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Carlos Bravo5
I've been thinking a lot about viral marketing lately. It's certainly fascinating. We all want to achieve it, but nobody really knows how to do it. Me neither. Viral marketing is not planned (although I want this experiment to prove me wrong), it just happens, and that's the problem.
Viral ContentPhoto rights by Fotolia
We can analyse virality (sorry for making up words) at different levels and identify some factors that are repeated in success stories. Without a doubt, one of the essential elements is the content. An essential condition for this to spread is that it is free and easy to share. This is a very basic rule.
Different types and levels of virality
Viral is not a fact. It is a matter of perspective. For a blogger japanese number phone who has 10 visits a day and publishes a post that gets 300 reads, this can already be a case of virality. We can differentiate different levels of virality.
Viral one-off depending on initial events : it is interesting to analyse the data of videos that become viral. In many cases, these are specific events, such as a famous person's tweet that can start a fire. Another event could be reaching the front page of Meneame.net, which attracts millions of users. This type of event can generate a one-off peak of attention that days later no longer receives the same attention as on the day of the fire.
Total viral that spreads and creates variations of the content : in this case we do not necessarily need a source of energy that generates the snowball. The virus passes from person to person and spreads. Over time it has practically total coverage. In a second wave of diffusion, parodies of the viral content are created, so what is viral can be called total. It reaches more people and survives for months and weeks.
Partial viral that seeks to spread in a specific niche : partial viral does not seek coverage of the entire audience. It seeks specific niches and wants its content to be spread to a segmented target audience. Free and exclusive content is ideal for this. It does not spread as quickly because there is a condition to access it, e.g. signing up as a subscriber.a