What is the secret of healthy viral content on social networks?

If you have been in Serbia for the past week, you could hardly have avoided Konstrakta (personally, I don't even know why anyone would want that at all, but we are not all the same). A woman with an original performance that is more of an artistic performance than a performance for Eurovision appeared and managed to steal the title of Serbian representative to all expected favorites, who not only have a huge base of followers on social networks, but also have friends, acquaintances, and associates who have the same huge bases and who "pushed" their songs and encouraged their audience to vote.

And somehow none of that worked. This may reveal a serious problem of influencer marketing ‒ it seems that people are ready to like the posts of their favorite creator but to refrain when they really need to spend money to support them, even if that money means less than 40 dinars for a text message. The fact that performers who have several hundred thousand followers received several thousand votes speaks in favor of this observation. This is not a critique of artists who were great in their performances, it just seems that the audience got a little tired of giving, and that loyalty to the performer was not enough motivation for his followers and fans.

However, this was not the case with Konstrakta. Let's start with the fact that she, although she has been active for years, is totally unknown to the broad masses. Unlike the favorites, she did not have a base of followers on social networks (but she is growing now). The artist managed to achieve the ultimate goal of this age ‒ she became a meme. Konstrakta attracted attention and won by being memed. She went viral and people who do not usually vote on Beovizija voted for her. The proof that these are people who do not usually vote is that we have never sent anything like this to the Eurovision Song Contest.

I firmly believe that going viral is the greatest fantasy of all of us in digital marketing, but also of all content creators on social media. Going viral is almost impossible to create in inorganic conditions, so when I think about social media trends, I don't think of any brand that started the trend. I'm not talking about what we know from the world of marketing, but about viral trends that everyone knows.

Konstrakta's performance is designed to become a trend, but the fact that something is designed that way does not mean that it will achieve its goal. I watched I don't know how many reactions of foreigners to the song and almost everyone repeated both hand movements and the chorus. The performance has TikTok potential, and her facial expressions and lyrics were created for memes, but everything that was thought out could not be accepted just like that if it didn't intrigue people as much as it should. Everything we see and hear on stage at first seems confusing and random. Anyone who has thought about zoomers and younger millennials knows that this is their favorite communication style.

TikTok creator Jovanka Bajčetić, better known as @zhogula on this platform, asked in her Insta stories whether this is an organic virality or an ingenious successful marketing campaign. The reason why she believes that this is an ingenious campaign is that the videos about Konstrakta and her old performances started appearing on TikTok en masse even before the semifinals, and they came from some small accounts (non-influencers). Jovanka thinks that they practically managed to break the TikTok algorithm by making a large number of accounts to share similar material, and that is how Konstraktra reached so many people, while the content itself already had the potential of going viral.

If Jovanka is right, and I think that the creator can have a better guess about how the TikTok algorithm "breaks" rather than us mortal observers (even when we look closely), the campaign was ingenious, and it took less investment than hiring influencers to promote the song and exactly what was supposed to happen happened.

Of course, this outcome could hardly have been completely predicted, otherwise, everyone would easily go viral, although it would not be bad to try this strategy of a massive number of anonymous accounts, which is so similar to the organic content distribution with a brand.

Zendaya's story also testifies to how much Konstrakta has blown up since among all the famous names on the list of top songs Zendaya shared, you can see this woman from Serbia who either randomly guessed the spirit of the time and the right moment or had a marketing team everyone could dream of.

In the end, of course, the only question remains ‒ what do we do now? If all goes well, we will confuse the whole of Europe.

Author: Natalija Jovanović, Senior Content Manager