Give Your Video Its Best Chance To Go Viral

Published on Monday, 18 March 2013 11:23

Darin McGilvra

It’s any company’s dream: a video about the company and its products or services goes viral and brings in thousands of potential customers.

While there is no magic formula for creating a viral video, there are common traits to many viral videos. If you incorporate as many of these traits into your video as possible, you can give your video the best chance at going viral.

Before getting started on your new video, it is important to remember that this is different from television. TV is designed to make viewers passive because television wants to keep you from changing the channel.

Online videos need to inspire people to action. This is because your video needs to get viewers to not only want to know more about your product or service, but to get them to share the video with their friends and family.

This is the online equivalent of word-of-mouth marketing. Marketing people have understood for many years the importance of people receiving recommendations for a company’s product or services from family or friends. When people share a video, they are giving it their personal recommendation.

So, what inspires people? This can vary wildly, but there are certain categories of videos that inspire people to share them with others.

A humorous video can be quite popular. If people laugh at a video, they are much more likely to share it if they believe the people they share it with are likely to laugh at the video as well.

Any video that shows something weird or unusual often grabs people’s attention. If you can show people something that they haven’t seen before, they are likely to share it with friends or family that they believe have not seen it either.

An emotional response from a video will inspire viewers to share it

Along with the video being unique or unusual, it needs to illicit an emotional response. If the viewer just thinks, “Oh. That’s nice,” then he most likely won’t share it. However, an emotional response is often a call to action for vendors. A positive emotional response is ideal, but a negative response can also be effective at convincing people to share the video.

A negative emotional response could be something like righteous indignation, which is what people feel when they observe injustice.

Successful videos also can be inspirational or be of inspirational famous figures that provide inspirational words of wisdom, especially if the video is of a key moment of the famous person’s life, such as the first time the person spoke in public or the last time the person will be speaking publicly.

Anything with a strong cuteness factor, such as a video that includes babies, kittens or puppies (or some combination of the three), also has a tendency to shared more often.

Your video should be kept short. People will rarely share anything over three minutesm and it should ideally be less than two minutes. Make sure you have something to draw in the viewer in the first 15 to 20 seconds of the video.

While the content is extremely important  for the video, so is the headline as well as making sure it includes descriptive tags. Don’t forget to share it yourself on social media. Post it on YouTube and share links to that post on other social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. Even if your video doesn’t go viral, it will help to keep viewers on your website longer and will help your website rank higher in search engines.

If your company is too small to hire a professional videographer and you’re not confident you can do this the right way yourself, then you may want to consider seeking out a Temecula Web design company that provides video services. An experienced company can help you have the most successful video possible.

Darin McGilvra

Darin McGilvra has been a professional writer since 1997. He currently writes about personal finances, information technology and sports for numerous websites, including mycashtime.com, mchelper.com, and Yahoo! Sports.

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