How to share viral content on Facebook
Now that you have a good understanding of you grand strategy for sharing viral content and leveraging content curation to build up your social media and blog following, here is a specific chapter on viral content marketing on Facebook.
Post viral content first on your Facebook page
The first thing that you need to do is to post the curated content on your Facebook page. This is the first place you’re going to post your material. You then take the link of that created post and republish other parts of Facebook as well as Twitter and other social media platforms using tools like HootSuite.
This handy tool enabled you to upload a massive amount of content to your social media accounts and space out the publication of that content. You can also play around with the hashtags, comments and titles. The great thing about HootSuite is you don’t have to babysit your social media accounts, telling it when it should publish.
You just need to designate the time and set the software and pretty much forget it. Once you have uploaded all your content, you can pretty much just sit back and let HootSuite do its thing. When people visit your social media accounts, they get the impression that you’re actively operating your account because you’re publishing at a regular rate.
What they don’t know is that you have actually set this up well in advance and it was software that published this material. This is a great way of automating your operations so you don’t have to physically or manually do work. A lot of people actually make great passive income just by using tools like HootSuite to post curated content on their social media accounts.
These then drive traffic to their mailing lists. These lists are then automated to send offers at specific times. The owners and operators of these systems just sit back and collect cash. I know, sound pretty awesome, but you have to have a system as well as a clear plan in order to pull this off.
When to republish
If you did your homework correctly, you should have a large collection of viral content in your niche. This stuff is tried and proven. These materials are known to attract a tremendous amount of eyeballs in your niche. The problem is, you don’t want to keep republishing the same content over and over.
For example, if you have 300 links and you have set up HootSuite to tweet out your materials at a rate of 6 times a day, this means that after 50 days, your list will get republished again. You may want to tweet more frequently, like 12 times a day, and this would cut down your republish date to 25 days.
Can you see the problem here? You’re probably going to lose followers if it becomes obvious to them that you’re just recycling the same content over and over, this is why I suggest that you get a huge amount of content so that even if you are publishing at a very frequent clip every single day, your republication is not going to look obvious.
Why republish anyway?
You can do things the hard way and get just a massive list of content and set up your system so that you’ll never publish the same content more than once. You’re more that welcome to that. It takes a lot of work, time and effort. A lot of people don’t do things that way. Instead, they would rather republish.
As long as you have enough materials to recycle, you should be fine. If you’re going to be republishing once every two months, that should be safe. Still, why should you republish? Well, when you do this, you get many bites of the apple. Maybe for whatever reason your initial publication did not get your followers’ attention, hey, it happens. If you republish, you get another chance.
Also, when viral content gets hot, it gets cold very quickly, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that people who are originally interested in it have completely lost all interest. When you republish at a later date, you might awaken interest. People might think that it’s a nice throwback and share it and this can give you new fans.
Regardless, if enough time has passed since you originally published the curated content, you give your fans the impression that they are seeing new content. This is always a good thing.
Always include a link to your conversion page with your curated viral content
Every time you publish curated viral content, you should link to the source, you should give proper attribution, but you should also link to your conversion page. This is your mailing list. If you can’t do that, then Facebook will publish your curated content as something published by your Facebook page.
This might be good enough. If you are sharing the direct post on your Facebook page to related Facebook groups or other pages, people might click to like your page and possibly get your updates.
Post your Facebook pages’ URLs on niche-related Facebook groups
Now that you have published a lot of content on your Facebook page, take the URLs of those posts and share them on Facebook groups in the same niche. Now, please understand that you cannot do this on day one. You can’t just join a group and all of a sudden dropping links. You’re gong to look like a spammer. People are not going to like what you’re doing.
You probably will get banned sooner rather than later. I suggest that you don’t even try to do that. Instead, join these niche-related Facebook groups and engage with group members. Ask a lot of questions, tell them what you know and otherwise carry yourself like a respected member of the community.
Remember, these Facebook groups are nothing but online message boards. They are like little online communities. When you join these places, conduct yourself like a responsible community member. Add value to the conversations through your posts. This is how you establish credibility.
Once you have established credibility and authority, you would then be able to share some of your content in addition to the direct third-party links that you’re sharing. You should do that to cover your tracks. You don’t want to be obvious about this. You don’t want to be the account that is so transparent. People can easily see that you are just promoting your Facebook page. People don’t like that. It’s only a matter of time before they ban you.
If you’re going to be dropping links, a small percentage of that should be your Facebook page, but the vast majority should be high quality content. It really fosters discussion. That’s how you build credibility and how you are given more permission to keep posting your own stuff. you have to earn this by becoming credible first.
Facebook viral content strategy
If I haven’t been obvious yet. Let me spell it out. For Facebook, your viral content strategy should first involve posting your curated viral content on your Facebook page. Next, you share that content on niche-related groups. This will then drive likes to your Facebook page. You want Facebook users to find themselves on your page.
By giving them enough information, some of them might like the page and this means that whenever you publish an update, a certain percentage of your page fans might see your content. This can then lead to those people seeing your conversion page links and finding themselves on your blog or your squeeze page.
Next, auto-publish content on your Facebook page to maximize eyeballs on your conversion page. In other words, keep posting on a regular basis to your Facebook page. Don’t feel guilty about this. Please understand that only a tiny minority of your Facebook fans will get to see your updates.
The vast majority of people who have liked your page will not see your updates unless the option “see first” when they first like your page. But generally speaking, only a small percentage of your page fans will see your updates, so it helps to publish on a regular basis and to publish a lot.
As long as the quality is there and as long as the quality is high enough to drive engagement, you should not suffer from this. However, if you just publish stuff that has absolutely no engagement, Facebook might actually penalize you. If you think very few of your fans are seeing your content now, wait until Facebook punishes you for low engagement. Even fewer of your fans will see your content after the penalty.
Next, get clicks on your conversion page. This is how you get list members. Finally, you auto-publish your email updates and you get conversions passively. That’s how you play the game. You basically just send out email updates to your mailing list on an automated basis. That’s how you drive traffic to post with ads or you get traffic to actual sales pages when people buy something from these sales pages so you can get a commission.
If you’re selling your own products and they buy something, you get 100% of whatever money they paid. Map out your overall Facebook viral strategy using the sequence I described above.