5 Smart Strategies to Make Your Content Go Viral

This is the content marketing era…

Every one of us is busy in creating valuable content for our target audience. From my point of view, I intend to create content that can help to solve my customers’ problems. When I produce content, I make sure to add a lot of value so that it can help my customers in growing their respective businesses.

But my work doesn’t’ end just by creating the content. Creating content is one part of the job. The other part is to make content go viral.

How do you create content that will go viral?

This is a very important question. Many of us are trying to figure out how to make our content more sharable, and get more people to see it.

I have concluded two things.

First, you should know what  type of content will go viral. This makes it easier for you to target the content in a manner that gets more shares.

Second, you should adopt some smart strategies to make your content go viral. In this blog, I will tell you in detail what I do in order to help make my content go viral.

Let’s start with the first part:

What type of content goes viral?

Imagine yourself scanning  social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, etc.) Have a think about which posts you would be likely to share? On which posts would you leave personal comments?

After analyzing the post sharing pattern, you will get to realize that you share the content that seems to be most:

• Interesting
• Exorbitant
• Humorous
• Positive
• Emotional
• Cheerful
• Trendy
• Informative
• Helpful
• Motivating
• Inspiring

You do so because you feel happy after reading such posts. Some posts resonate with your personal and professional experiences and you instantly hit the like button. Some posts reflect reality and make you want to hit the share button, while some posts are so exciting that you have to leave a comment about it.

Sometimes we feel unmotivated in our daily lives, but what can energize us are posts that actually inspire us to work even harder at achieving our goals or that motivate us to continue our efforts in fulfilling our dreams.

So basically, this is what you and I do daily on our social media accounts. We don’t need to go too far to get the answer about how to make content that goes viral. We just need to analyze our preferences and social media sharing pattern. This analysis will help you produce content that will go viral.

Social media sharing analysis

My analysis suggests that people love the content that is inspiring, humorous, emotional or motivating. They tend to like, comment and share the posts that inspire them to continue their efforts, or achieve something bigger in their lives.  They love to share this information with others so it can help to reduce pain or motivate them to keep striving hard to reach their goals.

So, you should really work on producing content that people like. Try to produce content that is emotional, inspiring, humorous and motivating. People also prefer that content that is real. Don’t produce content just for the sake of doing it. Understand the real worth of your content. Understand the fact that good content can actually influence the customers’ minds. Good content can give you potential leads and help you increase sales.

This valuable content can make it easier for your audience to understand the real essence, meaning, and ideology of your product or service. It can even work in persuading people about using your product or service. You have the power to change the lives of people through your posted content.

Try to mention the problems of your customers along with the best solutions. That’s what they look for. Stating their problems makes them feel that you care for them and you can help by presenting the best solutions to help make them happy.

Creating such content will enable you to get maximum likes, comments, and shares by the users. This is the right time to realize the fact that with influencing and inspiring content you can create wonders!!!

As discussed above, there are two sections of the answer to the most asked question: “how to make content go viral”. To make your content go viral, make sure you produce valuable content (that has been discussed above) for your target audience which really helps them in growing their business and solving their problems.

Once you have completed producing this valuable content, go for the 5 smart strategies below that can help to improve the reach of the content and make it go viral.

 5 Smart Strategies to Make Your Content Go Viral

Now I will tell you about the best strategies that I have been using over the years to makeg my content go viral.

Let us get into some detailed information.

1. Weekly social media posts

To help your content go viral, it is very important that you build customer trust. Once they believe in your post, they will eventually get interested in reading all your content.

For example, we post 5 times daily on our social media accounts. The content has to be relevant to your audience and customers because if you share irrelevant information, your social media followers may unfollow you! The key to gaining your customer’s trust is to provide them the latest information at the right time and in the right form.

So, what we do is share 5 posts on our social media accounts (Twitter and LinkedIn) daily. Our main concern while sharing the posts is that our audience should learn about personal grooming, sales training, getting leads, explainer videos, video marketing, SEO, online marketing, digital marketing, and entrepreneurship. Also, we try to share the latest updates regarding our industry and technology so our users stay informed about updates and the latest happenings around the globe.

You can see below how our social media posts look:

And this…

And this…

We become successful in gaining our customers’ trust because we try to fulfill the informational needs of our target market and provide them with useful information they can act on.

We use the daily 5th post to share our blogs, like this one,  on our social media accounts. This is the first real effort to gain the trust of the customer by providing them with the latest information and then we share with them our very detailed blog so that they can drill down even further for valuable information.

2. Motivational sayings

Recently we have started to share motivational and inspiring sayings on our social media accounts based on the observation that I discussed with you above.

What we do is we research and seek out  inspiring and motivational quotes that can help excite and motivate our users to work hard to achieve their respective life and career goals.

After we find the perfect quote, we design it on Canva. This is also a tactic to help gain our customers’ trust. These posts help our followers realize that we actually care for them and provide them with inspiration in the form of these motivational quotes.

Our posts consisting motivational or inpsring quotes appear like this:

But here is the key for making your content go viral. Once you get the customer’s trust, you can drive them to read your content. How? Well, it works like this:

You can see in the image that firslty the quote appears and at the the bottom of the picture, our brand logo appears. Now this is one of the keys to get your content to go viral. After getting to appreciate your quotes, your users will get interested to read your content as they now hold the belief that you are  a credible source of valuable content. Out of curiosity, they would go to your website to see what else you have to offer them.

Once they visit the website, the power of your valuable content starts to pay off. If you have crafted this valuable content properly (persuading, convincing, influencing, problem solving, informative, trendy, emotional, humorous) then you can get qualified leads from it.

