6 essential things to get right BEFORE you create viral content

3 min read

We’ve all seen viral content – quizzes, personality tests or videos appear on our social media feeds. They might be just for fun or full of fascinating information. Whatever the content, they provide something that instantly clicks with people. So much so that they instantly share it with their friends.

Creating viral content involves a bit of experimentation. There’s no guarantee that something you think is compelling, funny or surprising is going to go viral. You have to create a few pieces of content and track the statistics to find a formula that works.

So when something you create does go viral it’s vital that you get the most out of this massive opportunity. It would be a tragedy to have your 15 minutes of fame only for everyone to forget about you afterwards!

Here’s a handy summary of how to extract the most value from your piece of viral content.

6 essential things to get right BEFORE your content goes viral

Getting a quiz or list to go viral is incredibly exciting! Here’s some fail safe tips from us easily excited people from Riddle to ensure your viral content is also extremely rewarding.

Know EXACTLY what you want to gain from your viral content

We’re starting with the obvious, but many people spend more time creating fun element of the content than planning out the benefits.

Decide exactly what you want people to do:

Are you directing them to your web site or product?
Do you want to grow an email list so you can continually contact these people?
Do you want them to contact you?

Capture email addresses

Don’t be fooled into thinking that social media is the only way to reach your audience! Newsletters or regular emails are still incredibly effective.

A viral quiz without an email capture form is a wasted opportunity. Quizzes and personality tests have especially good capture rates when shown just before the user gets their result.

Work out how you will process email addresses

We provide a free email capture form at Riddle. You will get an email containing the name and email address for every sign up.

If you’re going to create viral content on a regular basis you’ll probably want to use our Pro Package. With this you can create more data fields in the form, and receive the email data in a CSV file that can be imported into your email software.

Add a link to your sales page

This should be too obvious for words but we’ve included it just in case! You can think of your quiz as a sales funnel.

Here at Riddle you get the stats for how many people started and finished the quiz as well as how many people chose each answer option.

If you use a tracked link such as https://goo.gl/ you know how many people clicked on your sales link so you can calculate your sales conversion rate.

Add your logo to the quiz

You’ve got thousands of people to take and share your quiz. Maybe they’ve signed up for your newsletter, or gone to your site. Or perhaps they just enjoyed the content.

Grab the Top of Mind Awareness of these people by adding your logo to the quiz. It also emphasises that you wrote it yourself. Adding your logo is another feature on our Pro package.

How to manage the fame!

Your quiz has gone viral. People are sharing their results and retweeting your link. You’ll probably get LOTS of queries in a short space of time as well as new followers and friends. You need to plan how to keep your viral wave going:

Will you acknowledge all social media mentions?
Focus on answering direct queries?
Or write your press release for immediate dispatch while the buzz is still there?
Briefly running around screaming with delight is also completely acceptable!

Start your journey to fame by signing up to Riddle today and create the viral content that provides the best rewards for YOU.