Asking yourself how you can incorporate today’s newsworthy trends into your viral content is worthwhile. Keep an eye on the Google News section and check out Google Trends. News also breaks out first on Twitter and Facebook’s trending section, so pay attention to trending topics there as well. If you upload a video to YouTube, Vimeo or even Facebook and get discovered by others who like what they see, they may do all the promotion for you by sharing it all over their own social networks. Make sure you have as many keywords as you can fit in the headline, description and throughout the text body if it has more written content. Platforms like YouTube, Tumblr, and Twitter also make use or tags or hashtags, which can also help you show up in search results. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to get noticed by someone big and famous. You can bug them a lot by reaching out to them via social media or email and hoping for the best, but there are no guarantees they’ll notice you. The wiser strategy would be to network intelligently with big influencers (not necessarily celebs, but people who have good reputations and large followings online) before you decide to ask for their help. Spend some time nurturing your relationship without asking them for anything first and you’ll have a greater chance of them agreeing to help you out with your viral campaign when the time comes for you to ask them about it. If you can give away something of value, this can act as a bribe to get people to like your Facebook page, follow you on Twitter and even get them to tweet about the contest or post it on Facebook to pull even more people in. A lot of social media campaigns make good use of contests and giveaways to keep their current audience engaged and attract new people. If your stuff is funny enough, you could get featured on all sorts of sites and blogs, contributing to the viral traction you were hoping for. When strong emotion is sparked from viewing a piece of content, people naturally want to share it to see how their friends will react to it too. Good or bad, it can still go viral! Now, we have major platforms that are almost entirely dedicated to pushing around visual content like Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest. Facebook also makes photos look very large in the news feed now, so people are more likely to notice them. It’s tricky, however, and it’s recommended that you take the time to get involved in the Reddit community first before just simply submitting links to your stuff for self-promotion. Reddit actually frowns a lot on submitting your own stuff, so you have to be careful here. To go viral, you need to do something that’s never been done before. You have to get people excited and offer them something that can affect their feelings strongly enough that it makes them want to share your content with their social networks. In other words, you have to hit them right in the emotions. That’s what it takes if you want to go viral these days.
