About a week ago I was invited to attend a mini Bloggy Boot Camp put on by the SITS Girls and Invisalign. Last week here on the blog I covered 5 important points that every blogger should know.
Holly (Quirky Momma) from The Kids Activity Blog was also a featured speaker at the Boot Camp. Holly is amazing and her story is inspiring. She grew her social media presence to the hundreds of thousands in just a few short months.
Holly instructed us on the important elements needed to create a viral post and I would like to share this information with you.
Formatting your post is very important. Let’s talk about Facebook first.
I pulled an example from Holly’s Facebook page:
LOTS OF YARN ACTIVITIES & CRAFTS
http://kidsactivitiesblog.com/52376/yarn-crafts
Oh the possibilities from a ball of yarn!
Here are the important elements to this post:
1. Your title.
2. White space.
3. Link to the source.
4. Chatty crap, yes she did say chatty crap.
5. Eye catching picture.
Don’t hash tag your post!!
The important thing to think about with Facebook is that it does not matter how many followers or likes you have on your page. Because if you have a low talking about number then your posts will never be seen.
How does one increase their talking about number? Experiment, keep posting, try new and different posts and always engage on your page. Consider also sharing posts from other pages with higher talking points than you. Doing this bumps up your talking about karma points.
Now let’s talk about how to Format a viral post for G+.
Here’s a post from her G+ page
10 Fun Play Dough Math Ideas
There are so many ways to combine the fun of play dough with math practice! Here are 10 we love!
http://kidsactivitiesblog.com/11092/play-with-math
#mathforkids #playdoughmath #playdough #parenting #kidsactivities #kbn
Here are the important elements to this post:
1. Bolded title use this * at both ends to bold a title.
2. White space.
3. Chatty crap.
4. Link to post.
5. Tag and hash-tag the heck out of that post. Tag everyone you think will be interested and add as many pertinent hash tags as you can think of. Make sure you are interacting with the same hash tags on G+ and liking their posts and commenting.
For both Facebook and G+ make sure that you are sharing content that is not your own. Holly does not ever use the share button. She uploads their picture directly to her computer and formats it the same as all of her other posts attributing the source. I tried this a few times last week and saw a bigger jump on views. The nice thing about this is that you are sharing the love to a fellow blogger all the while effortlessly adding content to your own social media sites.
General rules to successfully landing a viral post:
1. Stalk others who are successful and see what they are doing.
2. Experiment, experiment, experiment. Try to see what works and doesn’t work for you and your audience.
3. Always respond to comments on all of your social media accounts. People want engagement, not to be left hanging.
4. Test out different times to see when your community engages the most and see what type of posts and images create the most buzz.
That is quite a big chunk of information for one day. In the coming days look for another post on how to land sponsored posts and then once you do, how to write a killer sponsored post.
Stay Happy! Stay Informed!
Love,
Jen
If you liked this post check out these other posts:
Five Things I Learned At Bloggy Boot Camp
