"Viral" Posts and Social Media Marketing

For this blog post, I want to talk about the idea of media going “viral” in this day and age. I think it’s a really interesting concept that didn’t exist just a few years ago but is now an extremely common thing to happen. It often occurs with videos or text posts that are posted onto some form of social media such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. A popular example is the Pepsi ad that featured Kendall Jenner. There were millions of views of the video, thousands of tweets on the matter, articles written about the content of the ad. Within 24 hours of the advertisement being released, it had caused such an uproar that Pepsi Co. removed the advertisement from the web.

A more recent example is from a clothing company called Sunny Co. Clothing. This company posted a photo on their Instagram account saying that for the next 24 hours, anyone who reposted the picture (above) would get a free swimsuit and just pay shipping. Sunny Co. Clothing is owned by two men here at U of A. They did this as a marketing stunt to spread the word about their newly formed company, which was just founded a couple months ago. The post went viral though, and hundreds of thousands of people reposted the picture in hopes of getting a free swimsuit. This was unexpected and the company had to revise their Instagram post to cap the amount of free swimsuits at 50,000 and even then, they are currently estimating 3-6 weeks to get all the swimsuits shipped out. This example of a viral post happened literally overnight and reached hundreds of thousands of Instagram users! On Sunny Co.’s website, everything is sold out, which proves that their marketing stunt worked and got a lot of people all over the world talking about their brand.

I think it’s so interesting that things like Instagram posts and videos can be utilized to market products so quickly and at little to no cost. A viral Instagram post is way cheaper than a billboard or print ad in a magazine. This also makes me think about Instagram-famous people who get sponsored to promote products such as teas, teeth whitening kits and vitamins. It’s a new and really unique way of advertising to millennials and I am interested to see how this kind of marketing progresses.