5 tips to make your Social Media content go viral

Viral content is the type of information that people want to share because it is valuable, informative and timely.

Getting your content to go viral will benefit your website by incoming links, more traffic and visitors, comments on your articles and an increased reputation from your audience that you can create quality content. Generally viral content is spread through social media sites.

Today I will discuss some basic principles that you should consider if you want your content to be viral and spread across social networking sites.

1. Headline/ Title

First thing you need to do is make sure the headline of your article is ‘high impact’ and straight to the point. You don’t want to leave your users second guessing what your article might be about. You need to create value in the headline.

Using a title that starts with a number is a sure way to attract eyeballs. Whilst an ‘old trick’ it still does work.

For example the headline of this article – 5 tips to make your Social Media content go viral makes a user aware they are going to get valuable content and tips just from reading the title.

2. Give away high value content

This is an important aspect of making your content go viral. Give away information that your users will find useful and want to share with their network.

Don’t make your article too long, try keeping it short and concise so your message can spread quickly and it doesn’t take long to digest.

3. Make your content about your users

Viral content isn’t about how great you or your business is, viral content is about how you can help your users with their everyday business and needs. Craft your whole article around your users and it will be more likely to be shared.

4. Do your research

See what is on the front page of Digg, Reddit and Delicious. These sites show you the most viral content on the internet. Also look at high traffic blogs and see their most popular posts. Get into a habit of doing this regularly so you know what is trending on the internet. Looking at the Twitter trending topics is not really appropriate for determining what’s generally viral on the internet.

5. Hit Social Media sites with a Bang

If you are serious about making your content go viral, you will need some help from your network if you are not a big established brand. Create a strategy so when you do publish your content your close network will help you promote your article on twitter. This could simply be emailing 50 of your closest business colleagues and getting them to Tweet your article when it is published.

If each of them has 300 followers then your message is instantly being broadcasted to 15,000 twitter users and you have a good chance this will be shared even further.

Conclusion

It’s important to note that if your content goes viral it may not always an immediate reaction from your users. Sometimes it will take considerable time for your article to get traction – I’ve found articles of mine over 1 year old that still gets shared over and over.

Also creating viral content is not something you can simply ‘think up’. If you are sitting around trying to brainstorm ideas then the battle is already over.  They key is to look at other content on the internet produced by others that has been legitimately shared, get inspiration from  this and see what unique content you can bring to the table.