A couple of weeks ago on Facebook, most of us saw the video of a nine-month old, diapered baby getting his groove on to Single Ladies by Beyonce. (If you didn’t, check it out: it was hysterical!)
As a business owner, it can be frustrating to watch such a silly video being passed from one person to the next while you’re working as hard as you can to publish informative and useful information that just sits, resulting in little interaction from your fans.
Certainly, the people who are already fans of your business may find your content interesting, and it may help to keep you at the forefront of their minds, but why aren’t they passing along your posts? Why isn’t the Facebook magic that other people are buzzing about working for you?
Don your marketing cap. Think back to the principles of what transforms something interesting into something viral (passed along from one person to the next).
There are three main traits that a message must have to become viral:
1. Emotion. Your content needs to appeal to the reader/viewer on an emotional level, be that joy, sadness, fear, anger, love, or happiness. If you think about the dancing baby, most people chuckled heartily when watching the video. They felt joy and, perhaps, a sense of surprise, so the video touched them on an emotional level.
2. Benefit. The content that you publish must also give your fans the feeling that they will be helping people in their networks by sharing this information. Benefits either increase a positive or they reduce a negative. Benefits are concrete statements and are often expressed in numerical form.
For example, you might be saving your friend 20% on a clothing item or saving them 5 minutes by sharing an organizational tip.
Now, in the dancing baby example, there isn’t a way to quantify how much a person’s happiness would be increased, but certainly, people spread the video expecting that their friends would have a good ‘ol belly laugh after watching.
3. Trigger. A trigger reminds people to pass the information along. This is where Facebook “does the work for you” and why it’s such a wonderful tool to use from a marketing perspective. If you have the first two traits in place, Facebook users know instinctively that they simply need to click a “share” button or make a comment about your words and off your content goes to their network.
The lesson here is that, if you want your words to be sent of into the great land of Internet magic for all to share, you must focus on appealing to your readers/viewer on an emotional level AND making them believe that they will be helping others by passing it along.
Keep these two traits in mind with each Facebook post and you’ll see many more of your fans clicking that “Like” button or making a comment each day!
