Viral Social Media - Spread the Word Around!

Facebook and Twitter are both incredibly popular social media websites and for an online business, they represent an amazing potential to be viral social media, allowing the savvy internet entrepreneur to spread the word about his or her business to thousands of people for free and with a little effort and creativity. If you've seen the messages such as the color of bras raising awareness for breast cancer and the now popular awareness about various diseases, handicaps, ways of living, sexuality, etc. being posted in statuses and daring others to post the same thing for an hour, you've already seen viral social media at work. How can you harness this incredible and free power?

Just like with any advertising, you have to plant a very potent idea into the minds of people; in this case, awareness about your business. Unlike advertising which is overt, you'll have to be sneaky or else it won't spread around. This is where your creativity will have to come in.

You can go viral a couple of ways. First of all is through messaging people and making it look like a forward from others. This is adapted from the viral email where you send messages around containing your URL and hope to get some hits. The problem with this method is that people are so used to spam email that they may also ignore your viral social media out of habit. In order to succeed with this, you'll have to layer it with some mystery and giving people the feeling that they are being let in on a big secret. This is where the status updates/tweets come in. Put up a status update or a tweet in a way that provokes interest and daring others to post the same status. It should also hint at a solution to whatever puzzle you're posing. Then, once the statuses/tweets copy and pasting has caught hold and you have people on the hook, send out the viral email messages, only loosely explaining the secret and then pasting the URL at the bottom 'for more information'.

The secret to being successful with viral social media is to cloak it in enough secrecy to be intriguing and make users feel as though they are part of a social elite while you are actually targeting thousands of people. You won't get everyone who reposts the status or tweet, but you'll get more people than you would have if you just did the status/tweet or just did the messaging. The whole trick lies in presentation and in taking advantage of the natural curiosity of people. After you've had your message go viral, you can sit back and let it and word of mouth do much of the work of advertising for you. The best part of it? Viral social media is effective when used properly and absolutely free.

It may take some practice to find just the write phrasing for your tweets/statuses and the messages, but that's why viral social media is so useful; if you bomb, you can always try again without losing a cent. Viral social media-spread the word around!