Friday, April 25, 2014

How to Take Advantage of the Buzzfeed Quiz Craze

How to Take Advantage of the Buzzfeed Quiz Craze image buzzfeed growth 600x288

Traffic to quizzes helped Buzzfeed nearly double it’s overall visits in the last few months. Unless you live under a rock, you’ve heard of the infamous Buzzfeed quiz. The question is, what does this trend mean for your business? How do you take advantage of the waves of traffic that are flowing to quizzes?


First, make your own quiz. While Buzzfeed doesn’t yet allow you to use their site to make a quiz, there is a way to make a buzzfeed quiz. There’s a lot more to the process of creating quizzes than just writing a few questions and hoping for the best. The real magic in quizzes is getting the social shares going, because quizzes get 75% of their overall traffic from social networks.


To make sure your quiz has the best shot at being highly share-able. There are a few simple rules to follow.


  • First, name it right. It’s got to be fun by not too coy.

  • Second, be snarky. The more fun a quiz is, the more likely it is to get shared.

  • Third, use images. This study shows that having faces on your quiz will get you more views.

  • Fourth, tell everyone they are awesome. People respond well to positive reinforcement – be nice.

  • Fifth, write to a person. Have an ideal quiz taker and speak directly to them.

  • Sixth, Keep it short. Don’t go over ten questions unless you absolutely have to.

After you’ve written your quiz questions, it’s time to put together the results that people will see when they finish taking your quiz. This is where you have an opportunity to give readers a share-able snippet that will eventually drive more traffic back to your quiz.


Speaking to why quizzes are so share-able, Buzzfeed managing editor had this to say.


“The quiz gives someone something that they can relate to well enough that they can share it with others,”



Buzzfeed certainly practices what they preach, and every quiz result is both personal and positive – the perfect combination for generating social shares. For a step-by-step approach on how to write persuasive approach, you can check out this guide. Generally what happens in results is that compliments are paid to the quiz-taker in a way that is general enough to apply to a lot of people, but specific enough to be believable.


How to Take Advantage of the Buzzfeed Quiz Craze image widwestern 600x360


Second, promote your quiz. Your site isn’t Buzzfeed, and your new quiz won’t get automatically picked up and shared. To get traffic through your quiz and kickstart the social sharing you’ve got to put in some work. Quizzes are different from your blog posts and should be promoted differently. Here’s how to drive traffic through your quiz.


  • Share and embed on Facebook. The largest social network is also the largest driver of traffic for quizzes – no surprise here. In addition to sharing a link to your quiz, embed it in a Facebook tab so you can get traffic from future fans as well as current ones.

  • Promote it on Twitter with appropriate hashtags (twice). I’m not promoting spam, which would occur if you share a link to the same quiz over and over again, but there is evidence that sharing content subsequent times is an effective way to drive more traffic. This makes sense, with how fast twitter feeds refresh, most of your followers won’t see each tweet you send out, so recirculate your content.

How to Take Advantage of the Buzzfeed Quiz Craze image retweets


  • Embed your quiz as a blog post. Quizzes embed the same way a YouTube video would, with a simple iframe. Get increased exposure by showing your quiz to your existing audience.

  • Let people email it to each other. Email is the oldest and most natural form of social sharing. Email is amazing because everyone knows how to forward an email, you don’t have to teach someone that the way you might have to show them how to post on Twitter.

Quizzes have been around for a long time, but the formula for making them awesome is just being perfected. At the moment we are looking at the beginning of the rise of quizzes as a form of web content. You can bring your business to the forefront of content technology by creating Buzzfeed style quizzes for your site and sharing them out appropriately.


Source: B2C_Business



How to Take Advantage of the Buzzfeed Quiz Craze

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