So you want to go viral with the channel?

In the era of social media marketing, likes, shares, subscriptions and pokes (don’t think they are still a thing and I don’t even know the point of that feature!) the world has fallen away from the Yellow Pages listing and hope that someone will call you.

Everyone craves these likes on social media and even more so comments. It is a proven fact that social media likes, comments and shares increase dopamine levels which is closely tied to the reward centre of the brain. The more we get, the more we want.

Social media marketing is becoming the number one way to increase brand awareness, generate leads and build relationships. If you are not using social media marketing in the channel, you are missing a trick.

Making life easy for the partners to be able to market your products on your behalf is a sure fire way to increase your footprint in the market.

Email marketing is falling down the pecking order. How much noise do you get in your junk folder these days? We get lots of it. All offering the same things.

Social media is where it is at. I’m not saying to neglect email completely because it’s still a good tool to generate awareness but maybe the shift should be moving over to social media if you’re not already there.

How does something end up going viral?

We’ve had several items go viral previously where posts hit 100’s of thousands of views and gain reach into places that you would never deem possible before.

Initially, it seemed random on what went viral and what didn’t but the bottom line is that there is a formula to it.

The formula involves how active people are on the particular post within a time frame. How much engagement there is on a post in the first couple of hours greatly influences the success of a post.

There is more to it than this but the initial interaction is a major contributor to it.

This is where the channel comes into play to help things go viral.

We can have direct viral posts and indirect viral posts.

What’s the difference?

Directly viral

A direct viral post is a single post that is posted by the vendor and influenced by their partners and connections to increase the reach of it. The benefits spread across the people that get involved because they are invested into the company who is sharing the post. The more reach the post gets = more awareness in the market which makes it easier for every partner involved on the post to position it to their clients.

This doesn’t bring in immediate results for the partners liking, sharing and commenting but it does increase reach and brand awareness for the products that they work with.

It’s important to notify every single one of your partners every time that you post something to social media with this method and get them to interact as much as you can.

Indirectly viral

Indirect viral posts on the other hand are posts that originate from a single post that are re-posted with variations of the original. Whether that’s a logo inserted from the 3rd party or a change in contact details on the post.

Indirect viral posts may not appear to have much interaction with likes, shares and comments but they are designed to spread the message via as many end points as possible.

Let’s say we have 100 partners in our database. The vendor creates the social media post that has all of the content contained in it with set graphics, assets, links, landing pages etc that are co-branded automatically with the partners logo and details when it is activated by the partner.

As soon as the post is activated by the partner, it automatically posts to social media. If this is activated by all 100 partners, you effectively have an indirect viral post that is spreading the exact message that you would be putting out in a single post but instead with the benefits to everyone.

If one of these partner activated posts were to go viral, you get double the benefit. You get a post that reaches the audience of every partner that activates it and also exponential reach in their network’s networks.

Add in lead capture forms to these posts and it’s a lead generation tool for the partner and the vendor at the same time.

Wrap them up in a campaign with a series of posts and you are set for ultimate awareness generation and lead generation for the channel in an era where there is so much social media noise.

Having your 100 partners activating campaigns ensures that you are first in mind of potential customers and are one step ahead of vendors that make it hard for partners to do such things.

One step further

Imagine if we could automatically like those posts that are put out by the partners from our campaigns by members of the internal team at the vendor.

Every time a campaign is activated by a partner, the posts are released to all social media channels and the internal staff of the vendor give that content a like straight away.

It’s contributing to the effectiveness of the post and pushing it into the realms of becoming viral.

Conclusion

If you are not putting efforts into social media, it’s something you need to start doing.

The ability to build awareness of your brand through your partners is massive and can contribute to going viral much easier than it is going it alone.

Encouraging your partners to like, comment and share your direct content will help everyone who is a stakeholder in the business by increasing brand awareness and making it easier for your partners to position your products.

Indirectly forcing things to go viral has a much larger impact as it creates an army of marketers for your brand with content controlled by you the vendor.

For a sneaky peak of what’s coming in January with Channelyze to help with the direct and indirect viral content creation, register for a demo at: www.channelyze.io

Originally published at Channelyze Blog