The Viral Path on Facebook
Updated: February 2, 2016.
Social Media is often just a tool to connect with friends and family, but every once in awhile you post something that goes viral. The tools used to determine if a post is viral are all relative to the expected reach of a user. A user with a million followers would need many millions of views for the post to be viral. Basically if your Facebook post has a Reach that is 5 times the number of those that follow your Page then the post has gone viral.
There is no method to determine what people will find interesting enough to share or retweet or copy. Sometimes it is a video of a British child saying, "Charlie bit my finger." Sometimes it is a meme of what old people say. Sometimes it is uplifting and sometimes it is degrading. Sometimes comical and sometimes sentimental.
I want to share with you how one of the posts from our church Facebook Page went viral. It started as just one of the many hundreds of daily posts that we put up. We have found that the best time to post in order to reach a wide audience is at 8am EST. We try to schedule posts so that they are posted at either 8am, noon, or 5pm. Those seem to be the times when we get the best reach.
After the post goes up on the church Page, I then share it on my personal Facebook account. Typically we will reach between 200-500 people with a post by the end of the day. Not bad considering that we only have 270 Facebook likes for our Page. But each time one of our followers likes or shares the post it reaches more people.
One recent post started very slowly. It had only reached about 150 people by the end of the day. The next day I started to get notifications of Likes and Shares and Comments. We posted it on January 20 and as of today, January 31, it has reached more than 58,000 people with nearly 5000 Likes, Comments, and Shares.
What was our post? A simple quote using white letters on a black background as shown below.
You can use Insights to check on how well your posts are received by your followers. Unless you have a Facebook Page set-up with more then 100 Likes you will not be able to access Insights. Here is a snapshot of the information that Insights gives about a post.
The left column shows the date and time of the original post. The second column shows a preview of the post. The third column shows the type of post, in this case a photo. The fourth column shows the target, in this case it was public. The fifth column shows your reach. At the time of this photo it was under 58,000. In just a few minutes it had gone to 58.3K [In just 2 days that number has risen to over 200k]. The last column shows the number of post clicks with a blue line. This is the number of times people clicked on the post or photo. If your post is text and the person clicks on the "See more" to view all of your text it will count here. The red line indicates the number of Likes, Shares, and Comments the post has had.
How does a viral post help you? It is free promotion for your group or organization. Your Page name is visible each time someone sees that their Friend liked, shared, or commented on a post. Sometimes people will click on your Page name to check it out because they liked one of your posts. As a result of this post (or possibly others we have shared recently) we have had 15 more people Like our page.
Why would a church want their posts to go viral? Every group has a message that they want others to hear. The larger your audience the greater your reach. The more people that we have following the posts on our Facebook Page the more people we can reach with our message. As a church our message is one that has eternal implications and we believe that it is important for others to hear it. For a business their message has the potential to make them more money.
We do not focus only on posting things that will reach large groups of people on Facebook. Some of our posts are specifically intended for our local church members only. Some are simply photos of our fellowships and events. Some are informational posts about what our church is doing and how others can be a part of that. Some are messages about hope and love and forgiveness and salvation. Each of these posts may have a different audience, but our Reach is expanded whenever we have a post that goes viral.
The church can look at it this way. For an unknown amount of time, John the Baptist preached in the wilderness about salvation and had a Reach that was possibly in the hundreds. Jesus preached for 3 years from the Sea of Galilee to Jerusalem and had a Reach of thousands. His disciples shared His message throughout the Middle East and parts of Europe and reached millions. That message continued to be shared and has reached hundreds of millions. The Good News went viral and continues to be shared, liked, and commented on throughout the world.
Social Media is often just a tool to connect with friends and family, but every once in awhile you post something that goes viral. The tools used to determine if a post is viral are all relative to the expected reach of a user. A user with a million followers would need many millions of views for the post to be viral. Basically if your Facebook post has a Reach that is 5 times the number of those that follow your Page then the post has gone viral.
There is no method to determine what people will find interesting enough to share or retweet or copy. Sometimes it is a video of a British child saying, "Charlie bit my finger." Sometimes it is a meme of what old people say. Sometimes it is uplifting and sometimes it is degrading. Sometimes comical and sometimes sentimental.
I want to share with you how one of the posts from our church Facebook Page went viral. It started as just one of the many hundreds of daily posts that we put up. We have found that the best time to post in order to reach a wide audience is at 8am EST. We try to schedule posts so that they are posted at either 8am, noon, or 5pm. Those seem to be the times when we get the best reach.
After the post goes up on the church Page, I then share it on my personal Facebook account. Typically we will reach between 200-500 people with a post by the end of the day. Not bad considering that we only have 270 Facebook likes for our Page. But each time one of our followers likes or shares the post it reaches more people.
One recent post started very slowly. It had only reached about 150 people by the end of the day. The next day I started to get notifications of Likes and Shares and Comments. We posted it on January 20 and as of today, January 31, it has reached more than 58,000 people with nearly 5000 Likes, Comments, and Shares.
What was our post? A simple quote using white letters on a black background as shown below.
You can use Insights to check on how well your posts are received by your followers. Unless you have a Facebook Page set-up with more then 100 Likes you will not be able to access Insights. Here is a snapshot of the information that Insights gives about a post.
The left column shows the date and time of the original post. The second column shows a preview of the post. The third column shows the type of post, in this case a photo. The fourth column shows the target, in this case it was public. The fifth column shows your reach. At the time of this photo it was under 58,000. In just a few minutes it had gone to 58.3K [In just 2 days that number has risen to over 200k]. The last column shows the number of post clicks with a blue line. This is the number of times people clicked on the post or photo. If your post is text and the person clicks on the "See more" to view all of your text it will count here. The red line indicates the number of Likes, Shares, and Comments the post has had.
How does a viral post help you? It is free promotion for your group or organization. Your Page name is visible each time someone sees that their Friend liked, shared, or commented on a post. Sometimes people will click on your Page name to check it out because they liked one of your posts. As a result of this post (or possibly others we have shared recently) we have had 15 more people Like our page.
Why would a church want their posts to go viral? Every group has a message that they want others to hear. The larger your audience the greater your reach. The more people that we have following the posts on our Facebook Page the more people we can reach with our message. As a church our message is one that has eternal implications and we believe that it is important for others to hear it. For a business their message has the potential to make them more money.
We do not focus only on posting things that will reach large groups of people on Facebook. Some of our posts are specifically intended for our local church members only. Some are simply photos of our fellowships and events. Some are informational posts about what our church is doing and how others can be a part of that. Some are messages about hope and love and forgiveness and salvation. Each of these posts may have a different audience, but our Reach is expanded whenever we have a post that goes viral.
The church can look at it this way. For an unknown amount of time, John the Baptist preached in the wilderness about salvation and had a Reach that was possibly in the hundreds. Jesus preached for 3 years from the Sea of Galilee to Jerusalem and had a Reach of thousands. His disciples shared His message throughout the Middle East and parts of Europe and reached millions. That message continued to be shared and has reached hundreds of millions. The Good News went viral and continues to be shared, liked, and commented on throughout the world.
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