Many companies these days dream about creating a small YouTube, TikTok or LinkedIn post that goes viral. This is perfect for any major brand or even a small business. They dream about these things happening because they know creating viral content is a great way to get traffic and sales overnight and get a great deal of attention to their website and help to make them important overnight. However, despite their best efforts, most of their content fails and doesn’t gain any traction online, let alone get thousands of views.

Finding out what makes content actually go viral needs a deep dive into the current research and finding out how to trigger people to share it online. This is usually done by observing previous content that has gained these signals and reverse engineering them.

When you do this over hundreds or even thousands of viral posts and videos, your first step is, of course, picking a platform and finding all these hidden gems and then recording them onto a spreadsheet for further analysis, which can be conducted by you or your team.

According to the latest ideas on this topic, it seems that triggering a huge emotional response from the viewer or reader is the best way to create content that will help you go viral; telling stories that your target audience can also relate to is another way, and figuring out what time of day or month to publish it also plays a huge role in creating the perfect strategy that enables you to push people into sharing your content free of charge.

The goal of any viral content is to create valuable brand coverage and help it to reach audiences that it otherwise wouldn’t have made it to. This is also done extremely cheaply since viral marketing is typically done for free, and since a retweet or repost button is very easy to use, it means that a few shares from the right people can really get the ball rolling and drive an endless stream of new engagement for your brand’s account and online presence in general. This may drive sales, but if it doesn’t, then don’t worry; sometimes it will have an indirect effect that will last for years.

An indirect effect of a viral marketing campaign can still be found online years later. While many brands may see a huge spike in traffic and sales, many brands have found that even when a campaign goes viral, it still doesn’t seem to lead to a huge rise in sales. They often underestimate the amount of indirect effect that a campaign can have, such as a rise in links to their website, new social media followers or just a vast increase in brand name recognition, which will put them top of the list of names that come to people’s minds if they ever need that product or service.

From a study conducted on viral marketing campaigns, there was a discovery that positive emotions seemed to have more of a response than negative hateful ones; this is good since if we include a brand name, we really want to associate them with positive emotions.

In certain studies they also figured out that surprises were also a big talking point; it appears that any type of content that divides opinion on someone or something was enough to get people to like, share and engage. Certain emotions, such as someone breaking an obscure world record, curiosity over a study and also a high-profile person doing something out of character, were usually highly shared and debated.

AI can also be used to analyse the viral code; it can be used to give you some new seed ideas for your content and also may be able to give you some new words to use inside your copy which can attract brand new eyeballs and be able to tap into the emotional trigger points of the audience that you are aiming for. One great idea for this is to take a look on social media websites such as X, Facebook and Instagram to find out what kind of content generates the most shares and gets attention; this may take some time, but once you understand the algorithm, you can reuse it over and over. However, it’s vastly important to discover that initial data and work it into a small bullet point so that you can use it again and again.

Emotional content is among the top shared content, which is no real surprise; if you look at viral sites and even major news websites, you can see that a lot of stories revolve around some kind of major story about an everyday hero or someone who is suffering because of something happening in the world. Emotions are, after all, at the core of what drives humans to respond to something; we all want to see a good story with a happy ending, but sometimes the negative reactions can also draw many eyeballs. Picking what is the right move for your brand requires careful consideration, so think it over before uploading any content.

The theme of your post is also of critical importance; sometimes it can get you in real trouble, and this goes even more so if you outsource your content creation to someone else. Content can be planned out in advance and then set to schedule. Sadly, world events can really impact the message you put out that day, and you can find yourself on the end of a real firestorm which damages your brand and even causes a loss of revenue. Before posting, please check the current news items to ensure that you are avoiding anything that may conflict.

Timing is also a critical component of a good viral marketing campaign. Your content should be short but also posted at a time when people check the platform you are posting to. Posting at 4am in the morning is likely never going to reach the maximum number of people. Even though it might filter out the noise and make you gain more traction, it’s simply not a good timing strategy. The big brands also do this by timing their advertising spend. A lot of big brands, for example, really ramp up TV ads at Christmas time, as they know most people spend the most money on consumer items at this time of the year.

When planning your marketing budget, you should try to plan further in advance and use it to your advantage. As your competition spends forever trying to gain traction in a crowded marketplace, why not pick the second or third most popular time slot so that you can reach eyeballs much cheaper to view your content and possibly work your way up? After all, you can get feedback for your ideas from a smaller audience before you scale them to thousands of people.

An emotional response means that you will get great engagement with your post, and now you are seeing a huge driver of what people respond to online. Despite technology taking over the landscape, we can still see that human evolution has not changed over time, and we still have the same old emotional trigger buttons that elicit an emotional response from us. Advertising is a great way to display this and also gain engagements such as shares, comments and likes; however, your content needs to produce super powerful emotions rather than just interest. Your content must not sit on the fence and must get people talking. Creating content that will get people talking about their opinion is always a winning move.

High levels of emotions, especially surprise, curiosity and genuine excitement, are great needle movers; a prime example of this would be the announcement of Ronaldo coming back to Manchester United. When it was announced online, many people were surprised, and when they posted it, they received a bundle of curiosity clicks just to verify that it was in fact the truth and not just some clickbait title. Many fans were left completely in shock at this announcement since United had been on a bad run of form and Ronaldo was still seen as a valuable player who would command a hefty price tag. The publicity that United got just by signing him was likely worth far more than the transfer fee.

Studies have shown that content that produces curiosity or laughter can boost engagement higher than 20%, so it’s best to take your time to come up with a good idea and make sure it doesn’t backfire on you by being misinterpreted or is just too generic to be remembered.

Overall, the best way to produce viral content is to study already successful content that went viral. Most of these went viral by accident and just captured the perfect moment in time for ordinary people, so really you want to study any viral content from brand names and find out how they managed to weave in both a viral message and image but also weave in their brand’s logo and core values without making it too obvious. A good rule of thumb is to keep the main message clear, but remember that most people hate ads and being sold to; they do, however, love stories, so learning to craft a good story is something you should put some time and effort into if you want to be successful.

Putting together a cheat sheet of sorts is always a good idea. What you can do with this is to create a spreadsheet or word document that is a swipe file of successful campaigns. This is a great way to generate new ideas if you get stuck, but you must never copy and paste an idea; instead, you should take the core elements of it that you like and take out the parts you don’t like, then come at it from a new angle.

The real skill set is making it fit into your company’s culture and creating a whole new tagline, wording and humour, so you must always get your creative cap on and come up with a brand-new way while collecting and harvesting great ideas that you see on the web. Copying and pasting ideas is straight theft and can get you and your business in serious legal hot water, so instead, create something from scratch with the core elements to make it unique to your business.