How to Create Viral Content (with Four Real-Life Examples)

Are you looking to take your content viral in the hopes of finding new customers, increasing revenue, reaching new markets, or to troll the Internet?

Whatever your goal is with viral marketing, in this guide I’m going to show you how to make viral content, provide examples of how I hacked my content to go viral, and show you examples of businesses doing viral marketing right.

What Is Your Viral Marketing Goal?

Quiz time: How many impressions or views do you need before your viral marketing goal is reached?

The success of viral marketing shouldn’t be based on the amount of views or shares, but whether your goal was reached.

For example, let’s say a local ecommerce business is creating a piece of viral content hoping it will lead to more sales of their product. They service the local area of around 250,000 people.

After releasing their video it receives over 2.5 million views. Is that a success?

If the local population of 250k people saw the video and many of them went on to buy the product, then hell yeah it’s a major win! But if it didn’t make any impact on sales, it’s a fail even with 2.5 million views.

Don’t get lost in the numbers or impressions, because honestly they don’t mean anything if your goal wasn’t reached. They are just vanity metrics. If you want to get 2.5m views, you can buy fake views for less money and time than doing it organically.

You first need to define what your goal is with viral marketing, as this will help you create the right piece of content and give you benchmarks at the end of the campaign to see if it was successful.

If your goal is to increase revenue or acquire new customers, then at the end of the campaign you simply need to look at how much you spent on the campaign against revenue or new customers to give you your ROI.

But what if your goal is to get more engaged followers on Instagram or to reach users who follow specific hashtags?

These goals are much trickier to measure because with organic posting the metrics you can see are very limited, and because all followers aren’t created equal it becomes hard to quantify the success above an arbitrary follower count.  

For branding and awareness goals, a great hack to measure its success is to read the comments to give you an indicator of how people perceive you or your business. For example, if people are tagging their friends in with positive comments, it means there’s positive sentiment about your business.

If they criticize your content or attack your business, then that’s negative sentiment and it hurts your brand.

The Sport Bible is one of the biggest Facebook pages that still gains a lot of organic reach because it has (almost) mastered the art of viral content.

On a slow newsday (usually when the English football season is over), they repeat old news stories, which are often met with negative comments from their top fans!

Monitor the comments because viral content can go downhill really quickly if you offend or annoy people on the Internet – which, let me tell you, isn’t hard (see above).

Social media mention tools are also pretty useful when your business is going viral on the Internet. You can spot conversations that users are having about you on social media and the web using a few cool tools.

Some of the best monitoring tools are as follows:

• Hootsuite (social media)
• BuzzSumo (content marketing)
• BrandWatch (all rounder)

Where Should You Post Your Content?

For content to go viral, others have to share it.

You can write the best article in the world on your chosen subject, but if you cannot get eyes on it, you may as well not have written it.

You’ll first need to find online hangouts where your audience hangs out and then create content that is compelling enough for them to share.

Let me ask you a question: how often do you click the ’Share Post’ button on Facebook each week?

Unless you’re a vegan or cross-fitter, most only share things they are really passionate about or believe in. (I’m just kidding, vegans/cross-fitters!)

What you share on Facebook is a reflection of your own beliefs and values to some extent, so keep this in mind when creating content. You don’t want to create something so negative that users don’t want to share it, or something politically one-sided that isolates half the user base or ensures they attack your post.

Some of my favorite places are Facebook groups. There are over 100,000 groups, some with more than 100k members, and joining and posting is totally free in most cases:

When joining a group on Facebook, always read the group rules first, as many won’t allow you to self-promote right away.

The moderation features on groups have come a long way so you may need to be active in these groups for a week or two before putting your content forward.

Facebook groups now award members badges for starting conversations and replying. Getting one of these badges will make you look like a valuable member in the group rather than spammy.

Other places I like to post include the following sites:

• Reddit
• Community forums related to your niche
• Using hashtags to increase reach
• Paid advertising (more about this below)
• Blog commenting on high-traffic posts

If you’re in desperate need of ideas on how to create viral content, read the four examples of viral content below, including one of my own.

1. Riding a Community Trend

The first piece of content that I managed to get to go viral was a complete shock and surprise to me.

I wrote the article hoping that the few hundred people who visited the site might gain value. I did not expect it to reach over 250k views with dozens of sales.

It was originally posted on Facebook. Here it is:

It received over 12k likes, 583 comments, and 2,900 shares.

Considering this is a local business serving a small area (15 km distance), these numbers are fantastic. It resulted in a number of new sales, and locals were tagging their friends in the comments giving the business free exposure.

Sure, we didn’t get millions of views, but that didn’t bother me because I knew that my client didn’t have a million customers that would use their service in the local area. We drove sales, which was the goal of the blog post, and got free exposure which was great!

This piece of content went viral because it had the following three elements:

Seasonal – The article was posted during Bangkok’s hot season and there was a huge heatwave in the city. Everyone was feeling the heat and talking about it.

If you live in a city where a few days of the year it snows or you get an intense heatwave, I bet that each time you log in to Facebook someone is mentioning how it’s too hot or cold.

