It’s the dream of many content creators to have an awesome piece of content go viral. The audience, your readers, prospects and dream clients are often neglected in the process to creating viral content. What if there was a way to have viral content that engaged your readers as well as attracted in more traffic and increased brand recognition?
In this article from Sarah Arrow at Sark eMedia, you’ve going to discover why you need a marketing quiz and how to create one that has almost everything you need to go viral.
Almost everything that you need to go viral on social media? Why not everything? There are two things that are out of my hands
- Your ability to create an awesome quiz
- When you chose to promote the quiz, and where
If you follow the plan outlined in this article, your chances of creating an awesome quiz increase significantly. If you say “Meh” and then go and do your own quiz, with none of the main ingredients, well, that’s all on you and your abilities.
Choosing when to promote the quiz is also a deciding factor, this involves two more things
- Knowing who your dream client is, and the psychographic data around them
- Watching the news and knowing what’s going on in the world
The psychographic data is the little nuances that will make your quiz resonate with the taker, or repel them. It’s knowing whether she watches the Good Wife or Suits. Both are legal dramas. Both have great storylines and compelling plots, in fact, there’s likely to be some crossover. However, if you don’t know which program your dream clients prefer, your Team Harvey / Team Mike references will be ignored and they won’t feel as connected.
Don’t believe me? Think on the Team Harvey / Team Mike reference for a moment. You’re either thinking about which team you’re on, or you’re wondering what on earth I’m talking about. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about then you probably prefer The Good Wife. That’s what psychographic data does; it gives your marketing the edge and builds rapid rapport.
What’s this got to do with promoting your social media viral quiz? If you don’t know when your dream clients are watching T.V or when they’ve got idle hands, you’ll never be able to take advantage of that moment to enable your quiz to go viral.
Watching the news and knowing what’s going on in the world also has impact. Imagine you’re a fan of a long running soap opera. One of the main characters passes away in real life. If your quiz on “Which Super Soap Character Are You?” includes their character, then you need to decide whether to promote your quiz more (and risk being seen as insensitive) or less (and missing the viral traffic from the superfans).
How To Determine Your Viral Social Media Quiz Topic
For your quiz to go viral, per a survey by Buzzsumo, it must have three main ingredients
- Fun
- Personality
- Awe
It must also have context to the person taking the quiz, and it must totally be about them. Yes, the person taking the viral social quiz should be the star of your quiz. When you’ve indulged your quiz taker, they’ll indulge you and share your quiz, sucking in more traffic and quiz participants.
If your quiz is focused solely on you, then no one will share it who isn’t married to you, related to you or paid by you. Even your closest friends will suddenly be very busy.
When you know the tiny details of your dream clients, choosing a topic is very easy. It’s the adding fun that’s hard!
In this example I know that my dream clients love Suits. They’re interested in whether their answers to a quiz will show them whether they’re Team Harvey or Team Mike. They want to know if they’re a paralegal like Rachel or condemned to eternity in the typing pool. They want to know if they’d pass law exams Harvey-style … or Mike-style. They want to know if they’ll ever get a $500 haircut.
Decide whether your viral social quiz will evoke belonging (using your psychographics) or encourage competitiveness. Both are excellent at driving viral shares.
When it’s a belonging quiz, ie “Which Suits Lawyer Are You?” people will take the quiz to see which one they are, and to see if they’re Louis Litt like you. If it’s a “How Many Suits Episodes Do You Recognise By The Music” style quiz then superfans will compete with other superfans to be the best.
Notice that the word “which” starts a belonging, or tribal quiz and “How” starts a competitive quiz. What You call your quiz matters.
Headlines for social quizzes.
You’ve established your quiz type and style, the next step in creating your viral quiz is to work on your headline. A great headline makes the difference between a viral quiz and a quiz that only your mum will click.
Work on several headlines, and if you have the capability, split test them. The best headline of course, is the one that will get you the most shares.
Questions for Your Viral Social Quiz
You’ll need to decide your end goal for the quiz. If they’re like Mike Ross, then they will have more b-type answers or score between 70-80% correct answers.
If they’re a-type responses to indicates a likeness to Harvey, then you need to note that down.
Social quizzes that are graded work best for this style of quiz.
Write out a rough draft of 10 questions and decide whether they’re a Mike or Harvey (or Donna / Jessica) response.
Look at your questions – cross out any that are not fun. Put a star next to any that make you smile (these are good) and keep writing and crossing out until you have 10 questions with stars next to them.
These are the questions for your quiz. If in doubt, cross it out.
Images for Your Viral Social Quiz
You’re a smart cookie (you’re reading this post, what else could you be?) and you know that to make a connection you need to have gorgeous visuals as well as fun headlines and questions. This can become expensive as licensed images start at £1 per image, and have licensing restrictions.
For example, this is a photo of Patrick J Adams, who plays Mike Ross in Suits. It can be used for editorial use only. This means it can be used in a blog post, for news purposes but not used for promotional purposes. I cannot add a pithy quote to the image, or anything related to promoting this post. That means no website URL, or branding colours. In fact, if you share this post you will see the featured image is of a dog winning an Oscar (go on, share the post! You know you haven’t lived until you see a dog holding an Oscar statue).
To buy photographs where they can be used for promotional purposes, then you’re looking at around £5,000 upwards. Per image. This can make a 10-question social quiz very, very costly. Of course, it’s the quiz style most likely to give you the best ROI.
Some images in the public domain may be used, however, you need to look a little closer at the licenses to see if you can use them in your quiz. It doesn’t matter where you get the images from, if you are not allowed to use them legally, it is you (the publisher of the quiz) who will be fined. Saying you thought it was okay just because it was on Google doesn’t give you a get out of jail free card.
If you have taken your own photos of celebrities you can use those, but you cannot imply endorsement.
I cannot use the Suits logo, or the Suits branding as that can breach copyright and imply that it’s a licensed product.
How do you get around copyright for your viral quiz?
You don’t.
You don’t try to skirt around the copyright issues, you lean into them and use the ones publicly available. You can contact the PR companies of celebrities and ask for images. In some cases, you will be granted permission, and images to use.
You can check sites like PhotoPin and see if they have any of your chosen celebrities. Remember to credit the photograph owner on the image itself, as well as in your quiz.
And finally, you can choose an image that has the feel of what you’re quizzing about. The above image is of a suit jacket. If you’ve read “Harvey” into that image that would be because we’ve been talking about Suits, lawyers etc. It’s just an image of suit jacket from Zdenet on Pixabay.
Viral Quizzes: Pulling it All Together
Next, decide whether you are going to deliver your quiz via your own website, or, whether you will use someone else’s software / platform.
If you’re a WordPress website owner I recommend Thrive Quiz Builder. This recently released software will enable you to create viral social quizzes very quickly.
Whatever software you choose, make sure it has the viral sharing aspect built in. Make it easy for your quiz takers to share the quiz, and encourage them to do with a call to action on the results page.
And Finally…
You will need to create and market several social quizzes before you hit the viral jackpot – one is never enough.
Each one you create becomes better, and stronger and you’ll know what your audience loves (e.g. it turns out they love The Good Wife and not Suits) and you’ll know the time they most take a quiz (between commercials in the X-Factor) and you’ll know precisely where to promote it (e.g. targeting your Facebook ads to an audience of The Good Wife fans who also like the X Factor, based in the U.K.).
With a little bit of luck and the right timing, you’ll have your viral social quiz.
And if you’ve had one already? Leave a comment and let us know what you’d add to this.
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