One of the questions I get asked a lot is how to find viral content ideas for your Facebook traffic website.
Facebook-style articles tend to be quite different from their SEO-optimized counterparts. They are shorter, typically 500-1000 words rather than 2,500+, and usually in the form of emotionally charged stories, listicles, image lists, quizzes, or other simple, quickly digestible forms of website content.
I recommend brainstorming these article ideas with Chat GPT (more on that later), but how do you go about finding successful Facebook-style content to inspire you in the first place?
The Wayback Machine is the go-to repository for historical website snapshots and provides an almost limitless treasure trove of historical viral content ideas!
Facebook has been making website articles go viral for 15+ years at this point, so there are literally 100,000s of popular posts across thousands of niches you can find to model your own content on.
To uncover these gems, just go to the Wayback Machine website, and type in the root URL of a successful Facebook content site, such as viralnova.com, thedodo.com, boredpanda.com, ladbible.com or thelanguagenerds.com.
Now go back to a historically popular year, in this case, we’ll go way back to 2014. Now we click on any of the larger circles and a timestamp to show a snapshot taken at that point in time.
Now you will see loads of archived articles you can go through to get ideas!
But how do we know if these posts were successful on Facebook or not?
Well, there is a simple way to find out, you just need the Meta Sharing Debugger (weird name, useful tool)! You’ll need to be logged into your Facebook account to use this tool, by the way.
Just copy and paste the URL of the article you found on the Wayback Machine (you will find this in the top bar of your browser) into the Meta Sharing Debugger, in this case, we’ll try: https://www.thedodo.com/
Hit the “debug” button and you will see a load of information Facebook has scraped about the post, and also how many likes, shares and comments the post has had!
In this case, the post has received 1453 engagements, which is pretty decent.
Lovely, but what we really want to look for are those posts with over 50,000 likes, shares and comments which means the post went seriously viral and is well worth repurposing for our own site!
Now you can also have some fun reverse-engineering why these posts went viral in the first place!
A bonus tactic you can do with this method is finding a list of say, 25 viral titles you have found via the Wayback Machine, and feeding those into Chat GPT to produce unique article ideas in your own niche!
Use a prompt such as: “Write 25 unique article ideas suitable for a Facebook audience in the guitar tuition niche, based on the following successful viral pages [list viral titles]”
I hope these tips will help you discover viral content for your own Facebook sites…
There are far more in-depth details and walkthroughs about finding and repurposing viral content in my premium course The Facebook Traffic Blueprint, if you want to take things to the next level!
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