You need to be a virus!

Maybe not literally, but it’s a good idea for next year’s Halloween costume.

If you run any kind of blog or social media projects you DO need to spread the word of the articles you are posting. You need to make them viral. Viral marketing is the online version of “word-of-mouth”. Yes, the image of a virus spreading through someone’s body is completely relevant in this case – you want your posts to spread across the blogosphere, Twitterverse or whatever other kind of word you can think up to encompass the part of the social media world you are trying to take over.

The thing about trying to make your contributions viral is that they might not react in the way you expect them to. You could create an article expecting people to be swarming all over it in the next 3 days; and sure enough you get some traffic from it but nothing else really happens. Or you may post a small opinion piece you don’t think people will take much notice of and when you check your analytics the next day everything has gone mad! Conversions, links and comments galore. You just need to keep an eye on where the links are coming from and what people are actually saying.

Should you get good responses, then it’s a good idea to reach out again and thank people, keep the relationships going. Dr Pepper has recently released a video on YouTube for their new diet soft drink “Diet Cherry Chocolate” and is a great example of the good results you can get from a well done viral campaign.

If the responses aren’t so great, again you will need to reach out and try to rectify or explain or even just acknowledge that there are differences of opinion. An example of a viral ad going bad is the Motrin ad targeting mothers. Instead of getting mothers to buy the product, the mothers were offended and let the Internet know how they felt, causing a bad reflection on the company and their products. Motrin were able to try and rectify their mistake later on because they saw the uproar on Twitter.

Social media is about relationships and viral marketing thrives on those relationships.

You can try to predict how things will turn out by doing trend reports to see what subject or keywords are being searched for the most at the moment. You can also read the blogs in your chosen industry or browse forums, scan through your social bookmarking sites and see what type of articles are getting the most votes. Then, if you know enough about those subjects or have an opinion on what’s going on write about it!  If you have neither – research!

Example of unpredictability: I actually wrote an article a few days ago regarding some Twitter tips. I thought it would get a few comments at least, but after 3 days there weren’t any and I was quite disappointed. But then, after a comment I made on another internet marketing blog, I got my first comment – from the owner of that blog. I also got a retweet on Twitter, which grew to another retweet…and another etc. I also got some good responses on an internet marketing forum from a similar article I posted. I didn’t expect people who are already using Twitter regularly to have such an interest in the article. It was a great surprise to see that I connected with people I hadn’t expected to.

By seeing which articles are the ones that go viral you also find out who the largest percentage of your reader base are, what level of knowledge they have, why they visit your blog etc. It’s a good way to learn about your users’ behaviour and target it.

Remember to keep an eye open for Interleado’s next golden child – the online reputation management and press release tool. It’s going to be released in the next month or two and will round off your SEO site analysis perfectly by telling you what people are saying about you brand, services or products.

Have you got any viral marketing experiences to share?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.