How to utilize Social Media to make your content go Viral?

by Swati on February 9th, 2012

A lot of time, money, sweat, and tears go into the content creation process. Thus, making sure that as many people see it as possible, is essential in order to see the ROI of your efforts.

There are a lot of resources out there for viral marketing, but most of it is focused on overall social media strategies for your business. Here are few ways to take those principles and apply it to a specific goal – promoting content and getting coverage.

We will use infographics as a specific example, but a lot of these principles can apply to other pieces of content to ensure social success.

Key points to keep in mind

There are a couple of key points that, when utilized correctly, are effective across most types of social media. Make sure to consider the following while creating a viral promotion plan:

The Internet is simply a platform for networking. When reaching out to potential influencers, always treat them with professionalism, kindness, and gratitude for any help they provide.
Work smarter not harder. Target your outreach efforts toward people with influence in social media that are in your niche and realistic to contact.
If you can, provide some type of reciprocal value to people willing to share your content.
Conduct outreach before you invest in the infographic. This will help affirm that your content is spreadable and will give you confidence in your investment.

Tap into your existing network

To make an infographic go viral you will need to provide something very unique and informative through market research, consumer panels, and data analysis. Throughout this process, you will come across a lot of valuable resources that will provide data for your content. Create a list of the people you sourced this data from. These people may be more apt to share your infographic once it is completed since they are personally connected to the infographic. This is a form of outreach called egobait, as you are feeding into the “ego” of these sources by letting them know you are using their expertise in this piece of content.

Here is a pro tip: when making your list, include information about these people like blog links, twitter links, and other social media profiles in order to save time and not have to go back searching for this information. This list will be very valuable in promoting your infographic once it is finished and ready to market. As you create new content and infographics, you will already have started a list of great connections for future projects and general networking within your niche.

Social bookmarking and image sharing sites

There are a lot of social bookmarking and image sharing sites on the web that have large followings, which offers a huge opportunity to make your content go viral. The trick is in knowing which ones make sense for your niche and gaining a presence in those communities. The great thing about this form of promotion is the more you use it, the more valuable it becomes for future promotional efforts, as many social bookmarking sites work on a hierarchy method where the most influential bookmarkers’ content is more likely to be seen by the community than new users.
Social networking sites

As you continue to grow your online connections on various social networking sites, your potential to spread quality content grows, too. Here are a few ways that you should be utilizing social networks to find targeted individuals that would be interested in sharing your content.

Twitter: 100 powerful twitter followers can be more valuable than 1,000 mediocre followers. Just as in narrowing down a target market, when you want to spread content you need to find the people that are already interested in the type of information that will be in your infographic. Use twitter search with keywords relative to your content and search twitter directories like wefollow.com in order to find new outreach contacts. Have some people tweeting about your content already? Search phrases they used in their tweet in order to find other people who tweeted about their tweet. Since they are already talking about it, the chances of them hosting the content on their site are increased.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn makes it easy to search for and find professionals in your niche. As you learn about potential connections, consider things like how many connections they have, how often they are active on LinkedIn, and what kind of things they currently share on their profile. In order to find quality leads, target individuals that have a history of spreading information relative to your niche. For example, are they highly visible in your industry? Do they have their own personal blog? You want to target high influencers to increase the chances of your content spreading. Pro Tip: Not sure who to contact? Do advanced Google queries like site:linkedin.com COMPANY NAME to find a list of employees that work for a particular organization.

Google+: Just like LinkedIn and Twitter, build up a network over time on Google+. Many social savvy professionals use Google+ and are likely to share great content that pops up on their feed. So get on their feeds and the chances of your content spreading rapidly increases.

Facebook: Facebook isn’t just for fun anymore. Facebook has become a strong platform for spreading infographics, especially those that evoke strong emotions, are humorous, or even outrageous. Facebook also has a fairly new feature of being able to share posts like Google+. If you think your infographic has mass appeal, you could even look into Facebook advertising in order to get your content seen by more people.

There are many more ways to promote your content to increase the chances of it going viral. There could be whole posts written on the content promotion of any one of these sites. Start with your existing social networks both online and offline and build from there, adding new platforms and sites for promotion as you go. Over time, your following will grow and become more powerful – allowing your future content to benefit from your social network.

Author’s Note: This is a guest post by Adria Saracino. Adria is a marketer, blogger, and freelancer. When not helping businesses reach their marketing goals, you can find her writing about style on her personal fashion blog, The Emerald Closet.

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