Don’t like reading? Listen to the audio version instead:
if you listened to the audio, you may want to Click Here.
Otherwise, read on:
Is Aiming for Viral Content a Bad Idea?
Social media is full of “gurus” who teaches “anybody” how to have their content go viral. There are some Youtubers who consistently produce viral content, who claim it is possible to “make anything go viral”.
When you look at their track records, they probably can. They have taken what used to be a hit-and-miss shot in the dark, and turned it into a reasonably exact science.
The question is this:
Should YOU be aiming for viral social media posts?
It is a tempting thought…
Reaching all those people, growing a huge following, and seeing staggering numbers on a regular basis seem very desirable. After all, you would like your business to be famous, right?
The reality is that it is not as simple as it seems. There are three things you need to keep in mind:
1. Viral content is good for branding.
It’s simple math. The more people seeing your content, the more people are being exposed to your business brand. Assuming, of course, you had the good sense to include some branding on the piece of content you put out there.
While not all of the people seeing your posts will be potential clients or customers, everybody will be exposed to your brand.
It’s a win-win result, right?
Actually, not quite. It comes with a massive trade-off: The actual people you reach.
2. The people seeing – and interacting with – your content.
Yes, some of them may very well become clients or customers in the future. But when you look at the basic buying cycle (browse, research, purchase), many of them might not even be in the browsing phase.
They may be people who just stumbled across your content, found it interesting, and decided to interact with it.
As a result, the actual number of people who see it, and are also open to doing business with you, can be a tiny fraction of the actual number of people exposed to it.
So, you may wonder, why is that a bad thing?
Algorithms on social media.
Social media algorithms try to keep people on their platforms for as long as possible, in order to expose them to as many advertisements as possible, which makes them money.
This means that, instead of exposing your content to people who are likely to become clients or customers, they will expose your content to people who are most likely to view it, and then continue to explore other content.
After all, they feel that if you want buyers, you should pay the network for ads.
The people they show it to will be the people who are most likely to interact with your content (maximum view times for videos, likes, shares, etc.). This selection is determined by the behavioral records of the people consider showing it to.
Keep in mind that their interactions will also have some influence on who your future content is shown to first. Social networks first show your content to a small group of people who are most likely to interact with it, and subsequent exposure depends on the amount of engagement it receives.
So if you create one insanely popular post which gets a million views, and follow it up with s targeted piece of content that is aimed at generating leads…
Chances are that much of the initial group seeing it will include people who reacted to your viral post – because they are deemed to be the most likely to interact with your new post.
However, with most of these people not really being interested in your new, targeted piece of content, engagement is likely to be very poor, and your subsequent exposure – if any – is likely to be poor too.
This can influence the performance of future posts for some time to come.
3. It will give you many new followers – mostly the wrong ones.
Many people who interact with your viral content may decide to follow you. However, there is a glaring red flag:
Their expectations.
They are following you because of the one piece of content they saw. So when you put out a targeted piece of content after that…
Some of your new followers will be part of the initial group the content is shown to – and if not many of them engage with it, which is likely, it will severely reduce the further exposure of the post or video.
Imagine you had, say, 2,000 followers. You put out a piece of content which went viral, and gained you another 5,000 followers.
That means that more than two thirds of your existing following might not be interested in targeted content. So when you put out targeted content after viral content, your post is initially shown to a mixture of followers and people likely to interact with content from you.
If the engagement stays low for a few consecutive posts, algorithms are likely to classify your content as being of poor quality, limiting your future exposure.
In conclusion:
If you want to aim to create viral content, you should not only do so with every post, but you should also aim at the same cross section of people every time.
Depending on your niche, this might be a good thing or not.
The other option is to keep your own channel or profile focused on targeted, helpful content, and either use your viral content on another channel or profile, or create potentially viral content only to be used as sponsored posts on other people’s channels or profiles.
That way, not only will your main profile or channel keep attracting the right audience, but you can still use viral content to siphon targeted followers to you