HOW DO YOU MAKE MY VIDEO GO VIRAL?
I remember that day when he looked me in the eye and said, “Oh, we don’t have
a marketing budget, we’re just going to go viral.”
Everybody dreams of making their videos viral, but simply expecting your video
to go viral is an absolutely terrible strategy.
You’ve heard the number of hours
of content uploaded to YouTube every minute.
How many of them are viral?
The chances for you to make your video viral is infinitesimally small; it is a
terrible strategy. It’s like investing in the lottery.
Now if for some reason, your video becomes viral, if a billion people streamed
it, then great; leverage it, take hold of it. But the chances of that are up there with
you winning the lottery. It is very hard to plan a viral video; it’s just something
that you just have to know how to do.
Also, viral videos tend not to be marketing videos.
Viral videos usually are not
going to be anything that makes anybody money. Indeed, there may even be
song rights that come in there as well, further depleting profit. There is really not
much bang for the buck in viral video anyway, other than simply the bragging
rights.
I once spoke at an event that had a raffle for charity at the evening’s close. I
offered one of my YouTube training DVD sets and the person who won was
surprisingly excited.
When I asked why she was so into a YouTube training
program, she told me that she had a video that had seen millions of views - but
that she had no idea how to make a cent from it - and she was hoping my
program would help.
Just because your video goes viral, there is no promise of anything other than
bragging rights.
But with that said and done, there are some patterns we can look at here. In
truth, what makes a viral video is not complicated. Here are the basic principles:
A viral video is a video where somebody thinks, “I have got to share this.
It’s
the kind of video that creates that visceral response where you just have to share
it.
What are the things that people have to share on YouTube ?
They have to share really one thing, and that is something entirely unexpected. Nobody shares the expected,
and everyone shares the unexpected. If they come to YouTube, they usually see
a video they are expecting to see; and the transaction ends there.
But if you get
them something entirely different than everything else, then you’ve got a chance
that they’ll share it.
There are two ways that this happens. One – like a good majority of viral videos
– is just humor.
People love to be the one that forward along the really funny
joke. One of your best chances to add at least some viral elements to your video
is just by adding humor - unexpected humor - that people want to share.
The other reason that people pass along a video is something that I’ve learned
from my friend and web videographer Tim Street. Tim says that viral comes
from the mixing of two separate strongly contrasting emotions.
Think
about it;
you’ve seen videos where it’s a serene, beautiful moment and then something
scary jumps out. Or clips where it’s a humorous moment that gets tragic very
quickly.
Anything where you have contrasting emotions – tragic meets comedic,
beautiful meets ugly – these have the best chances of going viral because people
don’t see it coming. The shock value that comes from the unexpected forces
them to pass it along, and it goes viral.
It’s also a dirty little secret that a huge amount of the viral video sensations spent
millions of dollars getting those initial millions of views. For some, in the end, it
was money well spent; but it wasn’t the “let’s-put-something-up-and-see-it-go-
viral” idea that we’d all like to hope/dream it to be.
Please, do the math on viral videos. Just because I watched all of the Old Spice
Commercials doesn’t mean I changed my deodorant choice and just because I
watched a funny Air New Zealand video with the cast of “The Hobbit” doesn’t
mean I’m going there on vacation any time soon.
The real money in online video,
Specifically YouTube, is to be made using Google’s platform to
deliver a message that your specific audience needs. Focus on that, not on
“going viral.”
What are the action items?
Action number one is very simple: don’t worry about going viral, you’re
probably not going to do that and you’re going to fail miserably if that is your
plan.
It is a really bad strategy despite what I explained here. Instead, worry
about matching your video message to your audience; worry about making a
video that says what it is that you want to say to the audience that needs to hear
it.
Remember, if you have a bunch of folks watching the video for only a few
seconds, YouTube simply won’t give your video the search-ability or find-
ability. Find people who actually are interested in what it is that you have to say
and leave the viral to chance.
To confirm and reiterate, don’t worry about making things viral - it’s really just
a bad strategy to sink your teeth into. It’s a bit of “hopium”, if you will. Work on
a video that people will consume so that YouTube knows you’re serious about
what it is that you’re doing.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but that’s the sobering truth.
One More Thing About Viral Videos …
This might surprise you, but, more often than not, the viral videos that you
dream of someday making weren’t “viral” until , and yes I have this number
right, tens of millions of views were purchased. It is a common practice in the
viral video “space” to purchase enough views to make people treat/view a video
as viral. Think about it, if you see a video with a few hundred views, who cares?
But, if the video you are looking at has 10 million views before you, how much
more likely are you to pass it on?
YouTube is BIG BUSINESS and there is big money that goes into this business.
The beauty of YouTube is that with an audience in the billions, you still can be
heard above all of the noise and the tens of millions of views purchased to pull
eyeballs away from your audience.
Don’t try to be the next Psy or PooPourri (if you don’t know, don’t look them
up). Just do what we recommend in this blogger and match your video with an
audience that is looking to see the content it contains.
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