Virality or viral content means posts (images or videos) that people want to share with others, making the post more and more popular. Social media users read viral text posts, watch viral videos, comment on them and share the pieces on their own social media pages.
Not every social media post has the potential to go viral. Meanwhile, some do by accident even if their creators had no such intention at all.
Yet, there are tricks that will help you master the social media virality phenomenon and leverage it for your business.
Yanny and Laurel, the Ice Bucket Challenge, FaceApp, #Gradient, Dolly Parton challenge are just some-to-name examples of viral social media posts.
Why should your Instagram content be viral?
Content virality is not a secret of success at all and not a necessity in Instagram marketing. Yet, it’s a nice bonus that can increase your profile reach, help you earn more followers and even clients.
Here are seven reasons why you should try to create a viral Instagram post:
- Brand awareness and general popularity are increased. Remember the apps that became largely popular thanks to their viral features (Gradient, FaceApp, TikTok).
- Instagram followers count boosts.
- Your followers can potentially converse into customers.
- It helps to promote your Instagram page or website.
- New followers attraction costs relatively cheap.
- It’s generally more affordable than target ads or influencer marketing.
Some of the viral social media posts can later become evergreen memes which live on their own on the Internet.
How to create viral content on Instagram
Some types of posts have this magic potential to go viral. Here they are:
- Insightful how-to posts
- Tips and lifehacks videos
- Unusual cases and data-driven reports
- Lists with tools, tips, recommendations, etc.
- Step-by-step guides
- Infographics
- News
- Challenges and flash mobs
- Memes and vines
Remember that the content creation process is streamlined when you use special content planning tools. Combin Scheduler will help you plan posts and Stories, add a link in your Instagram bio, repost other users’ content, and tag other people to draw their attention to your content.
Aside from this, we’ve prepared some recommendations on how to create appealing content that can easily go viral.
Call for emotions
You need to understand your audience, their everyday routine, their fears and motivations, and know what kind of content will more likely resonate with them.
As a marketer, business owner, or a content creator, you should know how to get through to your typical target personas and their emotions. Viral posts go viral because people are not indifferent to them; the posts always touch on some people’s feelings. That’s what you should strive for when creating a potentially viral post.
Make your message personal, not generic. A perfect example of such an emotionally-based post is the #10yearchallenge on Instagram. The trick was in nostalgia that many of us wanted to feel.
Inspire and get inspired
Pay attention to and absorb everything you see on social media. Some ideas often have unexpected sources of inspiration. Instagram Explore Tab is a perfect place to start. Many of us discover current trends from this page, so don’t forget to scroll it every so often.
To make the exploration process quicker, use Combin Growth. Its powerful search tools will help you find any content on Instagram. Just type any interesting keyword or a hashtag along with advanced search parameters and start searching.
Once you’ve found and explored relevant content, you can start interacting with the posts, and the users created them. After you found the results, you can easily sort them by following/follow ratio, ER, virality, comments, and likes.
It’s also useful to scroll TikTok as an encyclopedia of virality. No other social media platform has so many viral challenges like TikTok. This platform, or its users to be more specific, made virality the special thing of TikTok.
Interesting is that challenges and trends on TikTok know no geo borders and often go viral internationally and even migrate to other social media.
Be funny
If your message seems appealing to people and is conveyed entertainingly and in a funny way, it will more likely resonate with your audience. Wonder why memes are so famous for decades? This is why they juxtapose humour and reality.
Come up with unique ideas
Original and unique characters or messages can influence the virality of your content.
Keep it useful
There are many cases when entertaining content went viral and had no even sign of usefulness. Yet, don’t discard the opportunity to be helpful for people. Offer a discount, promo code, or insightful hacks for a share or a repost.
Provoke
No wonder that spicy and provocative content is of enormous interest to people and quickly goes viral as users comment on it fiercely and share it with their friends. Yet, when creating such posts, it’s crucial to stay within reason; otherwise, there’s a risk of getting flagged by Instagram.
Now you know what you should do to create viral posts on Instagram. And the Combin tools are ready to help you master the virality on social media and make appealing content.
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