10 Ways To Become A Viral Social Media Superstar

JUST KIDDING! I can’t make you go viral overnight. You can try scrolling down directly to the actual instructions if you like, but in my opinion, any guide claiming to know the dark arts of going viral is lying to you. What I’m offering you isn't a real step-by-step guide on how to go viral – it’s more of a small dissection of what going viral means. But who knows, if you do follow my advice, maybe you’ll actually go viral (maybe being the keyword here). 

What even is “going viral” anymore?

I remember a time when “going viral” meant something, when it felt like being in the Average Joe team in Dodgeball, a victory to the underdog, so unlikely that you didn't even really know it could happen, and when it does happen, felt like getting an Oscar for your first ever film. Nowadays, we live in a different age. In 2015, everyone nurtures a secret desire to go viral. Some people even try a little bit too hard. Companies create online publications with the aim of going viral, because everything and anything can go viral, and every single day something goes viral.

Why has virality become so common? Here are three reasons:

The creation of free social platforms: everyone with an ounce of internet in their household or on their phones can now access these free networks. There’s not even an excuse not to be on social media anymore. If you’re not on social media, you obviously don’t want to be.

People are becoming more intimate with social media: Not to make it sound weird, but people are really taking their mobiles everywhere (I don’t even want to hear you say your mobile has never been to the loo with you). While a lot of it involves playing Candy Crush until you get carpal tunnel, it also means that people are spending more time on social media. I have proof! Not only are people spending more time with their noses in their Facebook apps, but these social networks' populations are also growing steadily. What's happening is the equivalent of a social network baby boom, and it’s not even hit a plateau yet. 

As social networks grow, so does sharing, which can take ridiculous proportions. For instance, behold MrPimpGoodGame on Instagram: 

You might have heard of him – he's "the selfie guy", self-entitled "leader of the selfie movement". He’s got 219,000 followers.That’s 3 times the population of Inverness, which is pretty impressive for an account that is essentially a mosaic of identical selfies. This is really the first time that it is possible for users to share something on that kind of scale – and the first time that we've been able to quantify “word of mouth”.

What were the first pieces of content that went viral?

The first pieces of viral content, and indeed a great proportion of the current viral content are YouTube videos. Youtube was the first platform to host the first truly viral pieces of content on the internet. It was the first platform to make embedding videos and sharing videos to social media so fast and easy. Here’s an example of a viral video from the good old days. 

They all had common traits: obviously user-generated, relatively low in quality, simple, and midly entertaining. This is what I consider truly viral content – content that is massively shared and exposed, but that will actually make you go insane trying to figure out why they’re so successful. This is basically what is known as a meme, but I'll leave Know Your Meme to explain the full definition of that.

The BBC reported that the Numa Numa guy’s video was the second most viral video at the time, with 700 million views. This is what it did to search trends: 

There is power in going viral

There is tremendous power in memes, and companies recognise that. It makes sense to harness this kind of power - who wouldn't want the opportunity to speak to an audience of millions with one simple piece of content? I have no qualms with this instinct, but what I do have a problem with is how companies are trying to replicate the viral process. What makes it unauthentic is how predictable the outcome of branded viral content is. 

Sure, semantically, viral means something that spreads from person to person, and in that sense, viral marketing is intended to cause people to spread the promotion to their friends. Fair enough, that Old Spice advert is actually really funny, and it went viral because it did everything right, without anyone really seeing it coming. However, the end result is obviously something that was intended by the minds who came up with it. You can’t make a video like this and say you expected anything less than 40 million views. 

Companies now understand very well how to replicate the organic process of going viral. They are trying to mimic user-generated content, trying to turn themselves into memes, always aiming for pure wackiness or shock value. They are trying to be The Harlem Shake, the Mutant Spider Dog, or The Woman Who Cried Because She Wasn’t Nicki Minaj. It almost feels like buying followers on Twitter or paying for likes on Facebook – fake, at best, even for the best of content. To go back to semantics, you wouldn’t want a virus to spread – therefore a piece of content that is viral shouldn’t really have any commercial intent behind it.

I'm not against non-user-generated content - I'm against trying to pass the mass sharing of some corporate content as organic. It's not exactly a question of whether or not the video is going to be viral, when you put 10 professionals around a table and tell them to come up with ideas. Of course it's going to be wildly popular if you know exactly what to say and who to say it to, but will it be the same quality of amplification that the Gangnam Style knew in 2012? That is a prime example of organic viral amplification, completely unexpected, and completely owned by internet users.

10 Ways To Go Viral

Without further ado, here are some ways you can (maybe) become viral. This list shouldn’t be taken 100% seriously because of, well, all the above. That said, even if you don’t go viral, the following advice will help your content (video, image, text or otherwise) be very, very popular, anyway. 

