strategy for most brands and digital marketers in the world today.