Writing Viral Content: It’s All About the Community
There are lots of ways to get your content to be viral:
Method 1 - You can try to get a reply from E Musk (with 90M followers… more than 5% fake ones?), cf @mgsiegler. This is guaranteed to net you thousands of new followers.
Method 2 - A more realistic way would be to learn the copywriting techniques that are working for big brands: (@jeffbullas)
Method 3 - A way that’s even more feasible or an approach to get a quick win would be to create collaborative pieces with and for the community you are targeting.
Here is how this works…
Making Viral Content for a Community
First, understand what your audience likes.
This step is crucial. Before we start writing with the community, it is super important that we learn what the community really needs. And before we go there it is equally important to know who our audience is.
Let me define a few terms for you then.
A. Ecosystem - a complete set of all your audience
B. Prospects - People from the ecosystem who might be future customers
C. Micro-influencers - People who influence the decisions of prospects
Now the first thing you need to do is to map each person within your community and identify micro-influencers, prospects and people writing great content.
Here is an example of an eCairn community map
How will you find these people if you do not have a formally created community?
Again you have three options here
1. You could use your CRM and research the social media accounts of your prospects
2. May be search for relevant hashtags and try finding people looking for a specific hashtag or
3. Try eCairn ;-) . we will help you define those personas and will also help you find those personas across multiple channels such as Linkedin, Twitter, blogs or even Github.
As an example, for this post (“Viral Content”), we are targeting content marketing experts. and more specifically those talking about “viral content” on social media.
Here’s a process I used to find a list of key influencers:
A. I logged in to eCairn - Conversation
B. Went to my pre-created community of “Marketers” i.e my ecosystem
C. Made a filter called “Viral content” and spotted people who have tweeted about Viral Content recently, and Voila!
Here’s a list of influencers who have tweeted about Viral content. I sort them based on their influence, I could also sort them based on their geographical location, or I could also sort them based on their relevance to “viral” topic i.e how many times have they have talked about Viral content:
Most influential marketers talking about “viral marketing”. Note (the zeros) that viral is a fraction of what they are talking about, except for Jeff Bullas and Ann Handley.
Here is the top 10 list we got along with all of their Twitter handles. You should definitely follow them if you’re interested in Viral Marketing:
Next we’ll move on to the next step of brainstorming content.
Where Do you Get Ideas From:
It is always good to listen before talking. Read the room and understand what people in your target audience are talking about. You also want to gain an understanding of how they talk about it.
Word cloud of ( ~20K) marketers tweeting about “viral marketing”
source: Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry
This is why we always recommend listening to many people in your audience and seeing what they are up to. As the list of 10 people we showed on the top, you can start with a set of 100 people and see their tweets, check out the article they have tagged in their tweet and then use them as a reference to the content you write in your blog.
E.g. Out of those 10 influential people that we had picked up, here is the article that Jeff Bullas wrote
We read through his article, and some of his fascinating opinion points have been mentioned here. This blog written by Louise Linehan details the type of B2B content that performs the best:
Here is an excerpt from the article that shows the effectiveness of B2B content
How to Co-create with the Community
If you’ve picked an interesting topic, there is a huge chance that many influencers in your audience have already covered it recently. You should read what these people have written and fill your own writing with references, quotes and links. Then, take their content as inspiration for your own.
Then add an X-Factor
Above whatever they have given, always make sure to add something that you feel hasn't been discussed by quite a few others. For these examples, many of these people mentioned above have never mentioned co-creating with the community in their blogs (which we did). If you have to do some primary research, use tools like @HaroHelpers and get people to respond to your questions. X-Factor is critical. If your blog offers nothing new, the readers would never know why they should read it and not 100 other blogs out in the market.
Did you know - sometimes it is just the context that makes something go VIRAL. Below is an example of context leading to virality.
This image went viral like crazy. Now, why is this image viral, and what does it really teach us? Two people kissing is no big deal. But in context, they are kissing while a protest is happening in the background. So everybody reported the protest, but the kiss, because it was different in terms of the context, made itself Viral. Similarly, X-Factor will help you define content that will help you go viral. And to find the X-Factor, you first should discover and map your audience/community/ecosystem and see what they are already talking about if they are already talking about the protest. So the kiss makes sense to go viral.
Compiling it all into a More Presentable Format
Remember, ideation is about diverging and finding many ideas, but presenting is about converging and giving a limited set of ideas. Thus compile them and create a presentable format.
While you start writing/compiling it, here are a few things you should do
Remember your content should be shareable, not really searchable
a. I am taking an example of Friends. If I write an article about characteristics of ROSS, I will title it as “10 signs you are a ROSS” instead of “Typical characteristics of ROSS”. The “you” part of the first title will help my readers connect more with my content than the list of characteristics. Let’s take another SaaS-friendly example, “10 sales emails that will make your prospects drool over it” instead of “How to write a sales email”. The first is a sharable format, whereas the second is a searchable format.
Always Start with a Sticky Content Section
Sticky content is a way to get your audience to stick to your content and read it through. Learn more about sticky content from this blog by Neil Patel: https://neilpatel.com/blog/how-to-craft-sticky-content-that-your-audience-drools-over/
Your first section will define whether your audience stays with you to read the entire blog or not. You can have multiple types of crazy sticky content sections.
You could start with some hard-hitting facts. Facts that make you and your audience awe
You could start by storytelling. For example, general advertising compares 2 individuals; you could start with a story of 2 individuals who started at the same place, took different routes of solving the same problem and reached 2 different places.
You could start with a joke. Well, who hates fun. Or even better, a joke about Elon Musk!
You could start with a personal anecdote.
All of these would make people stick and read your blog thoroughly
Make the Blog Genuine
Do not let the blog be filled with artificial comments and inspirational quotes; hit the reader with reality. Be as genuine as possible, no additional praises, no additional information, just relevant and authentic information and opinions.
Get your Audience to Interact.
One of the most essential features of Viral content is that it is written in a language that invites the audience to talk to the author. Generally, blogs on the internet and the readers feel an invisible barrier is stopping them from commenting on them. Break that barrier, and get people to talk to you.
“What to Read Next” Section
We recommend that you have a section with references to influential authors and that, even better, you connect with them and ask for feedback while writing the article.
The results from this are that the people who have been quoted in your article will most likely share your article. Since they are influencers in your target market, this is the best distribution that you can get:
This gives you credibility because it’s…
Not coming from you but as a recommendation
Relevant
Endorsed by an influencer
The “what to read next” can also be a “who to read next”, as we did with the “viral marketing influencers list”.
We feel these are the few critical points you should take care of when you want to get your content Viral.
If you think we missed a few other topics, do point us to them; happy to discuss them. Share this with your community.
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