When your audience is talking about something in your niche – be it a rumour or factual story – riding this wave can be super beneficial to creating viral content, especially if you can give them advice, a unique opinion, or turn it into a funny joke.

A funny image – The image used in the ad was of high quality and made people laugh. The image sticks out like a sore thumb in the Facebook news feed, and without having to read a single word, everyone living in Bangkok gets it.

There’s value – The article provides readers with tips on how to stay hydrated during the heatwave and foods they should avoid eating.

There’s valuable information in the post, so even the few scrooges who didn’t laugh at the image may still tag their friends or share the post because the content can help others.

Seasonality + humor + value = viral content

I posted this blog post in several Facebook groups and it was getting comments and shares, but after a few days it died down. I had to keep posting it every week and it was taking up a lot of my time.

Then I had a great idea: why don’t I use paid advertising?

When posting organically I was getting great attention, but it would die down after a few days.

I calculated what two hours of my time was worth each week posting organically and ran a Facebook ad using the page post engagement for a weekly budget of two hours of my time.

And the results were staggering.

Using Facebook ads, I could target a specific location, age group, and interests and ensure that everyone who viewed my post was my target audience.

After two weeks I stopped running the ads and the post kept getting comments and shares.

The photo below shows how many people I reached. Over half of all engagement was organic (light orange). This image was taken a year before the previous image above, as Facebook no longer shows you how many people it reached:

You don’t get that freedom posting organically, as you have no control over who views or clicks your content.

You don’t have to rely on organic posting to get content to go viral. With the right content and by targeting the right audience, you can increase your reach by up to ten times the amount and hack your viral marketing.

2. The Harlem Shake

The Harlem Shake is a great example of how to receive user-generated content at a viral level.

If you’ve never seen the Harlem Shake before, can I ask, do you even Internet?

The Harlem Shake was a 30-second video that allowed any group of friends to make their own music video:

It blew up the Internet in 2013 and even celebrities like Ed Sheeran took part. But it died a few months later:

What made the Harlem Shake so popular was that any group of friends could do it.

Each interpretation of the dance was no longer than 30 seconds, which meant social media users were more likely to watch more than one version compared to watching one video that was four minutes long.

The first 14 seconds of the video has one person dancing passively while wearing a mask. The final 16 seconds, when the beat drops, is when people are just goofing around and being silly.

The formula was simple: 14 seconds of doing nothing followed by 16 seconds of going crazy and having fun. You weren’t required to have dance skills, a high-end camera, or be in a dance studio.

It could be filmed at home, at the office, at dinner, in a park – literally anywhere.

If your goal with viral marketing is to gain user-generated content, provide your audience with a very simple formula to follow.

14 seconds of passive dancing + 16 seconds of going crazy + a camera = viral content

Don’t ask for too much or require them to think for themselves, as most people are just too busy with life to do that. Give them an easy formula and make it fun.

3. Break the Mold

Perhaps one of the best marketing videos in the past 10 years has to be the Dollar Shave Club’s Our Blades Are F***ing Great video :

Before the Dollar Shave Club, the shaving industry was pretty much a monopoly industry run by Gillette, who at the time were telling men they had to get the latest shaving technology because they deserved only the best:

Dollar Shave Club knew that if they positioned their product in the same way, they would most likely fail like others before them.

So they pivoted. Instead of letting men know how great they would look, they turned their marketing into a form of entertainment and actually made fun of Gillette.

In hindsight this was a great move by the Dollar Shave Club as most men today can relate more to their message than Gillette’s, who have been pushing the same theme for decades.

(I can’t relate to either as I cannot grow facial hair, but this isn’t my personal diary so I’ll stop talking about that now.)

4. Kentucky Fried (No) Chicken

If you were living in the UK in February 2018, #chickengate happened at fast-food franchise Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC).

700 of the 900 shops in the UK had to be closed down because they ran out of chicken!

KFC didn’t have a leg to stand on (pun intended) and they were turning into a laughing stock.

If they came out and apologized, that wouldn’t have done them any favors. We’ve seen CEOs apologize in the past for their business mistakes and they aren’t ever met with much sympathy.

KFC did the only thing they could do: make a joke about it:

You’re not going to win over British people by saying sorry, but you can win them over by accepting you messed up and laughing at yourself along with us.

The KFC ad went totally viral and they received praise on social media from their customers.

They did such a good job that when you Google the search term “KFC sorry UK,” nobody is talking about what a terrible inventory job they did, but rather how great their marketing was:

If you’re in a situation where you’ve let down your customers and it’s totally your fault, using a similar approach may help you get out of a hot mess.

Your Turn to Go Viral

Getting GREAT content to go viral is easy when you can put it in front of the right people.

Don’t imitate others and expect the same result. Many have copied the Dollar Shave Club video for their own subscription service, but everyone knows who the original was and it doesn’t have the same appeal.

You need to understand your audience, what topics are on their minds, and how you can incorporate that into your marketing.

You’ll notice that all examples in this article have a humor element to them, so keep in mind that most people switch onto social media to cure boredom.

Negative stories don’t do as well because people are less likely to share or consume the content in its entirety as they feel bad, whereas positive and unique humor can spread like wildfire.