Viral Seeding Launching Viral Campaigns
Viral seeding is the practice of launching (or 'seeding') your newly-created viral marketing content so that it reaches an ever-increasing audience and becomes viral within itself. To successfully seed your viral marketing campaign so that it becomes 'viral' and spreads like wildfire, two things are required:
1. A campaign which will appeal to the mentality of social media users - social media users have a particular way of thinking about things and the viral content needs to be aimed specifically at them. It needs to be crafted in such a way so that it's appealing to the social media user's mindset, which will encourage them to spread the viral content aggressively. Social media users need to understand the content and the content needs to be easily shared. Also, there needs to be a reason, which usually appeals to the social media user's mindset. The most common reason is to build rapport within their own social group of friends and by sharing the viral content; this will strengthen their relation with their friends. Never before has psychology played such a vital role in the success of internet marketing.
2. The amazingly sticky content that has been created needs to now be seeded correctly so that the campaign gets 'traction' and with a few small seeds, it will spread like a highly-contagious virus through the social media sphere and blogosphere, garnering massive customer engagement with the target demographic.
Launching the viral campaign takes place by seeding the content in multiple areas around the social networking sphere and blogosphere. These areas include:
a. Facebook: This is the biggest social networking collective and will give your campaign the best chance of success should you seed it correctly. With over 30 different ways in which to seed your content, you need to create a strategy which will give your content the best possible exposure.
b. Twitter: Many a viral campaign has been seeded on Twitter. Once the content is popular on Twitter, it will continue to propagate within the Twitter ecosystem and should become highly viral and will spread to other social media networks.
c. Blogosphere: Ideally used in conjunction with other seeding techniques. Put simply, get authority bloggers to blog about your campaign and this alone could make your content viral, which will then propagate around the internet.
d. Other means: There are thousands of ways in which to seed your viral content and these are not limited to just YouTube, MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Google. The trick is to understand your target demographic and create your campaign around what will 'turn them on'. Once you have understood what will appeal to your target audience, you're 95% of the way there.
Warlock Media will consult with you, helping you to structure your campaign in a way which will appeal to your target user-base and then create a strategy in which to seed your viral campaign successfully.