3. Sharing the blog (tagging the relevant brand)

Okay, so you are writing and drafting blogs, but you might not be sharing and spreading it as much as you could be, you are not maximizing the power of content. Let me tell you what you can do in this regard.

If you are writing a blog consider using this tactic:

• Write up the blog
• Try to mention some of the big brands in the blog concerning the blog topic
• Once you have published the blog,  share it on your social media accounts
• Tag the respective brand or company in the post to be shared on social media

These tips will enable you to increase your blog message reach to the largest number of people. After you tag the brand/company/client name in the social media post, your blog post will automatically be shown on the social media accounts of your brand/company/clients.

Can you imagine its impact? Do you realize how massive an impact that can have? Your blog post will be shown to the targeted audiences of  your brand/company/clients. Your message will be quickly conveyed to the right audience,  presenting you with qualified leads in the future!

Remember, social media has a lot of power in it. Here are two important things you need to do first:

1. Create valuable content
2. Maximize content power through social media influence

We do the same for our blog posts. Let me show you how we do it:

4. LinkedIn post

Another great way of making your content go viral is publishing it on LinkedIn.

But again, before doing that, make sure that you are doing all you can to take advantage of LinkedIn for branding and marketing purposes.

What do I mean by making best use of LinkedIn? Let me give you a quick run down.

Best use of LinkedIn for branding and marketing

When creating an account on LinkedIn:

• Post a good display picture (use the brand logo image in case it’s a company page, or your personal picture in case it’s a private LinkedIn account).
• Write up a professional summary. In it, include information about yourself, your work, your job, your job description, what you are good at and what you love to do regarding your work.
• State your education in the education section. The latest awards and certificates.
• Add your position, such as marketing executive, consultant, CEO, content writer, etc.
• Add your brand logo.
• Your organization.
• Your skills.
• Your interests.
• Include the start and stop date of your jobs.
• Add your experience.
• Get yourself connected with other groups (industry relevant).
• Participate in the group discussions actively.
• Share your blog links in the group discussions.

The points mentioned above will actually help you in optimizing your LinkedIn profile which is so necessary from a branding and marketing point of view. I say so because with whom ever you are going to talk with (business conversations), the individual can locate  you on LinkedIn. He/she will browse your account and in a few minutes, will decide if they  should talk to you or not. So, if you have your LinkedIn account properly optimized, you can actually make people want to have a conversation with you.

An optimized LinkedIn profile can be like this:

Again,  remember that social media is massive and very powerful. You just need to realize the value and impact and take advantage of it.

Once you are done with the optimisation of your LinkedIn profile, start adding industry related and like minded professionals on your LinkedIn account. Identify your target audience first.

In further addressing your LinedIn account,  make sure that you add people who are relevant to your industry. For instance, we are a video production company, so we add people on LinedIn who are related to our industry. We add entrepreneurs, online marketing consultants and executives, digital marketing specialists, media agency executives, recruiters, SEO experts, bloggers, writers, speakers, authors, sales trainers, sales persons, inbound and outbound marketers, voice over actors, illustrators, Script writers, animators etc.

The point of adding these people is to increase the reach of your content and brand awareness.

Creating content isn’t the end of the job, it starts from there but it ends by making it available to relevant people who find the information useful and helpful. Basically, my team and I work for them. We identify their problems and try to come up with the best solutions.

Our content would be useless if we didn’t share it widely with the people who are actually looking for it.

LinkedIn gives all of us another good channel of making our content go viral.

It gives us the “publish a post” option.

What you can do is after optimizing your LinkedIn profile and adding the most relevant people to it, you can start publishing your blogs on  your LinkedIn account. Some tips:

• Display detailed information to the users
• There is no word limit restriction
• Focus on providing targeted and useful information to the users
• Create a very attractive blog heading
• Embed a good blog image for the LinedIn post
• LinkedIn recommends to use blog image of 700X400 as it looks sharper
• Use a blog image that gives the users an idea about the blogs, such as one that can convey your business or blog topic to the users in a few seconds
• Encourage the users to add their comments to the blog
• Ask them to address specific concepts on the blog or the topic discussed in the blog
• Ask the users for their helpful suggestions on the topic or their future input in continuing the conversation
• At the end, present some “about the author” information.
• Add your website links and blog links to the introduction (if users like the information they will definitely go and check the website)
• Tag the post with the industry trending tags
• When finished, just click on the Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter symbols and share the post on all these forums

5. Guest blogging

One of the best ways of making content go viral is to look for guest blogging opportunities so you can extend your message’s reach and that of your brand.

Here’s how you can do it:

• Search for guest blogging websites (industry relevant)
• Check the Domain authority of the website (prefer the websites that have DA greater than your website)
• Check for the content relevancy
• After checking all this, if you feel like applying on the website for guest blogging, go through the website blog section and the type of content
• Read through the content completely
• Apply online for guest blogging (different websites have different policies, some ask for a blog outline, some ask for your blog samples that have not been posted yet)
• If you get the approval from the desired website, start working on the blog as soon as possible
• Focus on providing the most relevant information to users

Guest blogging gives you a great opportunity of sharing your valuable information to the traffic coming to that website.

And that’s it…

If you create helpful content for your audience and distribute it using the 5 strategies in this post, it will increase your chances of sending it viral.

Guest Author: Mehroz Khan is an Entrepreneur and Co-founder at Videoexplainers-Video production company. He is a blogger, strategist, social media marketing specialist and growth strategist. His expertise includes marketing and video production. He regularly writes on Videoexplainers where he talks about explainer video, its various business advantages (increased website conversions, high sales, qualified leads, and facilitating customers’ understanding level) and the massive video impact on the customers. Follow Mehroz on Twitter: @mehrozanwer, connect with him on LinkedIn: Mehroz Khan or email him at mehroz@videoexplainers.com.

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