How I Created a Viral Awards Show on Twitter
A step-by-step guide to delighting your audience
Work in advertising long enough and eventually you’ll be asked, without fail, to make something “go viral”.
It’s a social media manager’s worst nightmare.
There’s no “make it go viral” button! When something “goes viral”, that just means a lot of people decide to share it. I can’t make people share. Stop asking me to!
So you can’t make something go viral. But what you can do is create conditions that make it more likely that something goes viral.
That’s the system I created for our twitter account at Article Group. And that system is why our weekly awards show, Win a Thing Wednesday, has gone viral multiple times in its very brief lifespan. Here’s how.
What the heck is Win a Thing Wednesday?
So, we’re a creative marketing agency.
Every Wednesday, we invite our followers — agency creatives, strategists, brand and product marketers, folks like that — to participate in a creative challenge. We call the challenge Win a Thing Wednesday (#WATW). The winner gets a trophy — yes, really.
We literally ship trophies to our followers all over the world. It’s our little twist on agency social accounts, which usually just brag about awards they’ve won. Nobody wants to read that. So we decided to give awards to our followers instead!
You may have seen our most recent viral challenge, Painfully Relatable Pumpkins somewhere on Twitter Moments or read about it on NBC, Know Your Meme, The Drum and BuzzFeed.
Before those jack-o-lanterns, other #WATW challenges went viral, too: like that time we asked our followers to design protest signs for sea creatures, or that time we asked them to put Airpods on famous works of art.
The thing is, we didn’t make WATW so it could “go viral.” Don’t get us wrong, we love that it has — many times. Retweets probably hit the same reward centers in my brain that light up when I eat chocolate or pet a corgi.
We made Win A Thing Wednesday because we want to provide our audience of radically curious people with something creatively stimulating.
We don’t have the framework to make *all* content go viral (sadly), but we do have some building blocks we use to make Win a Thing Wednesday. You may find them useful in your own content endeavors:
The #WATW Framework
Like I said up top, you can’t make something go viral. But, you can create the conditions that help something go viral.
The first big condition: we interact with our followers all day long, regardless of whether it’s Wednesday or not. So, when Wednesday comes around, the #WATW challenge doesn’t feel like it’s out of the blue.
The second big condition: When we pitch #WATW ideas, we score them on a set of criteria:
Let me break that down:
1. Timely
Is the #WATW idea tied to a specific holiday or event? In journalist lingo: “Is there a news peg?” By making our challenges timely, we take advantage of a psychological truth: people care about what they already care about.
2. Relevant
Is the #WATW idea relevant to our audience’s core interests, i.e., the topics of creativity, work/life, a social cause? By making our challenges relevant to our audience’s interests, we lower the barrier for them to engage.
3. Interesting
Is the #WATW idea a unique take on an existing idea? Or, does the idea combine two unexpected ideas together (like airpods on art, or everyday anxieties on pumpkins)? Or, does the idea play off a popular meme or TikTok trend?
4. Accessible
Is the #WATW challenge easy enough? We’re not here to create a community of Photoshop experts or InDesign aesthetes. We’re here to build a community of creatives and creative marketers who understand that play is an essential component of work.
Here’s the important part: If we meet all of these conditions, we make it much more likely that a creative challenge will go viral.
And that is what you should be asking your content teams for. Don’t ask them to make something go viral. Support them in creating a system that makes virality more likely.
Create Contagious Content
No one goes viral all the time, and that’s a good thing! The internet would be super boring if one person — no matter how talented and fascinating and knowledgeable about creative marketing they might be — had a monopoly over everyone’s attention.
By focusing on the rubrics to create great content, you will surely create something contagious — in a good way.
