Advertising works best when we don’t feel as though we’re being sold to. Online virals perform better the more people engage with them, Tweet about them and share them with their friends. So it stands to reason that the very best virals shouldn’t preach about the brand that they’re there to promote but rather appeal to the audience on the most basic of levels – by being a bit of fun.
If you can pull people off task, engage them in a silly but addictive game that they forward to everyone in the office, make them superimpose their picture onto the face of a dancing elf for no good reason other than playtime, then you have got them on the most primal of levels, you’ve got them for longer and you won’t have to encourage them to spread your link because they’ll already want to. Clever hey? But how do you do that?
Key to a good viral is knowing what makes your audience tick, knowing what they enjoy and knowing what they will choose to share and why. We won’t lie to you, the most successful virals involve a certain amount of luck, but there are tools like http://www.proprofs.com that you can use to practice creating quizzes, games and other virals, then test them out to see how they perform so you can start small without any huge investment.
And remember that enjoyment comes from different angles – if the quiz isn’t a huge amount of fun to take then keep it short, make the result funny – something that they just have to share with their friends – and make spreading the word the source of the enjoyment, then sit back and (hopefully) watch it spread.
