What goes into creating content that goes viral?
This magnificent photo of 62-year-old senior footballer Keith Rogers – captured by Katherine photographer Casey Bishop – generated plenty of attention across social media in late June. The photo of the Ngukurr Bulldogs player generated well over 10,000 likes, 1,500 comments and 3000 shares on my Facebook page NT Football with Jackson Clark.
It wasn’t the only post celebrating our veteran community footballers that engaged well over the course of that week. Further photos of Rogers and one of Peppimenarti superstar Francis Miler all gathered over 4000 likes.
To maximise the exposure on the Keith Rogers post I went into Facebook’s incredibly advanced advertising platform and ran a couple of Engagement campaigns to the post. For the first campaign, I specifically left the demographics, location and detailed targeting broad so that I can study the analytics of the post engagement to help me with future campaigns.
For the detailed targeted I selected Facebook users who have expressed an interest in Australian Football League. I then narrowed the targeting further to include users who have expressed an interest in Australian rules football. By narrowing it further, I strengthened my targeting and the likelihood that it will be shown to football fans.
I excluded people who already liked NT Football with Jackson Clark – in order to hopefully generate more page likes – and manually changed the ad placements to only show in the Facebook News Feed. All up across four different campaigns I spent a grand total of $15 and my Cost Per Result which was post engagement hovered between one cent and two cents.
The value of creating viral content cannot be understated. These posts resulted in close to 1000 new page likes for NT Football with Jackson Clark. I also shared the content natively on Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter for great further great engagement. For me, all those new followers mean a lot more people I can share football content with, but for some businesses that number could be life changing. The post was viewed by over 700,000 people, which doesn’t compare to the page’s most-reached post of a trick-shot video of Darwin teenager Tymunna Clements, which received over 1.5 million organic views.
Why did the trick-shot video get substantially more reach, despite not engaging as well in terms of likes and comments? It could be a number of factors. Due to the length of engagement in a video, people often forget to like or comment. Or it might just be an indication of Facebook’s dwindling organic reach.
So why was Keith’s story so successful? A positive and uniting story amidst divisive times? The emotion of awe is one of the key drivers in ‘shareability’ of online content and being a 62-year-old still competing against young men in football is certainly awe inspiring.
Jonah Berger’s book Contagious contains great advice for anyone wishing to learn more about how to create viral content. In the book he lists the six principles of contagious ideas as: Social Currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical Value and Stories.
Study these ideas and to learn to curate the best possible content for your audience.
Win-win scenarios like Keith’s story are great. Clearly it’s beneficial for my football page but it’s also great to showcase one of the many good stories coming from Territory communities.
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