Why “Going Viral” isn’t a social media strategy

It honestly boggles my mind the number of times I see managers say that they want a social post that “goes viral”. The problem with this logic is three-fold:

1)      “Going viral” is extremely challenging, it can take years to build up to the point where it is possible for a post to go viral on your account.

2)      There’s a lot of luck involved. Virality, and the reason things go viral, require a lot of human psychology to go right and for the timing to be right. It’s like demanding to win the lottery.

3)      If “going viral” is winning the lottery, it’s also a bit of a cursed lottery. You can go “viral” for the wrong reasons – like a controversy (take the recent incident with a certain CEO at a Coldplay concert. And you can go viral but hit all the wrong people.

Basically, when people say they want “viral content”, they want the maximum reach, with the lowest cost, and the highest number of conversions. In other words, it’s an objective, not a strategy or tactic.

The reason a solid strategy matters is that you want to steadily grow the right audience, people who want to buy your product or service, and you want to produce consistent results. And you want to cultivate the circumstances that increase the probability of virality for the right reasons, to the right audience, and in a way that is going to produce long term benefit.

How do we go about this?

Like any marketing strategy the key elements are the following:

1.      Objectives and KPIs

2.      Target Audience

3.      Market Research

4.      Tone and Style

5.      Content Planning

But those we’ll cover in another blog post!