There are almost 800 million members on Facebook today. With this vast web of interconnectivity, Facebook is fast becoming the leading way for ideas and content to spread on the internet. If you want to go viral, Facebook is one of the main platforms to pay attention to.
Two powerful tools to master on Facebook are Facebook pages and Facebook apps. Both of these are integrated in Facebook’s ecosystem and have access a wide array of tools to aid in virality that other kinds of content just don’t have.
Here’s how to use Facebook’s pages and apps to go viral.
==> An Idea with a Call to Action
Your idea for a page or for an app needs to have a call to action built into it.
Many of the protests in the Arab Uprising, from Egypt to Libya, were organized on Facebook and/or Twitter. Newly created pages literally got tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of followers in as little as a week or two.
They grew so quickly because there was a call to action. Share the page and let the world know what was going on. Even people in non-Arabic countries got involved, because of this strong call to action.
For a more light-hearted example, take a look at FarmVille, one of the most successful Facebook games in history. One of the reasons it was so successful was because there was a constant call to action. People were always being asked to share the game with their friends.
Your idea needs to not only be great, but have a call to action for sharing built into it.
==> Reporting: Virality per Post
Facebook has one very unique reporting feature: it tells you about the virality of your posts and of your app, as a statistic.
The statistic measures how often people share your content. If you primarily have three different kinds of content, say polls, videos and text, you could measure each post individually and see which one(s) people tend to share.
If you find that people share videos released on your page four times more often than text released on your page, you’ll know exactly where to focus.
While it’s possible to derive this statistic on other media platforms, generally they don’t give it to you in this clear-cut form. Facebook makes tracking and optimizing for virality easy.
==> Making It Go Viral
Going viral on Facebook is all about having a great core idea, then testing and testing until you reach the maximum viral velocity you can reach.
It means testing different messages, different kinds of outreach and different call to actions. If you find it extremely hard to get traction, it’s likely that your idea just isn’t striking a cord. On the other hand, if your idea is spreading, then your job is to accelerate the pace and make the idea go truly viral.