When I launched WP4FB last week, I had no clue how big it would get. Of course, I did everything within my power to make sure it went viral, but since I’m offering WP4FB for free I didn’t want to invest too much time in it as well. Right now, 1 week later, WP4FB has 400+ RT’s, 1000+ likes and welcomed more than 7.000 visitors without spending a penny on advertising. Want to know how I did that?

1. Create something valuable

The first step is to create something valuable and unique within your niche. Try to think outside the box, what does your target market care about? A quality ebook has proven to be very effective, but there are many things that work at least equally as good (e.g. *good* coupons, free software (like WP4FB), etc).

2. Give it away in return for like AND share

It’s a well-known strategy to share the giveaway with fans only in order to increase the number of “likes” on your fanpage (since they will not be able to download the giveaway without being a fan). And this strategy is enough for a fanpage to go viral and get thousands of likes, right? WRONG!

When someone “likes” your page, the message “John likes [fanpage name]” will appear on the Facebook wall of their friends, but in most cases that’s not enough to go viral. If John has liked more than one page the message will say “John likes Coca Cola and 3 other pages”. There goes your exposure… In addition, these messages will hardly show up in the “Top News” wall, which is way more popular than the “Most Recent” wall.

So, the message still needs to be spread. We’re not going to sit back and hope for the best, we’re going to make sure the message will be spread. How? By letting users “pay” with a Tweet or Facebook share in order to download the giveaway. An easy way to set this up is using CloudFloud (created by Viperchill), but you can also develop your own using the Facebook SDK (I’m thinking about including that on the next WP4FB-version, by the way). In short, users first have to “like” the page before they will see the message that they also need to spread the message in order to download the giveaway.

Note: Make sure that you present your free giveaway well at your pre-like landingspage. There’s no point in creating a good product without being able to “sell” it.

3. Get the (initial) word out

Once we’ve everything set up, it’s time to start spreading the word! An easy way to do this, is to ask some friends and acquaintances to tweet or blog about (if their readers match your target group), send an email to your email list, put it in your email footer, etc.. You can even send some emails to small blogs that are hungry for content, and will most likely put the word out as well (if your giveaway is really good). There are in fact many ways to get some initial traffic (and thus likes) going. I can recommend to go to this post, for example. Don’t go after the big fish just yet!

4. Connect with influencers to go viral

Here’s the kicker. Once you have a fair amount of likes and retweets, you are ready to go after the bigger fish. The bigger fish? Yeah: the most popular tweeps and bloggers within your niche. Normally they’re harder to convince why they should write about your free giveaway (since they get these proposals every single day), but by giving them social proof you’re already one step ahead.

One of the biggest fish in my market is Smashing Magazine, so I emailed them my pitch and included (“It’s going viral as we speak, since it already got 100+ retweets and 200+ likes in the first 2 days”). Guess what? One day later they put a tweet out, reaching more than 384.000 followers at once.

Of course there’s no guarantee that they will write about your product, but I found that adding social proof to your (short!) pitch will definitely increase your chances.

Sit back and relax?

Is it time to sit back and relax already? No way, there’s still lots to do! Make sure to subscribe to my RSS feed or follow WP4FB on twitter, and I’ll tell you all about it in the following posts.