Principles of Viral Content
A few years ago, web marketers understood one of the secrets of successful content. It must be viral. The advantage of such material is that you get guaranteed traffic to the site. A huge number of users are interested in your post, video, image. Among them, almost certainly, there is a certain percentage of potential customers, and you have already managed to take the first step towards them - you have evoked emotions in them! In today's oversaturated Internet, achieving such a result is already a success. Terabytes of visual and textual content are simply flipped through. Virality is the way to increase conversion, which means that it must be used effectively.
Mechanics Features
It is important not only to create and use viral content, but also to understand how it works. For example, there are materials that, in themselves, arouse mass interest, but they are not shared, or are shared extremely rarely. Your task is to get people to spread information further.
For example, you have delivered a post to 1000 people. A few hours later, about five percent of this number wrote to 200 of their friends. Of this couple of hundred people, another 5-7% sent a post to friends and colleagues. In a few days, thanks to the social connections of the first thousand, and their friends, you will get a decent increase in views. It will not be 2000 or even 5000 people. Starting with a thousand, with the right approach, you can get 500,000 - 1,000,000 views in a week. It remains to understand what affects the success of content distribution.
Emotional content background
If what you read/view causes joy, touches, delights, you are guaranteed to get reposts. This is not an unfounded assertion. It is based on statistics that were recently carried out on social networks using BuzzSumo's analytical tools. For greater reliability, one hundred thousand various articles were studied, which were reposted by users. Guess what a quarter of all the people who shared the material shared. No, these are not socially important things at all, not politics, not memes. They distributed posts that make most ordinary people feel tender. Laughter, fun and joy occupy 2nd, 3rd and 4th places respectively. Irritating, aggressive materials are reposted much less often. Socially active dissatisfied citizens have accumulated only 6%, and those who like to mourn even less - only 1%. We draw conclusions - most people want to be happy and touched on the Internet, and not get angry and indignant.
The Magic of Numbers
No, we are not talking about popular numerology. We will talk about the use of numbers in the title of the article. Like 100 Ways to Become a Millionaire.
Statistics is an exact science. She operates with facts, not predictions. And the facts show that more than 35% of readers choose a headline that has a number in it. In second place (17%) are headings of the same type, specifying the request with the word “how”. In the proposed context - "How to become a millionaire." Ten is the most popular number. Why people like her so much is hard to say. Human psychology in relation to numbers, their combinations, has so far been little studied.
More about headers
Guessing with the title of the article is a lot of luck. You can be a great journalist, writer, copywriter, but at the same time constantly “fly by” with the virality of the headline. The material will be of high quality, interesting, but it will not be read and distributed. Why? Because the title "does not catch". Bright cases are known when changing the title brought an increase in the number of views. Moreover, the number increased by a thousand or more percent, relative to the original indicators.
People love specifics.
Such materials are read and shared more often than those where the headline looks like “The person who became rich after web design courses.”
Headlines and interest
Never give exhaustive answers in the title. Do not give them in previews, descriptions. The purpose of the headline is to get the person to read the material and find out what happened.
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A simple example of correct and incorrect headers:
What will interest you more? Birds, or a sensation with a reference to the secrets of the Bermuda Triangle? The first headline will attract a small percentage of Cousteau fans and ornithologists. The second one will generate massive interest.
Size matters?
In the case of viral content, and Internet materials in general, it does. As long as you think cats rule the internet, you won't be successful. Memes are, of course, popular. But they will not bring the desired effect. According to available statistics, which are relevant even for magazines and newspapers, materials of 2-3 thousand words are more successful than short notes. But these 2000 should be interesting content, not "water". If you manage to strike a balance between quantity and quality, reposts are guaranteed.
Don't overstep the bounds
Shock content attracts attention, gets views, but people rarely share it massively and openly. For example, an ad with naked people will get a million views, and several thousand reposts. Using original ideas without "excesses" you can get a much better result. People will actively share videos or pictures that can be posted on their wall without causing outrage from moralists.
The sexual revolution and the time for shock content is over. Now you need to learn to surprise people not with bare body parts, but with interesting and unusual material.
Visual content and its effectiveness
The text, no matter how interesting it may be, needs to be formatted. Photos, drawings, graphics, additional thematic videos, thumbnails - that's what attracts people, makes them repost. Statistics on Facebook showed that this type of content is distributed many times more often. Even one picture doubles the chance of a repost.
Staircase effect
Imagine that you need to change a light bulb in a house with high ceilings. You reach for it with your hand, but only standing on tiptoe. Standing on a stepladder, any person will solve the problem in 2 minutes. In every business, including Internet marketing, there is such a “ladder”. It can be a media platform or a specific person who “gets higher”. Approximately the same mechanism as the connections in the real world.
A well-known person, like a popular blogger, has thousands, and sometimes millions of subscribers, a visited Youtube channel. If such a person reposts your material, it will provide a huge number of views and reposts. By the way, blogs are the best place to find your future stepladder.
Summing up. Creating viral content is a whole art, and, at the same time, a science. Distributing it correctly is no less a challenge. However, using the simple tricks we have proposed, you will significantly increase your efficiency.