by JD Rucker on Apr 25, 2011
Viral. It’s been been the goal of marketers and website owners since the days of “RE:FW:FW:RE:You gotta watch this” emails, which made videos and images spread across the globe. Today, email is the last place to try to “go viral,” but there are plenty of new venues in social media that do the trick in a more controllable manner than ever before.
Here, we will look at three aspects of viral marketing: the why, where, and how. It’s the most challenging aspect of social media marketing. Few are able to take content and make it go truly viral, in fact you can count on 5 or 6 hands the number of companies who can go viral on a consistent basis.
If you know what you’re doing and focus on quality, you caould be on hand number 6 or 7 of that exclusive list.
Why Go Viral?
Those of us who have been working in social media for a while have probably experienced that moment when we learned one important message – viral social media traffic rarely converts. Whether your website is used to generate leads, make sales, or bring in ad revenue, going viral on any of the 5 major traffic generators (detailed below) is not a way to convert visitors.
Social media is a venue of enjoyment and interaction. Few go to social media sites to buy things, find services, or read ads. The revenue-generation aspect of social media is minimal when you look directly at the traffic itself. Compared to search traffic, it’s downright awful as a conversion tool.
With that being the case, why would anyone want to go viral?
via Viral Marketing: Creating Content That “Pops” On Social Media / Flowtown (@flowtown).