“This Will Go Viral!” Is A Disease Of The Ego
How does a video go viral? There are a lot of techniques that will help boost your YouTube views but the definition of “viral” is to reach epidemic proportions, quickly. Is that one million views in two days? Fifteen million in a week? Five hundred thousand in the first hour? There is always some benefit to having one of your videos go viral but how much energy should you put into it? Could these views translate into donations, tickets sales or support for your charity? It may actually be more important for your charity to reach a thousand of the right people with the right message versus one million avatars.
Sell Less, Socialize More
Don’t pre-plan all of your social media engagement, just keep most of it engaging. There is nothing wrong with pre-scripting some of your posts or tweets, in fact it makes good sense to have your team pre-approve some messages and guidelines but if you plan everything you’ll sound like a marketing robot. You may be putting on the most amazing event of the year but posting about ticket sales five times a week is not fun for the fans who already have a ticket. Engage your audience in topics and conversations that would be of interest to them and just forget the selling until you’ve established the relationship.
Tag Your Way To Better Relationships
Let’s say your group is organizing a 10km run for your charity. You could post the following: Registration is open, sign up now! This is a sales pitch and your audience audience has nothing to connect with. Instead you could post this: Thank you to @ScottSmith and @AndrewJones for registering your awesome team! This shows that you are paying attention to them and your post will appear on their facebook/twitter feed so you’ll multiply the impact of your post.