How to Use Social Listening to Create Viral Content

How to Use Social Listening to Create Viral Content. But there are several things you can do to increase the chances of your content going viral. I use Google Trends quite frequently for market research and for gauging people’s interest in various topics. If you see something that interests you, click on it: You’ll then get some of the most relevant articles, which should provide further clarification on what’s popular at the moment: Therefore, this could be something I would want to investigate further and a potential topic I could cover. And since engagement (shares in particular) is the ultimate indicator of virality, this is one of the best ways to capitalize on trends and increase your odds of creating viral content. I’ll set mine to the past week: Once you do that, BuzzSumo will populate your screen with the top content according to total shares. It doesn’t matter what topic you’re covering. Following these steps will let you know what people are responding to and give you very specific data to base your decisions on. It’s a guide for writing epic content that will go viral. And just think of the competitive advantage this gives you over other brands that simply slap up content at random without giving it any real thought.

Author: Neil Patel / Source: Quick Sprout

Viral content is inherently unpredictable.

You could have two similar pieces of content—with one receiving thousands upon thousands of shares and the other languishing in obscurity.

In that regard, there’s no magic formula that will enable you to create viral content on command.

It’s not like you can just flip a switch and get mass exposure.

It doesn’t work like that.

But there are several things you can do to increase the chances of your content going viral.

That’s what I want to talk about in this post.

More specifically, I’m going to explain how you can use social listening to your advantage.

Social listening, defined as “the process of monitoring digital conversations to understand what customers are saying about a brand and industry online,” is most commonly used for evaluating customer feedback and identifying their pain points.

But I’ve also found it to be absolutely perfect for predicting what my audience is craving and what’s most likely to go viral.

The way I see it, social listening is perhaps the best way to predict virality.

Here is how you can utilize it to your advantage.

Effectively analyzing content

There’s a popular expression:

the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

Although this can be debatable, depending on the context in which it’s used, you’ll want to follow this line of thinking in this instance.

Like I said earlier, you can never say with 100% certainty that a particular piece of content will go viral.

But what you can do is see what’s resonating the most with your audience at the moment.

If you notice that a particular topic, angle, theme, etc. is completely killing it, there’s a good chance you’ll see favorable results if you cover it as well.

But how do you know what’s popular and what’s resonating with your audience?

That’s where social listening comes in.

The key to effective social listening is knowing which tools to use.

I’m going to cover a few of my favorites you can use to discover trends and identify topics that have the potential to go viral.