How I made a Facebook post go viral with only ￡100

"Man, I feel just like a rockstar" - Don't worry, this sentence will soon make sense.

Ever since I wrote the article 'How I made a hashtag trend on Twitter in 3 hours', I wanted my next goal to be a post that will go viral on Facebook, possibly a video. I realised that it wouldn't be as easy as getting something to trend on Twitter (okay, that wasn't easy either), so it took me nearly two years to do it but I got it in the end.

Firstly, as the title of this article suggests - the post had some paid support behind it but not a lot at all considering the result it'd achieved. I will go into the strategy on that a bit later.

Here's the Facebook post that reached to 8.3M people and still climbing, at a much slower pace now. At the time of writing this article, it's had 79,709 shares, 22,271 reactions and 12,802 comments. This post was published under my personal brand Facebook page - Blake Ridder, I just wanted to try something fun and never expected to go this far.

The two things that made it possible

1. Animoji - This was something very new, and still is. I was lucky enough to own an iPhone X (the only device that lets you create animojis, watch the video below) from the first day of launch, and I noticed there was a animoji trend happening where people make it into a karaoke, they called it #AnimojiKaraoke. So I wanted to share that with everyone on Facebook, but I wanted to combine it with something else to make it even more fun.

2. Live Photo - So what is it? It's a video in a photo but it isn't quite a video, but rather a full-on 12-megapixel photo that animates 1.5 seconds of motion before and after the still. Super cool, right?! (Take a look at the video below for a detailed explanation). Live Photos can even be uploaded to Facebook with the same interactive feature, where you press and hold to see the short video. Live Photo itself isn't new. But if you want to get really creative you can create your own video and make it into anything you like, and that's something not many people have tried.

With a bit of research, I found an app that allowed me to turn a video into a Live Photo which then can be uploaded onto Facebook.

It was the combination of those two new things that really made it unique and fresh for the Facebook community.

The creation process

First, I had to decide a song for my animoji to lip sync it to. So I picked a popular song from the top 40 UK chart - Post Malone - rockstar ft. 21 Savage. I also picked the monkey because... well, it was just cute I suppose. But I'm sure it would have worked with any animojis, except the robot.

Then I edited the video with a yellow background, matching the Blake Ridder brand colour. I thought this would stand out even more compared to the standard white background. I also added the fingerprint location into the first frame of the video so that the animation won't obscured by the thumb.

The singing monkey was ready, it's time to share it with the world.

Pay to play

At the time of posting, my Facebook page had only around 5000 likes. It wasn't going to go viral just like that, I had to get it in front of the right audience, I had to pay to play.

I decided ￡100 was more than enough for that cheeky monkey. I boosted my post to the following audience:

Females and males aged 18 to 30, with an interest in the artist Post Malone, but must also have liked Facebook pages such as Buzzfeed, LADbible, NowThis and the like. I thought it was important to focus on the younger audience, as well as someone who's at least a fan of the song. I also capped the cost per thousand impressions low but still maximising the reach.

After just 24 hours, I reached the end of my budget but the shares kept going. At that point I still didn't think it was going to go far. It was when the organic reach overtook the paid reach, that I realised this was going viral, and it did, it spread like a wild fire. At one point it was getting 1000 shares every few seconds.

As a result, my Facebook page likes increased rapidly too. From 5000 to almost 30,000 now. It was literally an over-night success, with just one single post.

Conclusion

I really want to say this was so simple to do, in a way it was. You just have to be one of the first to create something, and even if it's something that has been done many times, you can still make it unique with your own style.

So what's my next goal? It's going to be video, that's where the future is heading. I'm hoping to create a full length production video that people will share and enjoy watching on YouTube. Will I succeed? Join my journey on my channel to find out. (let's hope it won't take another two years).