1. Tap into people’s emotions quickly and effectively. Build an emotional roller coaster that only lasts a few minutes, and throw your audience head first in it. Telling women they are beautiful inside won’t make them compulsively run to the supermarket and purchase Dove bars, but it sure helped Dove go viral. Make sure you use something that will resonate with the people you want to speak to. If you’re trying to promote something to tech-savvy people, for example, don’t try to be soppy. Pick their brains, look at their everyday lives and pick out something you know they will identify with.
2. Have a million followers. Of course your content is going to get shared and “go viral” if you already have a massive number of followers, provided the content is good. If you churn out a video as interesting as watching paint dry, then even your legion of followers won’t help you there – that said, if it's so bad that it's good, it might still get a lot of attention (see the GoCompare ads).
   If you don’t have hordes of followers, time to roll up your sleeves and do dirty work. A little outreach here, a little buzz-generating campaign there, and you’ll grow an avid base of followers in no time. Now all you have left to do is give them what they want: something wacky they can share to their friends and be popular on Twitter. What I mean to say in this point, is that networking is key.
3. Come up with a badass headline. Think “Attack of The Spider Mutant Dog”. Think “The Real Walter White”. Or if your content isn’t THAT epic, sell your soul and come up with titles like “11 Things Everybody Made Fun Of But Secretly Loved In 2014”. These numbered lists/rankings have become all the rage on the web, and we have Buzzfeed to thank for starting this trend. Or use superlatives, e.g. “The Best Movie Compilation of 2014” - even if it’s not necessarily true, you’re guaranteed to get attention. Also, here’s Upworthy’s advice on coming up with headlines. 
   
   
4. Optimise your content for sharing and collaboration. If you want people to share your content, better make it very easy to do so. This can mean things like finding a good formula to make your video quick to watch but also arresting enough to keep people interested. You can also make sure that you are using the platform that is best for your piece of content. Got a video of yourself doing 15 different accents? Upload it to YouTube and get UniLad to share it. Facebook is a good platform for these type of things – the majority of social network users are on Facebook anyway, and even though I can’t even count the number of these types of videos I see every day on my newsfeed, it is still the place where you’ll get the most views. 
5. Bring people together. There’s something about feeling like you’re a part of something that makes things go viral: the Harlem Shake, for example, made very different groups of people all over the world feel like they were part of a community that was actively participating in a mini-movement. 
6. Add a good cause to the mix (whenever applicable). Were you nominated to do the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge in 2014? Did you share a no make-up selfie? These wildly viral campaigns actually satisfy the above two conditions: easy to execute, highly shareable, makes people feel like they are part of something. What makes them even more likely to go viral is the fact that there is a good cause behind them. Jumping on the bandwagon feels even better when you receive good karma for it. Beware of cynics though, who have taken to calling this “slacktivism”.
7. Make a video. Even though numbered lists are popular and easy to digest, videos are still the type of content most likely to go viral. It’s easy to suss out why – they’re usually fast to watch, entertaining, and only require a passive degree of attention to grasp their concept. It’s always been a great deal easier to convince a friend that a video of a piano-playing cat is entertaining, than to thrust a 700-pages long Philip Pullman novel in someone’s face and try to convince them that it’s awesome. YouTube is where most viral content seems to reside, because it is very easy to quantify how viral a video is just by looking at the views. And once again, videos are easily shareable, quick to hook the viewer, and only require a very passive engagement to comprehend. All in all, very well optimised for going viral.
8. Get on Reddit– or any other user-generated content platform. Reddit in particular, has become the “home of what the internet likes the best” according to the Guardian. There is a subreddit for everything, and this one proves it. It’s a sure-fire way to get whatever you want shared out there, provided you, as a business, can mask your commercial intent well, as users don’t take very kindly to commercial messages on a platform that users have taken total ownership of. If you want your three-legged pug to get viral status, this is definitely the place to go.
9. Inspire both intense hate and/or love. It’s a hard thing to predict sometimes, but going for extremes seem to be something that will make you go viral. These racist girls got a lot of views on YouTube for example, probably because well, they’re racist and everyone hates racists. Sometimes, or maybe most of the time, this can be unintentional, so I’m not sure how you’ll go about following this particular piece of advice. Rebecca Black probably didn’t ask for any of this. 
   
   
10. Look like a boy band member. This isn’t very good advice at all, but I just wanted to take this opportunity to mention Alex from Target. He is simply Alex, a teenager who works at this Target. Someone tweeted a photo of him at work, with a caption that said “YOOOOOOOOOOO”, and all of a sudden, he’s a Twitter superstar. 
    
    
    
    Mashable revealed that within days, over 1 million people have tweeted about him. This is a recent, prime example of someone who went viral for seemingly no reason, and the kind of buzz that Fortune 500 companies would maim for. 
    Just keep your fingers crossed. Luck is the main factor for achieving this degree of virality. You can’t replicate luck, but by following the above advice, you are already giving yourself a good chance at it!