How to Make Your Content Go Viral on Facebook With These Seven Tips

For a little while now, Instagram has become the place to be for photographers and the word on all digital influencers lips. However, Facebook is not dead, far from it. There are still people on it and it’s still a good place to market your business if you do it right. Making content go viral is amongst the best solutions available, but it requires a little bit of knowledge to do so. In this short 10-minute long video, Lucy Martin and Chris Hau are going to explain to you the key points to making your images or videos go viral on Facebook.

The seven tips, or hacks as they like to call them, are quite basic but the base of pretty much any content that goes viral on Facebook nowadays. The given ideas are not far from what works on Instagram as well. So if you are working on the latter more than on the blue giant, be sure to experiment with the hacks as well. For example, what they refer to as "fake it until you make it," is simply what people call Pods on Instagram. A way to exchange comments amongst a group of users to boost the visibility. Chris and Lucy also go over the paid ads and why they might actually be good for your business. So be sure to watch the video above if you want to make your content go viral!

What do you think? Have you ever had any content go viral on any social networks? If yes, what do you think made a difference? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Lead image credit: Pexel.

Quentin Decaillet's picture

Quentin Décaillet is a photographer and retoucher based in Switzerland specializing in portrait and wedding photography.

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12 Comments

Lost me at "Boost it." Once he said he paid the rest doesn't matter. And here's a tip for you, Facebook will throw ghost likes at it and that's not engagement. Not only that, once you do pay, plenty of people have told their reach became even worse. They hold your hard earned followers hostage and once they know you're a payer, they try and keep you on the hook. Time of day means nothing if they refuse to even put you in the newsfeed of people that actually choose to see your content first. Every once in a while you might get shares and that's the only thing I've seen that gets passed Facebook's money grabbing border walls. I don't know anyone that actually likes using Facebook anymore. Anyone! They used everyone to build themselves up and then handicapped their pages for boost money. There's my two cents and neither are going to them.

It's interesting to see how the backlash against Facebook is growing. This made for interesting reading: https://blog.refactortactical.com/blog/how-facebook-is-destroying-small-...

Well with 8 billion video views a day on facebook and, for the first time ever, digital ad buying being greater than traditional ad advertising, and 20% of all online time spent On Facebook, it sure is irrelevant :)

Yes, you most likely have to pay now. Yes, you have to have a business plan, yes you need a measurement plan, and yes, you need to test and test and test . So, I guess that means we have to “advertise” to get in front of customers ...

We need to stop looking at Facebook like a social network and more like a media platform. People whine and complain all the time about Facebook and ad buys, but the reality is it will drive clicks much cheaper than almost any other platform. You can measure it. You can retarget . Etc

Granted , based upon your target audience, it might not be the BEST platform , but if your target audience is an older Millennial and older, it’s still THE best place to generate brand awareness and traffic if you have spent the time needed to develop and integrated marketing plan.

With that being said, if you’re putting all your eggs in the Facebook basket, that is unwise. It’s just one piece of the integrated marketing plan.

The rumor that reach gets lower once you start paying is false.

I was an advertiser for a company, initially we could reach over 20,000 of our followers by advertising. By the end of two months we could barely reach 600 using Fb's own calculator. What changed? The amount of money they wanted. The costs of advertising on Fb went up 1200%. Yes, that's right. 1200% to reach the same followers. We kept a spreadsheet of costs and reach/engagement and it actively made it worse for engagement on the Fb profile let alone follow through to the website. The site had enough of social media and created their own forums which ironically Fb has created groups for pages to stop companies doing this.

Interesting, I’ve noticed the exact opposite. Sorry you had a bad experience. Our CPM and CPC have gone down, but we do rigorous split testing before we send out. Do you follow any of the industry podcasts? How localized or specific was your audience

It was a while ago, but we did several campaigns over three months for worldwide and local geographic targeting. I wasn't in charge of the campaign so don't know the in's and out's of it but I do know that the marketing team was pretty savvy when it came to this stuff.

I'm not the only one who's experienced this, a few IPS groups have had similar experiences more recently when doing seasonal campaigns.

Interesting, I guess things must vary here and there based upon product. We advertise in Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Google, and YouTube, and FB is the best for us at driving traffic, hands down, and it’s wuality traffic.

But, to each their own, and everyone’s target audience will differ. But, I just don’t understand why people bash facebook for reaching new people. 20-25 cents a click (industry averages for most campaigns in USA) is pretty darn cheap.

I wonder how you would benefit from a video on Facebook going viral?
I have a video with over 12 milion views on facebook, and there was no direct profit for me in it. It was on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW78wLaDYDQ) for much longer, but still isn't growing like it did on FB, just 32k views.

Depends on what your “and then” plan is. If you have a plan in place prior to the video being published to capture leads, generate Pixels to retarget later, and generate custom audiences to send future content to, and calculate an ROI on sales, it can be good. If not, it’s just a nice piece of content and pat on the back :) great job on 12M views, that’s incredible.

It wasn't part of a plan, I just uploaded it and within a few days it was going like crazy. Got a bunch of followers now, that's nice, but would love to have had the same clicks on youtube ;-)

Yeah I’d take YouTube subscribers any day. That’s still a good amount though! You should be proud.

Lucy Martin has 576 subscribers on youtube but her content has millions of view........................................