By Karine Dutemple
October 12, 2017
10 tips to create viral content for your company
Particularly useful for promoting your services and products, or to highlight your expertise, your content greatly depends on its popularity to ensure the expansion of your business.
But, how do we create viral content?
1. Identify your target audience
In order for your content to become viral, you have to reach a target audience. To do this, an analysis is necessary. It is possible to draw a portrait of your target audience by focusing on several elements, the most important of which are:
- The age category to which it belongs;
- Education;
- Income;
- Mode of purchase (impulse or reflective);
- Family situation.
Once all of these target audience characteristics are defined, you will be able to determine the nature of the information that is likely to capture your audience, as well as the offers that are most likely to result in a sale or increase of your conversion rates.
Keep in mind that an interested public will be much more tempted to share your content if it feels as if your company took the consumer into consideration.
The idea behind this is above all, to rely on anticipation in order to base all of your content marketing strategy on the actual behaviours and expectations of your potential customers.
2. Diversify your content
Nothing can be as depressing as a lack of surprise from company publications. Avoid letting your customers sink into boredom and no longer consulting the content you put online by making sure you diversify.
This diversification implies the need to balance content between visual (images and videos) and purely informative. Know that short videos are particularly popular because they offer a touch of entertainment while providing concise and relevant information.
Looking for a content creation expert to create viral content for your company?
Contact us so we can refer you to specialists in our network
3. Become a social network pro: the best place for content to become viral
In order to optimize the full potential of social networks, make sure to deepen your knowledge of each one. The latter all have features that allow you to make your content viral. Facebook, for example, offers you the opportunity to launch contests and thus encourage a large number of users to share content.
LinkedIn, for its part, gives you the chance to create a discussion group and choose a surrounding theme for which exchanges will take place. Consequently, it will be easier for you to target content that interests your audience and get a better audience reach out of it.
In order to increase the virality of your content, remember the great potential of hashtags. By choosing popular hashtags in your area of expertise, you’ll ensure that your content is easily shaped by other users. In a second step, this one will obviously be easily shareable via the targeted keywords. Therefore, you will considerably increase the rate of sharing of your publications by making judicious use of hashtags.
It is also possible to promote your publications with social sharing buttons, which you should ideally position at the bottom of articles. Keep in mind that several tools such as Drupal, WordPress and Joomla make it possible to integrate these additions at the end of articles, without too much trouble.
Want to know more about the possibility of increasing virality of your content through social media? Our article “What are the best social networks to increase your company's visibility?” will provide you with more information about it.
4- Do not underestimate the impact of visual content
If informational content is of the utmost importance in the interest of publication, note that images also have a considerable influence. Indeed, it is imperative to know that content which is partly visual is more likely to be shared than those who lack a visual element. Not only does the image add value to your content, it also helps to aerate the text as well as adding a nice touch of colour to a publication that might otherwise be dense and bland.
Videos, on the other hand, also have great potential for creating viral content. Interactive and more capable of conveying an emotion, the videos also benefit from the addition of sound to keep the attention of its audience.
5- Write positive content
As much as possible, it is best to focus on positive emotions. Indeed they are more likely to be shared because they easily arouse public enthusiasm. Following this recommendation, let us say that a touch of humour is always welcome. It shows your creativity while giving a light and pleasant tone to the publications that it’s suitable for. However, be careful to keep your content informative.
Of course, there are more serious topics that are of interest to your target audience. If the nature of the content is to be taken into consideration in order to find the appropriate tone to address it, always try to highlight available solutions for your readers, especially when the subject matter deals with problematic situations.
6- Take advantage of feedback
Creating viral content inevitably happens through your ability to consider your audience’s comments to improve your business. Growing dissemination is motivated by content appreciation, and therefore, you can’t ignore feedback to better target your chosen topics or to find a better approach. Learn how to use criticism to improve yourself, and this way you will be able to better meet the expectations of your readers.
7- Publish practical content
Viral content is often the one that brings concrete information and has the potential for real application in everyday life. In short, a topic must be useful from a practical point of view and involve as many individuals as possible. These two conditions together represent an ideal tandem for creating viral content on the web.
8- Republish your content
Not wanting to be redundant and unoriginal, some companies may hesitate at the thought of posting the same content twice. Nevertheless, it is necessary to take into account the fact that content with better circulation considerably increases the number of online users who can consult it, and therefore, share it. If the content is still current and the information it contains is up-to-date, nothing should stop you from doing so.
If you want to benefit from the repercussions of the replay but do not seem insistent, multiply the number of platforms on which the content will be published. Also, reworking the form of content to prevent your publications from being identical is an attractive option for anyone who fears the negative impact of redundancy.
9- Publish your content at the right time
Even if the content is current and of good quality, it can go unnoticed if it's not broadcast at the right time. Indeed, relevant content will always be relevant not only to the facts it conveys but also to the public’s informational needs at certain points in time. Are you selling snow blowers? There is a good chance that no one will be interested in your publication on a beautiful sunny day in July.
Always keep in mind that any industry has a peak hour at which the target audience will be more likely to read your publications, and possibly share them in turn. The social networking tool Buffer has many assets, including the ability to schedule the distribution of posts and evaluate the time slots where your content will be shared the most.
10. Avoid long publications
Even if your inspiration prompts you to write a very long publication, remember that a long text requires extra effort from your readers, an effort that they may not want to provide. Bear in mind that it is much easier to lose the attention of your readers with a very long article than with a shorter version that gets straight to the point!
Related Tags
Content Creation
Social Media
Copywriting
About the author
Karine Dutemple
Blogger at helloDarwin