If you already have a growing community, and you understand it, with a little bit of luck it might happen that your post goes viral. And you just hit the jackpot.
Although there are agencies that deal specifically with viral content, there's no real recipe for going viral.
But once your post does go viral, you have to know it, understand whats happening and maximize the potential reach.
This is how we do it
The gate to understanding if your post goes viral is data. Concretely, it's the tool that shows you this data. In our case, when we post something that links back to our website, we check Google Analytics - Real time regularly. Ideally, right after you post the content.
This might be very individual, but in our case, it takes 3-5 minutes to see if our post went viral. If not, the problem is usually the title, description, bad timing or a bad photo (in this case it's better to take the post down and repost it with different attributes).
It's important for you to check the real time statistics in Analytics and if you see unusual amount of people visiting your website RIGHT AFTER you posted something, you know it's going viral.
This is how going viral looks in practice. (Source: boxchilli.com )
How to get the most of the posts that are going viral
Sooner or later, virality dies. While you are riding the huge wave of engagement and reach, you quickly need to think how to stay on this wave for the longest time possible.
When a post goes viral, it usually means that the content brings around 70-80 % of traffic to our website. If the real time numbers in Analytics are still growing, we just stop posting more posts for a while and leave the viral post on the top of our Facebook Page.
Once it starts to slow down and the numbers also go down, you need to change your strategy.
If the content is timely (for example breaking news) we boost it so that it gets to more people as soon as possible. Once our organic traffic is gone, boosting is the only way to (immediately) get more attention.
If the content is a magazine article, we usually wait one day before we boost it. One day after we post it for the first time, we boost the post and it results in better traffic in 2 days consecutively.
Going viral is not science. Although, it needs a thought or two. (Source: sujanpatel.com)
How to go viral
This might be the hardest part but in theory, it's the easiest.
You (just) have to understand what resembles with your audience. What kind of content, what kind of langue and communication?
Sometimes, the audience finds your message, but sometimes you have to get the message to your audience.
Do you have any experience with going viral? What were the results for you? Would you suggest any improvements to our technique of maximizing the impact of viral posts?
