How to Understand And Use Viral Content?
If you’ve ever heard of viral marketing, you know that it involves marketing materials that are spread via social networking. For example, you may have an article that’s largely a piece of marketing and that you post to a blog. The article then gets tagged in a social network, and begins to spread like a virus. Each time someone tags the article, more people see it. And then more people tag it and more people see it and so on. It’s like the snowball effect applied to marketing.
Viral marketing or any other kind, however, begins with good content-viral content. The content that’s spread virally by social networking doesn’t have to be your only marketing. And in fact it will be much more effective if the content isn’t “market-y” at all. Users are much more interested in con- tent that provides what they need at the time-real information-than in content that tries to sell them something.
And that’s where viral content comes in. Social networking and social media optimization are covered in depth in Chapter 18, but for now you should know that viral content should be written with the medium of distribution in mind. If you plan to use blog tagging to distribute your content, then the proper format for that content should be a blog post, written short and to the point, but including useful information (that’s more than just a link to another blogger’s web site).
You can also include articles and news stories in viral content as long as you use the appropriate social networking systems to distribute them. If you’ve ever seen an article with a button at the bottom that says Digg This, you’ve seen the seed of viral content. Digg is a social networking site that visitors can use to share information of interest.
The methods of SEO covered to this point are mostly based on SEO that has worked in the past. The Internet, in true Internet fashion, is changing all the time. And the most recent shift has been toward socially networked content systems. SEO for these types of content systems will require different strategies than the content systems of the past. It’s something that you should start considering now. Taking advantage of these social networking systems sooner, rather than later, will help you at least keep up with the pack if not take the lead.
