Viral content is the best way to get noticed in the online world. It’s exceedingly hard to make such content work due to increasing competition, especially for small businesses, and you’ve got to know where to place it in order to get attention. That’s why you’ve really got to look at the breakdowns of the various social networks to get an idea of how viral content is used and viewed across the world.
For those looking to make a big splash, you must start with Facebook. With over a billion users, it’s the most popular platform on which you can distribute content today. Users tend to be at their peak on the weekends, and really prefer their content to be in the form of fresh images – photos generate more than 100% more comments than their text cousins. Be careful, though, because Facebook users don’t like auto-generated posts – they want to feel like they are actually engaging with brands.
Twitter’s just as image-friendly as Facebook, but with a twist – Twitter users really love their hashtags. Hashtagged posts tend to get about 35% more retweets, especially during the afternoon. Don’t go crazy with the tags, though – users tend to disengage as soon as there are more than two hashtags on a given post.
If you’re looking towards videos, the place to go is YouTube. About half of all mobile traffic is video-based, and YouTube gets a huge share of that traffic. Consumers are looking for something short and impactful – most visitors tune out after about a minute, so keep your messages short. Users are more likely to view and remember video ads by brands than they are to read text ads, and those videos that are strongly branded and have closed captioning tend to be the most effective online.
Beyond knowing the networks, you have to learn how to track your influence. Checking out a variety of services will help you learn who is searching, who is sharing, and who is tagging what content online. It’s important that you spend time on market research if you really want your viral content to go anywhere – poorly researched content is hit or miss, and you can never count on it going viral. Instead of spending all your time wondering what you can do to take a hit, you can look at the numbers in this infographic – you might just learn a bit more about social media viral sharing.
