3 Ways – You, as a content creator, can create viral content.
In this article, we’ll break down how others have created viral content and how you can achieve higher shareability, more views, and building a broader audience.
Everyone wants to be known, seen, and heard.
What are the three critical areas of viral/shareable content?
- Contextual Content
- Emotion Evoking
- Quickly Digestible
Contextual Content
Every piece of viral content has these three elements. Suppose you want a piece of content to grow in views, likes, or shares. The content has to be contextual to the viewer.
People will double tap on what is familiar, relatable, funny, and share with similar audiences when they feel it reflects an aspect of themselves or the relationship.
As a gamer, I have a group chat where there’s a constant chatter of memes, videos, new games, industry news, or the like. We each are a gatekeeper to the discussion, and we keep it about gaming. There’s no politics or sports-related content. It’s contextual, and we gauge and understand the audience will like relevant content.
So contextual content is a way for specific content groups. In short, groups of people will share content with their friends when it’s relevant and content they enjoy.
So how you create contextual content starts by answering the following questions.
- What are you creating?
- Who are you making it for?
- Why should they care?
- How is this familiar to the audience?
Emotion Evoking
Once these questions get answered, you’ll only be a third of the way through creating viral content.
The second stage is about evoking emotions. The largest and best emotional groups for shareability is joy and anger.
Doesn’t seeing this image, wanna make you smile?
If you have great content, but it’s not emotionally evoking. It’s likely to get passed over for more emotional content because emotional content is compelling. There are millions of images of sunsets, but cat videos get shared? They are funny for cat owners or pet owners.
Sunsets are beautiful and vast, but they typically don’t have any emotional attachment to viewers unless they have been to the same place. It’s a memory for the viewer. Make sense? Now you’re getting it. The behavior of social media is understandable, rationale, and repeatable.
Answering the following items will help you create viral content.
- Figure out the emotional appeal to the viewer.
- What’s funny about it? Insert the type of emotional response.
- Why do they want to see it?
Quickly Digestible
The last aspect of viral content comes down to digestibility. Have you cut out all the unnecessary parts? Have you edited it down to just the meat?
You may be thinking, okay, I have contextual content, and I’m evoking emotions. Why does making it digestible matter?
Think bit size. You’re feeding content on platforms where the interactions are a few seconds to a few minutes.
If you have two hours of content but only 12 seconds is the primary message. You think a user is going to wade through an hour of content to get your twelve seconds. Nope. Wrong. Incorrect.
Why has the meme culture or tweets taken over social media? Because they get to the root of humor, frustration, or sadness as quickly as possible.
Many content creators are struggling to gain an audience or break-in because they don’t spend enough time thinking about what it is they are putting out.
Before posting, consider these questions:
- Am I getting to the point quickly?
- Is it immediately relatable?
- Can I cut out anything that isn’t necessary?
Wrapping Up
If you want to be rich and famous but your habits are more in line with a couch potato. Are you going to achieve your dreams? Doubtful.
Can you achieve your dreams? Maybe, depends on your goals, your skills, and the ability to work towards your vision. Even more importantly, that those items are not giving up when crap gets real hard.
It would be best if you cared about what it is you’re doing. Why you’re doing it, who you’re doing it for, and then you need to be patient.
This ain’t going to happen overnight. It takes time. Think…years. So slow down, it is okay for it to take time. Get the formula right and then build it over time.
Get the basics down.
Go experiment.
Execute.
Learn something.
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