How To Create Viral Social Media Content That Will Grow Your Business

Intro

Have you ever heard the saying, “Attention is the new currency”?

With more than 5 billion people using the internet worldwide, brands and businesses are all searching for unique and exciting ways to increase their online presence with the help of social media.

However, many of them are mainly using paid social media advertising to capture people’s attention… and falling short.

As advertisements have become too saturated, boring, and unoriginal these days, most viewers would just tune them out the moment they see them. That is why businesses are shifting to organic content for their marketing, but it remains a huge question mark on whether they will go viral at the end of the day.

So how can you break out of this sea of content, and re-capture your audience’s attention?

In this article, I will share with you tried and tested strategies that you can implement in your marketing and outreach efforts to create viral social media content.

1. Know Who Your Audience Are

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Before you go about making your first viral content, you first need to know who your target audience is, or what kind of demographic you are trying to market to.

Find out who your audience is, what they like, and how old they are. Next, find out what kind of content they like, share, and engage with the most, and what is going viral in their space.

Each social media platform has its unique target audience from different generations. Some platforms are also designed to cater to a specific group of audience. Using the information you have gathered, you can evaluate and decide which social media platform(s) would be best to reach out to your target audience. For example, TikTok is great for targeting users between the ages of 16 to 34, while Discord is the go-to platform if you are targeting gamers or specific interest groups.

As the saying goes, knowing is half the battle. It is equally important to see what your competitors have been doing and analyze what content has gone viral for them. From there, you can level up and create something much more engaging, effective, and relatable.

2. The Idea Of Giving

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One common thing that all viral content holds is the idea of giving. Whether is it to entertain your audience, inspire them, or impress them with something new, you always want your content to value add and reward your audience with something in exchange for their time. This allows your business to build more trust and connection with your audience too.

Start by figuring out how you can introduce and market your product or service naturally by evoking an emotion that will engage with your audience and encourage them to share.

Take this example of a company selling basketballs.

Instead of a regular promotional video with the basketball at the center of focus, the company could invite passersby on the street to participate in a basketball challenge, and film and produce a video on the experience. The rules of this challenge are simple: whoever scores a goal with the basketball wins a prize of $100. However, the catch is that it is a very tough goal to score. Having an incentive motivates passersby to take part, and this challenge may also introduce potential customers (e.g. sports lovers) – both offline and online – to the basketball you are trying to market. Content like this helps generate excitement and engagement because it triggers the audience’s curiosity.

Although there is no specific mention of the product, the basketball that is used for the challenge becomes an organic product placement in the video.

With this approach, there is a higher probability of the video going viral and helping to increase brand awareness without hard selling.

3. Importance Of The Hook

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People have very short attention spans these days, and a good hook will determine whether they will stay or swipe.

The hook is the most crucial part of any content. A good hook can grab your viewers’ attention and give them a reason that your content is worth watching, reading, or listening to. It can make or break your marketing efforts and that is the power of a hook.

A good hook should be clear, concise, and easy to follow. Of course, it should also be appealing to your audience. From making use of a “shock” factor to sharing interesting information or creating dialogue, images, and more that promote curiosity, there are many different ways you can design a hook.

The possibilities are endless and trust me when I say that anything can be used as a hook to draw in your audience. For example, an enticing thumbnail on YouTube or YouTube Shorts is a good way to draw in audiences and one that creators often use! For an article, an attention-grabbing headline would do the trick, while an image post should be accompanied by a relatable tagline.

A hook is the first step to setting a piece of content up for virality so it should never be overlooked.

4. Create A Buzz

The algorithm of a platform plays a huge role in making your content go viral, or not. While different platforms use different types of algorithms to determine what rises to the top, one thing that they all favor is human interaction.

**Human interaction is always the key element to gaining virality. **

In other words, this refers to the engagement you receive on your posts, such as comments, likes, and shares. The more organic engagements you receive for your post(s), the higher the likelihood for the algorithm to favor and boost your content.

To turn this to your advantage, ideate on things you can do to create a buzz in your comments section or encourage someone to share your content. As a start, you can hold giveaways for attractive prizes or experiences.

Alternatively, you can do something out of the ordinary purposefully, to get the viewers to comment about it. This is best explained through an example. Let’s use the example of the basketball challenge we just talked about earlier.

While the challenge is happening, you can place someone far behind dancing with basketballs. Yes, very random, I know. Although it seems out of place and does not directly relate to the basketball challenge, the audience will be inclined to comment about it, and that will create conversations in the comments section. This tactic will help increase the number of comments and encourage the algorithm to boost your content further.

5. Best Time To Upload

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Timing plays a huge role in getting a viral hit. Publishing content when most of your target audience is asleep or inactive on social media can kill your content instantly, even if they are really good.

To set your content up for success, businesses and marketers should always do prior research on the habits of their target audience, and understand when they are most active on social media for maximum outreach, opportunity, and results. For example, posting content meant for teenagers during school hours will end up being counterproductive. You would have a much more significant outreach if you had posted the same content after school hours instead.

6. Keep Posting Consistently

Oftentimes, businesses and marketers would stop posting content maybe just after a week’s worth of effort, and immediately consider their marketing strategy a failure.

This is a BIG mistake.

An overnight viral does not happen all the time. Growing an online social media presence takes time and patience, and having consistency is key to producing consistent results.

Keeping that in mind, think of going viral as a numbers game. The higher the number of content that is being published, the higher the chances for your page to go viral.

Posting consistently has other pros as well. First, it helps to build your brand reputation. Secondly, it helps to establish your account and affirm your content as a reliable source. Additionally, the algorithm may work in your favor to push out your content even more.

7. Track Your Content’s Analytics

This is a step that most people neglect. Most businesses and marketers seem to think that their job ends after the content is published, but the truth is the opposite!

Many social media platforms provide real-time analytics data that you can use to your advantage. Apart from the standard number of views, likes, and shares, some go even more in-depth to provide statistics on the impressions-to-engagement ratio, the common drop-off point, and more. Learn from these numbers to prepare for a more effective approach in your next marketing campaign.

I have learned in my content creation journey that going viral and sustaining it is a neverending cycle of mistakes and improvements. Do not see mistakes as a failure, but see them as room for improvement so that you can create something even stronger, better, and more effective the next round.

Final Thoughts

Great! Now you hold the secrets to creating viral social media content that can forge stronger engagement with your audience, build your brand and boost its awareness.

While no one can give a hundred percent confirmation that a post can go viral, these tips and tricks will certainly increase your chances.

Just remember! Whenever your content is not getting the traffic you had hoped to see, start by analyzing what could have caused it and go over these steps again to see if there is a particular area that is falling short. Most of the time, the answers can be found within your plan itself.