5 Tips On Building Your Online Following and Going Viral

It's every advertiser and marketer's dream to see their content go viral. Having literary thousands or even millions of individuals viewing as well as sharing your content in a short time frame is quite a heartwarming experience. Such exposure can greatly help your brand to thrive and prosper in the marketing world. Notwithstanding, such an achievement doesn't just happen – it calls for focused and consistent efforts that come before every instance of a post going viral.

While there's no full guarantee that your content will spread rapidly, you can enhance the chances of becoming viral by following a few well-tried good practices. Here are some five simple yet effective tips to help build your online following as well as make your content go viral.

1.    Know Your Audience Well

To generate viral content, you first need to understand your target audience well. This is because viral content can only be effective if it speaks to your potential audience convincingly, such that they are eager to share the content. 

It's vital for you to create a marketing persona which is a detailed representation of your target audience. It includes demographic and psychographic information as well as data related to social media behavior and content preferences. 

One effective way to build a marketing persona is by speaking to some of your clients in real life to understand what is important to them as they interact with your content. This way, you're able to create content that they will love and likely share online.

2.    Invest In High-Quality Content

When it comes to going viral, the importance of high-quality content cannot be overemphasized. Creating unique, instantly engaging, and valuable content that keeps up with the latest trends eventually leads to constant engagement as well as loyalty from your audience. 

Additionally, keep the content short and straight to the point. Modern social media users normally have very short attention spans, and therefore, too much text or long videos can be a complete turn-off for them. 

3.    Build an Emotional Connection

The ability of your content to connect with audiences on an emotional level plays a big role in making your posts go viral. Your content should be able to spark emotional responses in your audience, which is a great way to enhance the chances of mass sharing. 

4.    Get Influencers to Boost Your Content

After clearly defining the interests as well as the social media behavior of your intended audience, you can use that data to partner with powerful influencers to boost your chances of going viral. Social media influencers refer to brands and personalities that have a huge user engagement and fan following.

Partnering with them gives you a chance also to enjoy attention from a large audience. And one effective way to partner with them is by reaching out to them to help share your content. 

However, for this approach to be more effective, it's important to start building relationships with them by, for instance, sharing their content, mentioning them in tweets, contacting them to let them know that their content is helpful, as well as connecting with them on social media.  Showing them that you appreciate their content will make it easy to request them to share your own content.

5.    Use The Right Keywords in Your Headlines

One of the most fundamental elements of your content is the title – it can either make or break a story. So, to ensure that your viewers and users follow you from the beginning, use the right keywords that will pique curiosity and convince your audience of the need to keep using your content.

Bottom Line

Though not every piece of content you create will spread quickly, by considering the above tips, you'll increase the likelihood that your content gets shared, giving you a better chance of going viral as well as increasing your followers.