Your audience is on social media. According to a recent PEW study, nearly 70 percent of people living in the United States use at least one social media network. Over 2.5 billion people (a number that is growing rapidly) are on social networks worldwide.
If you’re an entrepreneur in this digital era, you need to be on social media. Creating a viral marketing campaign is a great way to create brand awareness using the power of social media.
Think of virality as an exponential curve. If two people directly related to the brand share a piece of content, and if that number doubles 30 times, it means that over a billion people will have shared the content.
Viral marketing is a powerful tool for businesses. It’s how organizations like Facebook and Lyft (among many others) quickly acquired new customers. You can create a viral social media campaign by following the viral-marketing principles practiced by some of the world’s best brands.
1. Master the target audience.
In order to create viral content, you must first understand your target audience. Viral content is only effective if it speaks to people so convincingly that they are eager to share the content.
Social media marketers should start a viral campaign by creating at least one marketing persona. A persona is a representation of the target customer that includes demographic and psychographic information, as well as information related to social media behavior and content preferences.
Build a marketing persona by speaking with real and potential customers to understand what is important to them as they consider a purchase and share content online. Armed with this information, it will be considerably easier for you and your team to create content that users are likely to share online.
2. Select the appropriate social media platform.
Every social media platform is different. Before creating content, choose a platform on which to specialize. Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are all good platforms on which to start a viral marketing campaign; however, the content you create will differ depending on the platform you choose.
If you choose to create content for Instagram, for example, a series of Instagram Stories or an image with a compelling caption can spark viral shares online. However, content that will perform well on LinkedIn is usually created from a Pulse article or from a thoughtful LinkedIn update.
The platform you choose should be informed by the information gleaned from your work creating a marketing persona.
3. Create content with high engagement.
Most social media platforms use an algorithm…
