How To Go Viral Right Away?
If only someone could devise a sure-shot technique to go viral right away. Although this does not mean it's impossible, quoting the age-old phrase hammered into our heads, ‘try till you succeed’. Yes, that’s the secret main ingredient of this process. Whereas one should never forget that content is the KING. Your content has to be the protagonist of your story.
Viral content is a modern mystery. It's anything that is shared widely by millions of people, and brands across different platforms. It mainly comprises of a great strategy, timing, an ounce of luck, and picking the nerve of your audience. Although at times you may never know what can actually catch your audience’s eye. For example, an actress winking and becoming a national crush, a banana stuck on a wall, weird celebrity red carpet looks, funny reactions, or even a song about kachha badaam (raw almonds)! And that’s also how the meme culture was introduced. Creating memes is now an actual profession and memers are doing a great job in my opinion. There are an inexplicable number of meme pages on the internet which are now a part of everyone’s life.
It's almost as if it's a second language people now converse with. If you have been turned into a meme, you are viral! Know in your heart that you are silently reaching every mobile screen on earth.
There are a plethora of social platforms where you can post your content like Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, Youtube, TikTok etc, but Instagram is probably the one platform that can make you a star. It is a given that the Instagram team is leaving no stone unturned to make itself a profitable platform for creators all over the world. Its constant efforts to add new features to the platform change the algorithm with every release. It's no longer just a photo-sharing platform, it is so much more than that. It's now a community-building app where you build your community and they are the ones who can make your content go viral.
Quoting my initial observation again, your content or story is the king. It's the most powerful weapon you can have on social media. People will share anything that is relatable to them. Draft your content in such a way that it's relatable, relevant, and highly shareable. It does not have to be something from an Astrophysics book; it has to be simple, and easily accessible. Get creative, get weird. The covid pandemic gave birth to so many viral content creators, wherein all they did was sit at home and get creative/funny in order to entertain people. People are spending more time on social media than ever. So much that even their phones now have a feature of monitoring their screen time. On the flip side, their attention span is also reducing more than ever.
The second most important thing is to know your audience, what they expect from you, and what they do not expect from you. Either can work in your favour provided you create strategically. Have an explicit point of view as to what you want your audience to feel, laugh, cry, be angry, excited or trigger their nostalgia. Knowing your audience’s touch points can be highly beneficial to you in pushing the right content. This may take some time but will help you in creating engaging content. Whatever you do, be consistent. Nothing will come easy, leave alone going viral. Never expect your first post to be an instant hit, you will need to build your audience first with regular content. And you never know, in no time some content might click with the people and make you viral!
Next, you should pan your attention on making your content visual and fun. Posting content that is visually attractive and aesthetic can be your key to fame. When people watch something they find entertaining, by default they tend to share it with their friends. A video will always speak a thousand words more than a photograph. Use the video format for your content, add trendy music to it, a crisp copy, and maybe subtitles to it and watch it fly. Don’t forget to keep it short considering their attention span of microseconds. Start with a bang and end quickly. Also, posting your content across various channels and not just sticking to one platform can help in boosting your engagement rate.
From experience with viral campaigns run by me, my logic has always been to let the content perform on its own organically, I don’t believe in paid marketing to make it viral, as it holds no guarantee to make it work for you. The idea is to create something weird consistently every time and with the all-time changing algorithm, it will click. Make use of all the features of the respective platforms you’re posting on and hop on what is trending, then add your own twist to it and give it an edge.
The final step is to measure your content performance. You will find a number of sites on the internet which will help you map the statistics of your content and record the performance. Measuring the success of your every content will help you understand what your audience actually responds to and what they don’t. With this data, you can plan your future content and alter it accordingly. Once you find your niche, keep working on it and exploring different avenues to approach it every time.
The world of digital marketing is super competitive and ever-evolving. With so many content creators creating content and wishing to go viral, it can seem daunting to stand out with your content but with the above steps, I am sure you will pass with flying colors. This has worked for me, my clients, and my campaigns for sure, hoping this works for you too.
With this, you may become viral soon. See you on the other side.
