5 Key Elements for Your Content to Go Viral

This is the holy grail for every marketer, entrepreneur and any other professional on the internet: To go viral. At least, when I first started out writing articles and producing content, I could think of nothing else other than trying to figure how to get this post spread like mad on Facebook, Twitter and all the other important places. What I quickly found out is that it takes a little more than posting cute cat photos, although I keep questioning myself on that.

A few months back, we did some research on what it really takes for content to go viral. We analyzed an article that got well over 500,000 likes and then spoke with the authors about their strategy on how they did it. The good folks over at Social Media Explorer have now turned this piece into a wonderful infographic and I think it makes getting the insights easier than ever.

So, without any further ado, here are the 5 key elements every piece of content needs to have to go viral:

As a 6th point, we also looked at the science behind writing great headlines for Twitter, Facebook and your blog recently, which I believe is another really important factor of how your content will perform and spread.

Of course, there are tons of other elements still that need to be part of a great piece of  viral content to spread wide and far on social networks. What have you found to work the best when trying to publish content that reaches more people?

Credit: Big thanks to Mark Smiciklas for putting this infographic together.