Viral content helps to increase the visibility on Google, Bing, Yahoo or Ask Jeeves search engines. Social networking sharing is viral content that can drive backlinks to your website. So how does this work? Social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Google+ and Twitter are great ways to create some content, either an image or better still a video, a get your audience to share it on their pages. The amount of visibility will increase exponentially as it is shared around by your friends, followers and other people in your network. Huge amounts of social marketing shares will mean a large number of people found what they were searching for and consider it good enough to share on Facebook or retweet on Twitter.
It will never be simple however to produce an image or video that will go viral. Viral content sends a clear flag to your website that it is up-to-date, actively busy and has got your audience interested. Viral content is shared around by others sharing and even people talking down the local bar or restaurant. One great example of viral content was the British newspaper, The Guardian and its reproduction of interviews with famous or notorious people. They printed interviews with Princess Diana, John Lennon, The Sex Pistols, Malcolm X and Marilyn Munroe.
The interviews were very popular online as they were available on its website and you could share the transcripts of those famous interviews with friends and other social networking folk. This was a great way to learn from social sharing and viral content exposure. Famous people or A-list celebrities and legendary artists are everywhere on the internet but gather together in one place all those names and get some powerful keywords and watch it go viral.
Another type of viral content is the free and bite-sized content that is of great use to us as a guide for creating virility. Seth Godin’s ingenious book about viral ideas was free and it was small enough to link within an email as an attachment and it was very useful information. Funny videos are the type of viral content that really takes us into the top ten popularity charts. Remember the Miss South Carolina blonde interview? The YouTube video went viral because of its blonde beauty contest fail. People thought it was just funny and it spread via email, Facebook shares and on Twitter links too.