Social Share – A Viral Social Marketing Strategy

If you are looking to promote your business online, then you must have surely come across the term viral marketing. This is just an online marketing buzzword. It refers to a working marketing technique to create brand awareness through social networking services and platforms. The viral ads are circulated online by the sponsor company and would be showcased on their websites or on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.

So what is viral marketing?

In the true sense, viral marketing is the internet word-of-mouth advertising. There is no powerful advertising tool than word of mouth. And using it online can help your business to easily grab the attention of your target audience. By using the word of mouth on social media, your advertising becomes even more potent. It is proven that people using social media networks recommend to their friends about the companies that they like and also look to buy products that they follow. They also check out more details when their friends recommend a new product or service.

Creating a viral marketing campaign

Viral marketing is available in a plenty of forms. This very fact makes it one of the best choices for business to advertise their products online. Some of the ways you can market your new product or service online are through articles, emails, videos, e-books, white papers, text messages, tweets, flash games, etc.

As a marketer, you will be looking to create the best marketing campaign that goes viral. This is how you can make your work click. The following are the tips that you need to keep in mind in order to create a successful viral marketing campaign.

• Visually appealing

It is very important for you to make the content that you need to go viral to be visually stunning and attractive. That is why you see some of the best campaigns to contain a good amount of videos and images. The visuals you choose must be in relation to the brand that you are promoting.

• Know the audience pulse

It is very important to know what the audience wants from you and how they can be entertained. If you are able to know what your audience wants in your marketing campaign, then you are sure to make the campaign go viral.

• Proper planning

The messages that you carry on the campaign must be appropriate and hence proper planning of the messages is a must.

1. The planning of a campaign must be done with the target audience in mind.
2. Make sure to communicate through social media on a regular basis. With a proper social media plan, you can have short-term goals for all the social channels you use.
3. If you know as to what people are searching for in your area of expertise, then you can make use of these keywords in your campaign ads to attract your target audience.

• Simple campaign

A complicated campaign can break the entire purpose of the campaign rather than making the campaign work. So, ensure that it is simple and easy to follow by your target audience. Have two or three marketing messages supported by images and short videos.

Follow these strategies to create a viral campaign for your website or business. However, to make it viral in the true sense, you need to promote social sharing of your content. Let’s take a look at this in detail.

Promoting social sharing using social media share buttons

Adding social share buttons on your website is a very simple, yet effective tool you can use in your business website to boost your sharing stats. If used properly, this viral marketing tool can work wonders for your business. The visitors visiting your website can instantly make use of the social media share buttons on your web pages to share your web pages through various social media platforms. By this way, you can amplify the reach of your website or blogs within minutes.

The following are the best practices you need to follow to add social media buttons to the website.

• Choosing the right social share buttons for your website

Website owners must understand that putting a lot of social media share buttons on their website will not help in bringing in more lead to their website. You should only make use of the buttons that you think will work for your business.

Using popular social media network buttons like Twitter and Facebook is ideal for all kinds of contents. But, the same cannot be said for LinkedIn or Reddit button. There is no harm in including an email button or even an RSS button, especially in blogs. The best way forward will be to take into account from where your current traffic is coming. And then optimize accordingly. It is imperative for you to aim for not more than 3 to 4 social media sharing buttons on your website. You should also make a sincere effort to house all of them in one widget.

• Where to use the buttons?

There is no need for you to place big sized social media sharing buttons on your website. It will be a distraction to the website visitors and this might do more harm than good for you. The ideal option would be to place the button in such a way that it strikes a perfect balance between the content and the promotion. The buttons should be easy to find and use. And should not attract much of attention on the web page. The sharing buttons must always be seen above the fold on all the important and relevant web pages. It should be placed in such a way that it is visible as soon as the visitor opens the web page. He should never be doing any scrolling or research of the web page to find the social share buttons.

Contents to share on social media networks

There is no doubt that you would be looking to post most valuable content on the social media channels in order to increase visitors to your business site. You would love to have many followers, shares, retweets, likes and followers. The following are the best types of content you can share through social media networks.

