viral marketing

Success in Viral Marketing – 3 Steps to Harness The Power of Social Media

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Success in viral marketing is best exemplified by the massive hit Angry Birds. What started out as a mobile application about poultry and pigs is now one of the most viral games throughout the globe!

Rovio released the Angry Birds app to be played in different social mobile platforms. It turned out to be a flop at first but when Apple featured it as a game of the week in UK, it started a viral social media campaign. The Angry Birds franchise is now worth about £760 million thanks to successful viral marketing and social media. Achieving such a feat as that of Angry Birds is not impossible. Here are just 3 steps to harness the power of social media:

1. See it to believe it

When Apple agreed to feature Angry Birds, Rovio came up with a YouTube video trailer of the mobile app with the goal of attracting interest. From being in the 600th in the game apps chart, Angry Birds jumped to 1st.

Remember the cliché “picture paints a thousand words”? Well, it operates on the premise that humans are very visual creatures. If one still photograph paints a thousand words, imagine the many messages a single video can send! YouTube is truly one viral media source!

Putting up a high quality video on YouTube or Tweeting a very interesting (read: catchy) photo are just two guerilla marketing ideas you can try. It’s all about out of the box ideas that are so unbelievable, people would want to learn more!

Click on the PLAY button to watch the video

2. The gift of sharing

Success in viral marketing happens when people share things without actually getting paid to do it. How useful are those tiny Facebook share and like buttons and that retweet button, right? Never underestimate the power of word of mouth marketing. As long as your output for step #1 is creative enough, it has every possibility to emerge as viral advertising.

You may want to take advantage of sending viral emails with promos too! After all, who wouldn’t want to share freebies and discounts to friends and family?

3. Put it all together

Integrating social media is probably the best marketing strategy. Viral campaigns exist when they are visible in all forms of media. It is simply not enough to make use of just one social networking site or single form of viral promotion. Make full-blown invasion of social media your goal. Angry Birds rose to such fame because it was found on YouTube, talked about in all social networking sites and available in mobile phones.

Success in viral marketing may not be something that happens overnight but it is clearly achievable.

Next, if you are planning to start a viral marketing campaign and looking for tools to speed things up a little, you want to look at this.

Advantages of Viral Marketing – Top 3 Ways to Create A Buzz Online

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Due to the tight competition in the business world, all business owners constantly look for successful marketing techniques to promote their business all over the world. A very popular free marketing strategy is called viral marketing.

In the next few paragraphs, we will be discussing the advantages of viral marketing and looking at the top three ways to create a buzz online.

Advantage #1: Low cost

Viral marketing operates on the basic premise of word of mouth marketing: peer-to-peer product recommendations. The internet is full of social networking sites, blogs, forums and review sites that are practically free for everyone to access, sign-up and participate at.

Use it: Marketing with social media is done by setting up an account or making a page for your business at every possible social networking site. Marketing with twitter and Facebook are the top choices because these two sites are known to have over a hundred million users on a daily basis.  Visibility is the name of the game—the more visible your business is, the more it is readily accessible to the public and the easier it is for you to deliver your message to your target market. Again, set-up profiles everywhere possible, it’s free after all.

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Advantage #2: Great Reach and High Efficiency

Most effective marketing strategies make use of social media word of mouth because of its wide reach in a short period of time. The technology today makes it easy to like, share and repost photos, articles and updates about your products and services.

Use it: Once you have an update about your business, whether it is a promo, a revamp in your establishment or website, freebies or coupons, a new offer or product, posting it on Facebook or Twitter as a status update is the first step. Upload pictures to appeal to the visual senses of the web community then ask friends and family to like, repost or share. Do so politely. If your post is attractive and catchy enough, you can monitor the turnout of likes and watch it translate to sales and revenue.

Advantage #3: High credibility

One of the advantages of marketing on the web is the rapid and easy feedback system. See, it is common nowadays to whip up your phone, take pictures of daily life and let your friends and family know about it. Instant messages, tweets and status updates are the quickest ways people express their rants and raves. I’ve seen it far too many times: friends tweeting away about that sale we saw as we passed by, asking people on twitter for opinions on an outfit being tried at the dressing room, ranting about a strand of hair found on top of a pasta dish. Yes, rants and raves. The point being: people want to share what they know in an instant. And the information that come from these people are regarded as highly credible by individuals in their own networks.

Use it: Maintain your business’ credibility by constantly checking on people’s feedback and responding to them. Small thank yous for rave reviews or responding to requests and even making changes according to people’s non-so-good reactions makes your audience feel important. Part of the advantages of viral marketing is that it information spreads really fast. Why not make the buzz about your business a good one?

Keep in mind however that as all things go, there are also disadvantages that come with the advantages of viral marketing. Successful marketing entails having the good side outweigh the negative aspects.

Next, if you are looking at how to start a viral marketing campaign, you want to check out this tool, it might help you save some time.

How Does Viral Marketing Work – Top 4 Secrets to Success!

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Viral marketing comes from the concept of the sinister virus: one that secretly creeps, transfers, makes use of resources until it is fully alive and winning by exponentially increasing its power. It is a marketing technique that is also sometimes called viral advertising, word of mouth marketing campaign or network marketing.
Creating a buzz online to help your business may seem like an expert’s job. Questions like” how does the internet work for my business?”, “What is seo and how does it work?” and “ how does viral marketing work?” always come to mind.
Well, we’ll discuss all that and let you in on the top 4 secrets to success!

Does viral marketing work? Definitely. It is time consuming, entails careful planning but generates income and great results!

Click on the PLAY button to watch the video

Here are basic elements or secrets that experts use in making viral advertisements and generating viral traffic:

1. Power of freebies
Free is probably the most powerful word in the marketing world. After all, who could resist something that doesn’t cost a cent?
The trick is giving away a product or service as a part of a promo or using what is commonly known as “delay of gratification”. Say, availability of a free downloadable trial version to entice customers to get a pro version with more perks. There may not be any income from giving away today but once people rave about the trial version, there will be an increase in demand of the real thing!

2. Effortless transferability  
Basic premise: Viruses only spread if they’re easy to transmit.
Viral networking happens when people can easily spread the word about your business, sometimes without even consciously doing so. E-mail, software downloads, websites, graphics and links are some of the easiest to transmit and replicate. From a marketing point of view, the simplest and shortest message works best. Something like hotmail’s “Get your private, free email at hotmail.com.” is a classic because it is brief, concise, informative and found at the end of every email message that people forward or reply to. Effortless, wouldn’t you agree?

3. Use of common human motivations
People desire to belong, be social, popular and more. Knowledge of these drives of human beings widely help in viral marketing. Take SEO or search engine optimization for example, websites want to be at the top rank of search engine sites to increase visibility, popularity and income. SEO works by feeding on widely searched keywords and incorporating them in websites to make some ideas and contents trend and go viral. Another example is the blogosphere which caters to people who desire for their opinions to be heard. Blogs can propel a business through word of mouth advertising on the internet, whether the bloggers are paid  to do so or not.

4. Taking advantage of existing networks and resources
Experts in the social sciences would tell us that each person has a network of about 8 to 12 close friends, family and associates. This is what fuels today’s social networking sites.  How does viral marketing work in these sites? Put your message across. It might be as simple as a link on Facebook or as complex as an affiliate program with other networks—the thing is, as long as it’s on a network, it’s bound to work.

The answer to how does viral marketing work doesn’t just lie on these 4 secrets we’ve shared with you. Information on the internet rapidly changes and nowadays, novelty is the name of the game. To keep your business afloat in terms of viral marketing, employing these secrets and keeping a list of creative and fresh ideas always help.