How to Make Something Go Viral on Facebook

One of the greatest benefits of social media is the ability for something to go viral very quickly. For example, a few weeks ago a photo of an owner taking his dog for a swim has captured the hearts of millions around the world. Check out some of these amazing statistics:

• It has been viewed more than 2 million times
• It has been liked by over 345,000 people
• It has been shared on Facebook by over 200,000 people
• and it has over 36,000 comments!

Wow! To me those stats are absolutely amazing and just goes to show the viral power of Facebook. In the YouTube video below, I talk about how to get something to go viral on Facebook, which in turn means more fans to your fan page and higher user engagement rates.

One of the key steps in making something go viral on Facebook is to post content that creates a buzz or stirs up attention. Great examples of this type of content include content that stirs up emotion just like the dog image above, content that is funny, anything controversial (but make sure you are careful with this one as it can turn out really bad just like these Twitter horror stories) and fun content.

Focussing on fun content, a great example of this is to post a fun game for fans to participate in. This really increases the level of user engagement especially if the game is challenging. Recently that is exactly what I did on my Facebook fan page. I posted an image where it was filled with lots of the number 9 and you had to find the single number 8 in there. Check out the screen shot below:

Straight away fans of my Facebook page started commenting with the amount of time it took them to find the number 8. Now although this has already created the opportunity for the post to go viral, there are two extra things I did to really turbo boost the post so that it went berserk virally. They are:

1. Having a clear call to action for people to like the post if they couldn’t find the number 8 and to share it if they could find the number 8 in one minute or less. Of course, people sharing and liking it would increase the number of people viewing the post and hence increase the viral nature of it.
2. I paid $5 for Facebook to promote it even further! This further promotion ran for a duration of three days. I’ll talk about this in the next section.

Promoting Your Page Posts

According to the Facebook help center, which has more information about promoting your page posts, it allows fan pages with more than 400 fans to promote their posts so that more people who like your page and their friends are able to see it. In a nutshell, promoted posts will be viewed by a larger percentage of the people who like your fan page than what would normally see it. Likewise, promoted posts will also be viewed by a larger percentage of the friends of people who interact with your post that what would normally see it.

By combining the above two factors, the page post had managed to be viewed by 8850 people, received 90 likes, had 112 comments and 148 people shared it on their Facebook timeline. Imagine adopting this same procedure with a promotional offer that you might be running with your own business. The possibilities are endless!