A viral Facebook post is what digital marketers everywhere dream about at night. It is marketing gold, and better yet, it’s free.

Creating these elusive posts, however, can seem like the Mount Everest of content strategies.

First, marketers need to realize there is no exact formula to viral posts. Like all good advertising and promotion, viral content takes a lot of creativity, good timing, and a bit of luck. The goal, then, is to examine the pieces of the most successful posts to understand what made them work (like Matthew Broderick’s Super Bowl commercial for Honda, in which he re-enacted Ferris Bueller’s Day Off).

As a brand, the question facing marketers is how to achieve this Holy Grail of digital in an organic, measurable fashion. To begin with, do a little research. Find out what is going viral now. Check out sites like StumbleUpon and Buzzfeed to see what is trending. For example, BuzzFeed creates a list of the top 20 viral posts of the week, with indicators that show the post’s reach.

This slideshow describes the creation of a good viral Facebook post with examples of how they have been done effectively.

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