{"id":47886,"date":"2018-01-05T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-01-05T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.techopedia.com\/what-makes-web-content-go-viral\/"},"modified":"2017-12-28T12:23:27","modified_gmt":"2017-12-28T12:23:27","slug":"what-makes-web-content-go-viral","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.techopedia.com\/2\/27828\/it-business\/viral-marketing-what-you-need-to-know","title":{"rendered":"What Makes Web Content Go Viral?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marketing is an industry that has been around – in some form or another – nearly as long as commerce itself. However, new forms of media can mean big change for marketing, and that's especially true with the advent of social media<\/a>. In recent years, marketing through social media has become a billion-dollar industry. Viral marketing<\/a> is undoubtedly powerful, but it poses problems for advertisers in that it's difficult to predict when efforts at going viral<\/a> will be successful. Here, we take a look at viral marketing, how it works – and when it doesn't. (For background reading, see Understanding Social Media: What You Need To Know<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

The Dangers of Being First<\/span><\/h2>\n

Somewhere, maybe in New York, there is probably a chalk outline fading away, but still marking the resting place of the first brave soul who tried to sell his boss on social media. The conversation may have gone like this:<\/p>\n

Boss: “We want you to slap together a new campaign for the fall widget line.”<\/p>\n

Brave Soul: “Can do, but I’m done with booking billboards, negotiating for TV spots and all that other noise.”<\/p>\n

Boss: “You’re telling me you are going to run a campaign with no advertisements?”<\/p>\n

Brave Soul: “No, no. I’ll make some advertisements. In fact they might cost more to make than the old ones, but then I’m only going to show them to my friends. I’ll let them do the rest.”<\/p>\n

Boss: “You know we hired you to market our product, right?”<\/p>\n

Brave Soul: “Of course. I’ll still market it, but I’m not going to advertise it. I don’t do advertising anymore.”<\/p>\n

Boss: “Without advertising, how the hell are we going to spur sales?”<\/p>\n

Brave Soul: “Pah. I’m not going to be selling anything. I don’t do sales. I build communities. Then they can sell each other on our products.”<\/p>\n

Boss: “I see … Come over to the window for a moment. I want to show you the beautiful view we have of the city from up here.”<\/p>\n[Glass breaking, screams]\n

Well, it probably wasn’t quite that bad – or at least not that fatal. However, thanks to those brave souls who laid the groundwork, viral marketing is one of the hottest advertising trends on the web. The problem is, many people – senior executives included – still aren't sure what it means or how it works.<\/p>\n

Viral Marketing in a Nutshell<\/span><\/h2>\n

Viral marketing is an evolutionary step up from word-of-mouth<\/a> or grassroots marketing. These two traditional forms depended on a positive marketing message about a company or brand being passed around communities by influential people. To have a message go viral, however, you need more scale and speed than you can get from having people physically traveling to different locations while carrying the message.<\/p>\n

This is why traditional marketing tries to put messages in as many places as possible – on the sides of buildings, billboards, TV, radio and so on – because you can’t count on word-of-mouth advertising to cover the distance you need your message to go.<\/p>\n

Enter the internet, which has basically served to shrink the conceptual distance between places and people. Social media platforms<\/a> have made that distance even less significant. All of these online personal networks provide an opportunity for the right content to spread rapidly across the people hooked into social media and the web. In a nutshell, this is what viral marketing is all about – leveraging social media to spread a marketing message.<\/p>\n

How Viral Marketing Works<\/span><\/h2>\n

Businesses want to know how viral marketing works. The truth is that it often doesn’t work. Worse yet, when one approach pays off, it often gets copied so many times that it never works as successfully again. Throwing questions of success aside, however, the actual mechanics are pretty consistent.<\/p>\n

There are three main pieces to a viral marketing campaign:<\/p>\n