26 Aug How to Use Social Data to Create Viral Content For Your Blog

The rise of social media gave us a new perspective on what viral content is. Social networks allow us to spread a viral message in a matter of seconds, giving a new meaning to the good old word-of-mouth marketing.

Today, with the abundance of tools provided by social media, viral marketing is one of the top strategies to promote content, loved both by companies and average consumers. According to Smart Insights:

• 54% of respondents claim that word-of-mouth marketing is the driving force of their purchase decisions
• 49% of Americans believe that online viral messages are highly credible
• 55% of consumers are ready to recommend a company because of their viral activity

Viral marketing is very versatile, making it a perfect strategy for promoting a blog as well. Moreover, this is the best strategy to quickly spread a message about your blog.

The biggest benefit social media can bring to your blog in terms of viral marketing is social data. This data can be used to optimize your viral message and make sure that it fits your target audience.

Social Data and Viral Marketing

Social data includes but is not limited to:

• demographics and biographical data (including location and language)
• feedback (comments, shares, likes and other reactions) and shared links

This information comes as raw data which can further be analyzed and applied to promote a blog with the help of viral marketing.

Here’s how it works.

A viral message has the following characteristics:

• Addressing particular emotion – people share viral content because it addresses a certain emotion. Oftentimes, this is a positive emotion.
• High accessibility – a viral message can be easily accessed by any audience
• Easy to share – viral content is shared within a few seconds, which allows it to spread quickly

Social data addresses all these characteristics. It helps address a particular emotion by providing you with audience analysis. Social data ensures high accessibility by giving you the information on how people share your content, helping you find the optimal way. And lastly, social data helps you create viral content that’s easy to share, for instance, helping you find the best-performing hashtags.

Now, let’s go practical. Here are 3 tips on how to use social data to create viral content for your blog.

1. Understand Your Social Media Audience

After you’ve set up social media plugins on your blog (a must-do thing if you want to receive up-to-date social data), you can begin creating viral content from studying, who your social media audience is and how it reacts to your existing content.

Lucky for you, social media platforms provide you with the ready-to-use tools, which allow you to take a look, where your audience comes from.

Let us look at Facebook, for example.

A general overview of your Facebook audience allows you to see the age, gender, and language of people who follow you:

This demographic data is social data collected from your followers and ranked.

How can it help you create a viral message?

• Age and gender can help tailor your message appropriately
• The top language indicates that you should use it for your viral message
• The top country helps you identify which time is the best to share a message that will refer your Facebook audience to your blog

Next, you can take a look at best performing content that you’ve already shared:

The best performing content type indicates the form of the post which will promote your blog content. This increases the chances that your message will go viral.

Such analytics tools exist on every social media platform, and all of them provide up-to-date social data to help you create a viral message.

2. Ask Questions

To help you create viral content for your blog, you can ask your audience about content recommendations they would like to see.

Social networks provide surveying tools, which engage your audience in sharing feedback, which then is turned into social data.

Instagram is the best place to survey your target audience. Polls and surveys on Instagram come in an interactive form, which takes your followers only a few seconds to answer the questions:

Types of Instagram polls

You can ask your followers directly for viral blog ideas and use them to create viral content. Their feedback is social data that can help you better understand your audience and determine what blog content can potentially go viral.

3. Make Content Easy to Share with Hashtags

One of the prerequisites of successful viral content is making it easy to share. And, the easiest way to spread viral blog content on social media is a hashtag.

Companies greatly benefit from using hashtags to turn attention to their blogs. International real estate company Flatfy managed to double the traffic to their blog, where they share interactive graphs and maps, through the use of one hashtag.

When choosing #bootstrap for the viral marketing campaign for their blog, they performed hashtag analysis – the analysis of social data a hashtag carries that determines its popularity:

A hashtag is the fastest way to share viral blog content. However, picking a random hashtag won’t work. When creating a viral message, make sure that you do hashtag analysis before sharing your blog content.

Wrapping Up

Although social data has limitations (not everyone shares the same amount of information), it is still a very useful viral marketing tool.

Using social data to create viral content for your blog is a methodical approach that will help you successfully promote your blog. Creating a viral message requires thorough preparation, and social data provides you with all the information needed to create viral blog content.

Hopefully, these tips will guide you through creating blog content that will be shared by the millions of people worldwide!

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ryan is a passionate writer who likes sharing his thoughts and experience with the readers. Currently, he works as a digital marketing specialist, you can check his website at flatfy.com. He likes everything related to traveling and new countries.