Make Your Content Viral with Share-Ready, Engaging Headlines, Text, and Video
Do you want your content to go viral? There’s no sure formula that will guarantee a viral post. Daily, there’s more than 4 million hours of content uploaded to YouTube and almost 700 million tweets made on Twitter. That’s a lot of content trying to get attention. We live in an age where consumers experience an onslaught of content from the moment they wake. How do you cut through all this noise and actually get your content marketing viral – here’s your answer.
There’s nothing more important than your headline, like it or not. A bad headline and no one’s going to click it. One estimate suggests 80 cents of your marketing dollar is spent after you’ve written the headline. Developing a clickable headline can take time to find. Let’s say you’ve written the greatest article of all-time. It won’t count for anything without a headline. Instead of writing your content first and then the headline, do the opposite. Writing to a headline, your content is more likely to be effective.
When in doubt, look to the people who are doing it best. Buzzfeed is probably best at getting content to go viral. They’re essentially a hub of viral content, pulling from stories from all over the Internet. The average Buzzfeed writer generates 25 headlines per article, slowly wittling this down to the right headline for the article. You don’t need to go this far with headline writing but the expectation is always going to be for a high-impact headline. Don’t be afraid to do some A/B testing in your digital marketing to find the right headline for you.
Another thing to consider in putting together viral content is in knowing the platform. Different social media sites prefer different headlines. Analyzing the most viral Facebook content marketing, you’ll find the most common phrases to come up in headlines are ‘Will make you’, ‘Can we guess’, and ‘This is why’. Comparatively, on LinkedIn looking at the most popular viral posts, you’ll find the most common phrases to be ‘The future of’, ‘X ways to’, and ‘Need to know’.
Another general rule to go by is that longer headlines tend to work well, particularly on social media marketing sites like Facebook and Instagram. User engagement tends to peak around fifteen words so this is where you want to aim your content for.
A major reason why content goes viral has to do with timeliness and tribalism. First off, a piece of content will be commenting on something newsworthy. These posts can help get you looks although they pose no long-term value. Content marketing that goes viral will also capitalize on tribalism. Social media users have ideologies and the platforms themselves can be very emotionally driven.
The last thing we want to mention is the importance of video. Video content marketing does particularly well on Facebook where the average video reaches 12% of total page audience compared to 7% on links and 4% on status updates. Ideal subject matter for a video is a how-to and a tips-based video, and the ideal length for a viral video is 60-90 seconds. It almost goes without saying but even on a video, the headline counts.
Write out some options. Look at what other viral posts are using. Mirror it in your content. Give yourself 5 headlines to use. Choose what you think will resonate the most. That’s the first step to going viral in content marketing. Join us today!
