How Make Your Video Go Viral
1. 1. Don’t be “too good” for marketing
I almost didn’t put together a marketing plan. Because what if I did all this marketing, and then the video still flopped? That would’ve been embarrassing. Then I realized how stupid that was.
It’s better to try your damnedest and fail than to hold back and always wonder what if.
If you put all this effort into your video, why would you rely on luck for the last leg? Swallow your pride. Give your work a fighting chance. Put together a marketing plan. This article will show you how.
2. It MUST Evoke Emotion
If there was ever a viral video production school, I’d expect to be taught this on the very first day as for me, it’s the most important lesson you can learn if you’re looking to create a video with the intention of it ‘going viral’.
I’m sure everyone reading this post (at least those with Facebook or Twitter accounts) will have been sent a ‘viral video’ at some point. Now, I want you to take a moment and think about the videos that have been shared with you, or ones you’ve shared with others. What were they about and why were they shared in the first place?
When asked this question, I’d expect most people to say that the videos they shared were funny. Take the recent Internet sensation, Gangnam Style for example; the reason this went viral was initially due to the fact that Psy’s crazy dance moves are hilarious. However, there are other reasons for sharing – the video must be awesome (and by that, I do mean truly awesome), sad, controversial, or educational in some cases.
All of these evoke some sort of emotion, and this starts the path to virality. Imagine your friend told you a joke or a funny story, chances are that you’d pass that joke or story on to your other friends and they’d soon tell their friends too because they’d want to make their friends laugh too. This is exactly what is happening in the online world when it comes to viral videos so it’s important to incorporate true emotion into your videos.
3. Tell a story
I’m a decent dancer for a year of practice but I’m nothing compared to the pros. There are thousands of dancers way more talented whose videos didn’t go viral.
Girl Learns to Dance in a Year went viral because it wasn’t just another dance video with cool moves and cool camera angles. It wasn’t about how good the dancing was. It was about how awkward I was when I started, and how I got better with practice.
And it’s not just a story about dancing. It’s about having a dream and not knowing how to get there — but starting anyway.
People want stories. That’s what all TV, movies, and books are. Tell a story.
4, You Must Have A Marketing Plan
Yes, companies have seen their videos ‘go viral’ through nothing more than a great deal of luck, but you can’t afford to take this risk. It’s also usually a lot harder for a video to spread if it’s been produced or endorsed by a company, as opposed to something uploaded purely for entertainment purposes such as the well-known viral hits Hamster on a Piano or Keyboard Cat (two of my favourites).
As I previously mentioned, there are also a lot of companies commissioning videos these days without the understanding that not all of them are going to be successful. Sure, your video needs to be great, but you also need to have a great marketing plan.
Now, a lot of well-established companies might find this easier than smaller companies or start-ups because they already have a major social media following. Coca-Cola for example has close to 55 million Facebook fans, so as you can imagine, they are likely to see their videos go viral pretty quickly.
The reason for an initial marketing plan is simple: there has to be someone to share the video in the first place. Let’s look at a real world example and imagine that you wanted to start a rumor about someone. If you never told anyone the rumor, how would it ever spread? Likewise, if you tell one person the rumor, it has some chance of spreading but if you tell 50 people the rumor, it’s going to spread a lot more quickly. Once you plant those initial seeds, some of your work is done.
Conversely, it doesn’t matter how good your initial marketing plan is if your video doesn’t hold its own. There will come a point where it stops being shared, and you want to make sure that doesn’t happen too quickly. I recommend you read this article which goes into a lot more detail about a three tier/circle concept and why it’s likely that your video will fail if it doesn’t get past the second circle.
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