Content that goes viral on social media brings millions of customers with minimum investment. Marketers always search for different ways how to go viral on social media. Today most customers are on social media. According to the latest PEW study, more than 2.5 billion people use at least one social media platform, and this figure is increasing rapidly with each passing day.
All the brands target to capture customers through the platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. However, due to immense competition, many businesses find it challenging to understand the strategy required how to go viral on social media.
To understand the trend of how to go viral on social media, brands need to consider the given situation:
Suppose two target audiences relate to the content shared on social media. In that case, there is a high chance of its virality if this content reaches a considerable number of customers. If you are struggling to understand the trends of how to go viral on social media, focus on the points listed below to create highly engaging content.
How To Go Viral On Social Media
Your success through social media marketing campaigns depends on your strategy and content quality. To make a lasting impression and encourage the audience to take action, you must follow the steps mentioned below:
1. Understand your target audience
Understanding your audience is the primary step to developing content that will help you in your quest for how to go viral on social media. All the viral social media posts connect directly to the customers by understanding their preferences.
To get success on social media, business marketers need to create a marketing persona which is a representation of the target audience. The persona includes the psychographic and demographic information of the target audience. In addition, it also covers the audience’s content preference and social media behaviour. All the listed information helps markets develop a content strategy for social media.
This step for how to go viral on social media also requires marketers to speak with the potential customers and understand their preferences and crucial factors they consider before making a purchase.
2. Promote your brand through appropriate platform
There are multiple social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. All the platforms are equally good and have billions of customers worldwide. To understand how to go viral on social media, you must select one platform and design your marketing campaign accordingly.
If you want to market your brand by knowing how to go viral on social media like Facebook, you need to use a high-quality image that is either captured with a camera or digitally created using graphic design tools and add a compelling tagline. Many brands also use Facebook to go viral through video content. On the other hand, if you aim to know how to go viral on social media like LinkedIn, it is advisable to create a well-drafted article to engage the target audience.
3. Create interesting content for high engagement
Creating highly engaging marketing content helps you rank higher on your follower’s pages. Most platforms use social media algorithms to rank the content based on the chances of customer engagement. How to go viral on social media depends on your content’s quality. Moreover, the content that engages any user is automatically amplified to another user. This way, the algorithm helps in the virality of content. Manual share is another way that contributes to making content viral. However, for this method as well, the engagement and preference of customers play an essential role.
4. Time of releasing a content
How to go viral on social media highly depends on the time of release. Since the social media platforms rank content according to their algorithm, which is based on the chances of engagement, the time of release plays a vital role in deciding the virality of the content. Therefore, to increase the reach of your business through social media posts, it is necessary that you design your content keeping the trend and upcoming events in mind.
5. Go viral through advertisements
Many small organisations face hurdles while trying how to go viral on social media through content marketing. In this situation, brands can count on paid ads that boost reach and visibility on social media platforms. These ads are crafted for a specific group of most influential users. When these users share the ads with their followers, they broadcast the brands to a broad spectrum of audiences. If you are searching for an economical way to go viral on social media, then advertisements can be the best solution for you.
6. Collaborate with social media influencers
Social media influences have a huge base of followers who tend to invest in almost everything suggested by their idol. In today’s scenario, social media marketing is growing rapidly because it helps businesses capture a huge target audience. Moreover, this marketing strategy succeeds about 95% of the time. Therefore, new businesses who want to know ‘how to get viral on social media’ must consider taking help from social media influencers to increase their reach in a short time.
7. Analyse performance to design better campaigns next time
Social media offers analytical tools that provide information on your brand’s performance for each marketing campaign. These tools help understand how to go viral on social media and what factors work to get your target audience’s attention. In addition, these analyses help decide what you need to include and exclude in future marketing campaigns to improve your chances of how to go viral on social media.
8. Encourage call to action
If you create your content merely by focusing on how to go viral on social media, you can not meet your business goals. Therefore, you must look towards creating content that encourages your target audience to make a move that is beneficial for your business.
Brand awareness is one aspect of marketing, but a call to action is a much more significant and crucial aspect to keep your business thriving in the market. All the big brands create highly engaging marketing campaigns that target how to go viral on social media and persuade customers to make a purchase.
9. Get featured on news channel
A viral social marketing campaign often captures the attention of mainstream media. If the message and content of your brand’s viral campaign are newsworthy, it can help your business get national attention. Therefore, if you’re wondering how to go viral on social media, you must consider creating content that is worth capturing the attention of the target audience as well as news channels to get featured in mainstream media headlines.
10. Create unique marketing content
Customers are dynamic and quickly get bored watching similar types of content. To keep getting their attention and keep them coming back to you, it is crucial to think out of the box and offer them something unique every time. The biggest secret of how to go viral on social media depends on how creative your content is and how well you incorporate every piece of information about your product in a concise and engaging manner.
How To Go Viral On Social Media
1. P&G Distance Dance campaign
During the pandemic, when youngsters were not abiding by the social distancing norm, P&G decided to launch a distance dance campaign after discussing the matter with Ohio Governor Mike DeWine. P&G collaborated with Tik-Tok influencer Charli D’Amelio to do a dance challenge. This campaign went viral and influenced 1.7 million youngsters to stay at home and complete this challenge in the first week.
2. Apple ShotoniPhone campaign
In March of 2015, Apple started its ShotoniPhone campaign, which is still thriving to engage its customers. The campaign primarily aimed at people sharing their experiences by posting pictures clicked on their iPhones. To date, it has generated more than 21.9 million posts.
This example shows how to go viral on social media using user-generated content.
3. Friskies Dear Kitten campaign
This marketing campaign shows us how to go viral on social media by creating funny content. In this video advertisement, Friskies used a human conversation between a young kitten and an old cat. The conversation quickly grabbed the customer’s attention and made this campaign a hit for the brand.
Conclusion
Social media marketing campaigns require strategic planning and timely execution to get effective results. However, as the first step, you need to understand your target audiences and their preferences to increase engagement. Marketers should also use social media analytics to thoroughly understand their marketing campaign performance and design future campaigns to increase traffic.
