How to Build a Viral Social Media Strategy From Scratch

A thriving social media strategy can boost brand awareness, increase audience engagement, and generate sales. But how exactly do you build one from scratch?

Establishing clear goals is an essential first step. Make sure they’re measurable, attainable, and relevant (known as SMART) to your business.

Selecting the right platforms is an important part of any social mediastrategy. Each platform excels at different content formats.

1. Understand Your Audience

Getting your content to go viral requires careful planning, perfect timing, and an understanding of what makes people engage. This type of marketing technique generates positive results that can help you increase brand awareness, organic traffic, and customer loyalty.

To create content with viral potential, focus on identifying current trends, using eye-catching visuals, telling compelling stories, and encouraging user interaction. It’s also important to optimize your content for each platform. For example, Instagram is great for photo and video marketing, while Facebook is best for text-based posts.

Finally, make sure to track the performance of your content. This will allow you to adjust your strategy as needed and ensure that your goals are being met. For example, if one of your posts is performing well, consider repurposing it. For instance, you could turn a long blog article into a Top 10 list or a how-to guide. Moreover, you can use paid promotion to further amplify your content and reach new audiences. A reputable ppc agency in Dubai can assist with this process.

2. Create Content That Resonates With Your Audience

It's no secret that content can increase visibility, build brand loyalty, and drive conversions. However, creating content that resonates with your audience requires more than just writing a well-crafted message. It requires the ability to connect with your audience at a deeper level.

One way to do this is by incorporating feedback into your strategy. Whether this is through comments on social media, email responses, or surveys, incorporating feedback into your content allows you to better understand your audience's needs and wants.

Another way to do this is by creating content that adds value to your audience's lives. This can be done by sharing industry insights, providing helpful tips, or offering exclusive deals. By doing this, you'll show your audience that you care about them and are dedicated to establishing a long-lasting relationship.

Finally, you can also create content that resonates by creating content that speaks to the current topics or events in your industry. This will demonstrate that you are up-to-date on your industry's news and discussions, and it will help to establish you as a thought leader.

3. Create Content That Evokes Emotions

The best content grabs our attention, compels us to keep reading, and ultimately, convinces us to share it with our friends. That kind of content is powered by emotional triggers that are able to create an instant connection with your audience.

Emotional content evokes powerful emotions such as happiness, sadness, fear, or surprise, which encourage engagement. It also helps drive brand loyalty and increases memorability. In addition to positive emotions, emotional content can also evoke negative emotions such as frustration or anxiety. This can be a great way to highlight the problems that your product or service can help solve.

Creating emotionally engaging content requires a strong understanding of your audience. Using customer personas and behavioral data, you can tailor your content to evoke the desired emotion.

Personal stories and testimonials are effective at evoking emotions, as they can relate to your audience’s experiences. Additionally, utilizing visuals can amplify the impact of your message. Examples of this include images, videos, and infographics.

4. Utilize Visuals

Visuals captivate audiences and encourage them to interact with your content. Posts containing visuals attract 77% more engagement than those without. Using visuals also increases retention and understanding of information, making it easier for viewers to digest your message.

To create viral-worthy visuals, analyze your previous successes and identify the core elements that evoked audience emotion and drove sharing behavior. For example, if a short video about a life hack performed well, consider ways to expand the concept into a longer, more comprehensive piece.

Leverage trending hashtags to gain discoverability and pull your brand into relevant conversations. Use tools like Hashtagify to find popular tags and experiment with different formats (polls, carousel posts, and short videos) to see what resonates best.

While view counts and likes offer a good gauge of performance, avoid over-focusing on these metrics as they can mask low engagement and can give the impression that your content is opportunistic. Instead, focus on metrics that reveal genuine audience connection and sharing behavior – like shares, comments and time spent watching. Then, use this information to create content that performs well across channels and delivers impactful growth.

5. Encourage User Participation

Brands can encourage organic engagement and increase their visibility by implementing viral marketing strategies. These strategies help businesses reach a large audience without significant expense or effort.

Viral content should resonate with the audience, capture their attention and evoke an emotion that is relatable to them. A successful viral campaign will also be easily shareable. This can be done by using trends, hashtags and creating interactive content.

Interactive content can be in the form of quizzes, polls and contests. The key is to craft questions that are intriguing, relevant and engaging. For example, Sephora’s “Shade Finder” tool is an excellent example of interactive content that resonates with audiences. The tool allows users to input their skin tone and undertones to find the perfect foundation shade for them.

Another way to encourage user participation is by running a contest or challenge that is time-sensitive. By releasing content during peak engagement times, brands can maximize their reach. For example, a sweepstakes or a giveaway during a holiday can see an increase in participation.