Anatomy of a Viral Post : 3 most Important Ingredients to make your content go viral!
There are so many things that can make content go viral that they’re pretty hard to number and dissect on a whim. You have seen this many times by yourself already: you are on your own, minding your business on Facebook or wherever, and all of a sudden you see something on your wall that immediately grabs your attention.
Then, a gut feeling telling you to click on the link in the post overwhelms you, and you can’t do a thing about it. You click without too much of a second thought, and find the story to be short yet compelling, and you can’t help but click on the share button corresponding to your social network of choice.
That is the exact same reaction that thousands upon thousands of people just had with that same post.
How do they make a post go viral so easily?
The secret, besides cool, engaging content, lies in the post’s structure.
Here is a breakdown of the anatomy of a successful viral post.
Use this information wisely and you will soon see people reacting the same for your posts!
1. Title
Common sense would tell you that a great title is a self-explanatory one. A title that tells you just what you need to know. If it contains the information you are after, it will lead you straight to what you wanted, but does this apply to everybody?
The short answer is a flat “NO”. A self-explanatory title will just get the attention of people interested in what the title promotes, but everyone else will pass it off. If you want your titles to grab everyone’s attention, you have to create a title that drives curiosity in people.
These types of titles are called “click baits,” and they are designed to make people curious. They do not tell the entire story behind a title, they just tease people with possibilities, leaving the message of the title open to interpretation. It makes people fill in the gaps with their imagination which forces them to click on the title to see what it is really about, closing the cycle!
One of the best ways to drive curiosity and get people to click on a title is by making it list based. List based articles get more traffic because people prefer content that is presented in chunks instead of long articles.
For example, you can create an article titled “6 myths about diabetes – number 5 might shock you!” and cover two elements in the same title: you’re teasing a list based article and a shocking surprise, which will drive curiosity and shares.
Another element that you can add to a title that people will want to click on is a teased answer. Let’s develop a second example with this element: Let’s use the “We Challenged 6 Health Food claims – This is What We Found”. You added a teased answer to that title, increasing its value to people seeing it!
2. Image
Images are great previews for your posts, and are a great compliment to your title. A well-placed image under a well-crafted title will make a huge difference between getting lots of traffic and attention, versus getting just a few clicks here and there. You will always need to accompany your title and body of your posts with high quality images.
What makes a great image viral? Depending on what your title promotes and what your actual content is about, you might get away with using a common image or you might not, especially when your viral content is all about something really specific.
The important thing to keep in mind when using images is that you have to use images that are both fun and relevant to your post. Where can you find viral images? There are three great venues for finding high quality viral images.
The first one is “tumblr.com”. There, you will be able to find tons of funny images related to whatever keyword you look up. Just right click on the image that you want to use and save it to your computer. Another free resource to find images is “Pinterest”. Just use the search bar to look up any keyword or topic, select your images and save them!
This Video has over 800+ Million Views ! – I am sure you remember Charlie 🙂
3. Distribute & Share Content on Social Media
One of the reasons why viral content is so prominent in recent times when compared to many years ago, is that viral content used to go viral through word of mouth and email forwarding, now it’s because of social media. Social media makes viral content spread so easily that right now you don’t think twice about something when it goes viral. You just think its business as usual.
That is exactly why you should like it! When you take a look at the sources of traffic from all types of viral websites, not only from the most popular ones, you’ll realize that most of that traffic comes from social media networks and not from, say, organic searches.
That is because viral content gets shared on social media first, and then spreads from it. In the past, sources of viral content were not that easy to spot or were just plain unpredictable. You now are in a time when the preferred platform for releasing viral content is social media, because social media makes it so, so easy for marketers to post viral content.
I hope this helped 🙂