How Do You Find Hot Content?
Now that you have a clear idea of the two-step trick to effective viral marketing, how do you pull off Step #1? Well, there are two ways to do it. You can take the hard way or you can take the shortcut.
Just so you have a clear understanding of the manual filtering process involved, I’m going to describe these two options in detail. First, you can try to do things manually. You can get highly targeted content through this labor-intensive method.
The first thing that you need to do is to go to Google Keyword Planner tool. If you don’t know what that is, sign up to Google Ads and click on their tools link, and you will be shown a menu that lists the Google Keyword Planner tool.
Click on that tool. Enter a few keywords directly related to your niche. Keep doing this and you will see tons of related keywords.
Once you have this massive list, filter them based on their accuracy or specificity to your niche. Once you have cleaned up your keyword list, use these on Facebook or Twitter to search for social media accounts that target these keywords.
Of course, you’re going to only consider social media accounts of people, organizations or businesses who are truly in your niche. You can tell by the way they describe themselves whether they are in your target niche.
Keep filtering these accounts. At the end of a long process, you should have a nice, clean list of social media accounts of your niche-specific competitors. These accounts can be on Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, you name it. The longer your list, the better.
Find and Poach Your Competitors’ or Niche Fans’ Viral Content
Please note that when you actually click through the social media accounts of people and organizations in your niche, you will quickly discover that there really are two types of accounts: competitors and fans. I’m not even going to describe competitors because this is self explanatory.
Fan accounts are non-commercial accounts started by people who are just emotionally invested in your niche. For example, if you are promoting dog training online courses, you might be able to retrieve a large list of puppy training social media accounts. When you look at their content, it’s obvious that they’re not really doing this for money. They’re just sharing their interests or enthusiasm. These are fan accounts. You need to gather a big list of these as well.
Once you have gotten a massive list of niche-specific social media accounts, go through all their content. Take a look at how many times their content has been reshared or retweeted. Pay attention to pictures, videos, interesting links, picture quotes, or any other type of media.
As you can probably tell, this process is not easy. You have to know what you’re doing. You have to know what to look for. You also have to have a lot of time. Doing things by hand can burn up a lot of time.
The Shortcut: Buzzsumo.com
If you don’t have the time or patience to find all your niche competitors’ and niche fans’ social media accounts and poach their content, use BuzzSumo. This online tool will scour the major social media platforms for content that is directly related to your niche keywords.
Make sure that you save the niche keywords that you got from Google Keyword Planner tool and use them at BuzzSumo. You will see a lot of content that has been filtered already based on certain social signals like retweets or shares.
BuzzSumo is a handy tool because it saves you a tremendous amount of time, effort and frustration.
Get Your Links Ready
Once you have filtered your competitors’ most viral pieces of content, copy their URLs and put them in an Excel sheet. On the right side, try to find the description for that piece of content. Usually, when you come across viral content on a social media platform, there’s a short description or even a title. Use those materials.