Create Or Seed: How To Make Content Go Viral?

Written by Igor Beuker on May 26th, 2010

We often share our opinion on virals and seeding. Today I thought it was time again do some cross checks for you. How do others feel about making content go viral? We will share some quotes and tips of Dan Zarrella, author of The Social Media Marketing Book. Are you ready?

Ideas do not spread because they are “good-I have to myth-bust this,” Zarrella said. “There are plenty of good ideas that do not go anywhere and plenty of bad ideas that go everywhere.”

Ideas spread because they fill a need or stand up to certain pressures better than others, he said. At his presentation, he shared his advice for increasing the odds that your content will spread far and wide.

Among his tips:
* Seed your campaign with as many people as possible. If you introduce an idea to more people, it will reach more people. Grow your Twitter followers, your e-mail lists and Facebook friends.

* Personalize. Just like you’re attuned to hear your name even in a noisy room, people respond to personalized messages in a crowded social media environment.

* Avoid the crowds. Click-through rates rise later in the day and on the weekends, even though traffic is lower on Twitter and Facebook during those times. That’s because there are fewer links competing for people’s attention. Post your content during these times.

* Talk like a fifth-grader. Use short words when sharing content on social media. The higher the reading level, the less people share your content.

* Put out a call for action. “Asking people to retweet works,” Zarrella said. “Don’t do it all the time. But it does work.”

I can live with most of Dan’s ideas. I will ask him what viral performance and ROI tracking tools he recommends, since he calls himself ‘the social media scientist’, he must have some tips for you. Dan has some very nice Facebook insights on his site by the way.

To tap into seeding, I decided to share this Quickplan (PDF) Natural Seeding from our SocialMedia8.

If you like some more Quickplans about i.e. social media monitoring, influencer identification or outreach, grab them here.

For the people that have not discovered their VSPOT yet, take a look here. And sorry guys, I know sexs sells on Facebook- thanks to this post by Dan- but our VSPOT is very social, but not very sexy…