7 Tips to make your blogpost go Viral
Everyone wants to write content that goes viral and spreads like wildfire. However, it doesn’t always happen. Mostly by luck, I was able to create some content that went viral.
The blogpost I will refer to here is: Seesmic will Destory Tweetdeck
1. Say something controversial in the title (but use the best objective and logical statements to support it)
People love controversial stuff. As long as you truly believe in what you say and can back it up, throw up a controversial posts and give people a reason to click on it. If you just say something like, “Seesmic Desktop emerges as an alternative to Tweetdeck”, people won’t care, and they won’t share it.
2. Include at least one name that people have heard of in the title
People will only click on your post if they recognize what you are talking about. In this case, most people on Twitter knows about Tweetdeck, and Seesmic has a strong brandname in general on the internet. When you include something that people know and care about, they will check it out. If I said, “FriendTweets will destroy Qualiky”, people won’t pay attention because they don’t know the competing parties. (I have both domains btw if you are interested :P)
3. Marketing Gamification Tip: Support people with influential power on the internet
You want to write posts that make influential people look good. You want to write something so good, that they want everyone in the world to read it. No matter how awesome they are, it’s more lame to say, “Yea, we’re the best and you should use our products.” But if SOMEONE ELSE writes, “Yea, they are the best, and you should use their products” it suddenly becomes a lot more compelling. I just happened to support Loic since I truly believed he had the better product for me.
Because of this, when the post was published, Loic tweeted it out multiple times and wrote a blogpost about it. That helped tremendously (this post itself was retweeted almost 100 times).
4. Write an extremely elaborated post that includes as much details and analysis as possible
A lot of people talk about writing short, crisp posts. They say people don’t have the attention span to read long posts. I completely agree with that. However, after chatting with Andrew Warner from Mixergy (one of the BEST sources for entrepreneur education btw!), we both agreed that people read short posts, but dont’ share it, whereas with long posts people just skim, but they bookmark it and share it with others.
Think about those posts that give you 100 links to something. No one’s going to click through all 100 links. They’re not even going to read all the anchor texts. But they save it and share it with others.
5. Tweet relevant people and ask them to retweet
Everything that goes viral needs a starting point. Twitter is a good tool to find that starting point. A good tip is to go on Twitter and search for everyone who is talking about the topic you are writing about. In this case Seesmic Desktop. I could do Tweetdeck more, but they are less targeted because everyone could talk about Tweetdeck for anything. However, people who talk about Seesmic Desktop are either people who are thinking about using it, or the early adapters of this new app, and they would care about any literature that explains the great things about it.
Also, if you have space, politely ask them to Retweet it for you. For those who do retweet it, make sure you send a thank you tweet and try to help them out if possible.
6. Include social media influencers and let them know about it
This is KEY. A few days before I wrote the blogpost, I saw Zaibatsu (super awesome Social Media Maven…yes, one of the VERY few people who mean it when they say it.) tweet out his frustration about using Tweetdeck. I thought it would add some colors to my post if I included it. After I published it, I tweeted Zaibatsu and asked him if it was ok that I have an old tweet there, since it also had an abbreviated cuss word.
My tweet was actually really sincere and just wondered if he would prefer me to take it down. However, he didn’t respond to me but merely retweeted the post. Immediately afterwards, dozens and dozens of people started retweeting that post too. It went wild and crazy, just because Zaibatsu decided that it was good content.
This is actually another lesson about Twitter: follower count does not matter. Authority through engagement is what truly matters. It doesn’t matter if you have a million followers if no one cares about what you say. Zaibatsu has built up a reputation where people trust his authority and trust his selection of content. I believe many of them didn’t even read the post before retweeting it.
If you are a company or looking to build a personal brand, don’t just amass numbers. Get people who care about and trust you.
7. Engage with the community and respond to all comments
After the blogpost started getting a lot more attention, tons of people started to comment on the post. Many companies make the mistake of just letting people comment but do not engage with the commenters themselves. However, it feels good to have a writer respond to you, so I strongly recommend engaging everyone’s comments, whether they are compliments or simply saying how ignorant and disgusting you are.
Hope this helps, and I look forward to one day stumble upon your viral post! Contact me if you ever need help with anything, anytime!