• Interactive content

Presenting interactive content in the form of videos, games, images, animation, etc., is a sure shot way to reach your products or services sooner to the target audiences. It is no more a ‘read it and pass it’ kind of content marketing industry now. Everything has to be visually appealing for people to quickly share with their social media friends.

• Newsworthy content

It is seen that news articles are often the most shared on the internet than any other kind of article. Even though you are not in the news industry, there is no harm in trying out breaking news type of content to entice your audience.

• Sparking positive emotion

Your social media content must always be creating positive thoughts in the minds of your readers. It must make them feel happy and must be high on happy and joyful emotion content. This is how it will be shared with many people.

• Infographics

One of the best ways to engage your readers is to offer infographic content. As humans can easily process visual information, saying the things that you have to say with videos and images can help in a great way. The attractive content will drive the brain to read the content on offer as well. Sharing infographics socially will make the social world share it as well.

Finding the best social media channels

There are plenty of social media channels out there. And you will find it very difficult to choose the most deserving one for your business. It is vital that you handpick the channels that would help in making sense to your brand. And then present your content in the right manner. There must be several factors that should influence your decision in choosing the right kind of social media channels for your business.

• The first thing you need to know is who your target audiences are and what kind of social media networks they use.

• Then the best way to find out if a particular social media network would benefit your business is to check out the social media activity of your competitors.

• You should also check out the social media channels that are already bringing traffic to your website. Some of the popular social media networks that can on your website are: Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Pinterest, Blogger, Weebly, etc. You should also think outside the niche social media networks and use some of the not so popular networks depending on the website or business you are promoting.

Different content styles to suit social media channels

In order to improve online visibility, you need to think beyond SEO, email marketing or PPC. Adding video channel share buttons like YouTube will help you in easily showcasing the new products or services launched by you. Using catchy words or phrases and hashtags on Twitter and Facebook will help in getting more people to like and share your products.

The best times to post content on social media channels is:

• For Facebook, the ideal posting times are from 1 to 4 pm on Thursdays and Fridays, 12 to 1 pm on Saturdays and Sundays and 3 to 4 pm on Wednesdays.
• The best time to post messages on Twitter is between 12 to 3 pm from Monday to Friday.
• The ideal time to post on LinkedIn is between 7:30 to 8:30 am, 5 to 6 pm on Tuesdays to Thursdays.
• For Pinterest, the best time to post is during the evenings on any day and from 8pm to 11pm on Saturdays.

Examples of Social share for different business domains

Social share and e-commerce

Social share is nothing but the organic way of promoting a business through the public. The users share the web content that they see on their social network to their connections, friends, and groups.

This is mainly used by businesses and brands to create brand awareness. They encourage their current set of audience to share the content to amplify the reach. The social share is a great tool to bring more people to your business. Consumers will be tempted to visit the company’s website. See what is on offer, and also check out their Twitter and Facebook feeds.

Social share and blogs

The reasons web site and blogs promote social sharing is because there is so much traffic it can generate. Traffic from social media services is only second to that of search engines.

Therefore, promoting blogs through social share is a sure-shot way of generating traffic for the website or blog. If your blog site happens to be on WordPress, the there are thousands of plugins available for each functionality that the user demands. Therefore, choosing the right functional plugin, should not be a difficult task.

To name a few like UserPro, along with creating awesome communities, it gives users the option of social sharing and adding social media buttons to their profile. It eliminates the requirement of having a separate plugin for social sharing. Another plugin, Ultimate Social Media allows to flawlessly share content using attractive social sharing buttons.

Alternatively, you can add social sharing to your WordPress themes like the Corden Bleu.

Easy social share buttons is another plugin. It allows users to add eight social media services with several button designs. Also, have a look at Shareaholic which provides many different layouts, sizes, themes and counter styles.

If you have any more questions related to Social sharing or viral marketing or wish to contribute with some additional information, then let us know in the comments section below.