WHAT GOES
INTO A VIRAL VIDEO?
make laughter video
The actual content of a viral
video can be anything from a chimpanzee doing kung fu to a hilariously low-rent
TV commercial to a really great guitar solo performed by some thirteen year old
in his bedroom.
With that in mind, go ahead and develop whatever idea you like.
Whether you're marketing a product or service or you're making short movies for
fun, just fill your video with whatever you find interesting because, here's
the trick: If you find it interesting, someone else finds it interesting, too.
So that's the one thing that all viral videos have in common; they're
interesting.
There's something to them that leaves the viewer either impressed,
or laughing, or, sometimes, even touched on an emotional level.
It's not all
cute kittens and silly commercials, there are also viral videos like Christian
the Lion, where an adult lion is reunited with the humans who took care of him
as a cub, and Where in the Hell is Matt?,
where a man records himself dancing
in beautiful locations around the planet.
Actually shot on location in forty
two different countries, the video serves as a portrait of some of the most
beautiful places on Earth. So whatever you have in mind, just go ahead and do
it.
Don't stop yourself and say "Well, who's gonna care about that?"
because as long as you care, you can bet that there are thousands of people out
there who will care, too.
POPULAR CONTENT
Now... that
said, we're not going to sit here and give you all this feel-good advice
without also giving you some real, solid facts about what kind of viral videos
do tend to garner a lot of hits.
So, yes, there are some types of videos that tend to get more views than
others.
However, none of these are a guarantee.
Because it can be so hard to
predict whether or not a video will go viral, you really can't take any advice
on viral video making as a one hundred percent sure fire, guaranteed, fool
proof strategy.
Likewise, it's always possible to ignore everything and still
get your video going viral.
A lot of it comes down to luck.
Really, all the advice we're giving here is meant to increase the chances of
your video going viral.
Nobody can outright promise that their tips will make
you go viral, so we're not going to lie and say that we can.
Anyways, on with
the popular content!
TUTORIALS
If you look on YouTube, some of
the most popular videos on there are tutorials.
The appeal of these videos is a
lot like the appeal of How-To books, which always tend to sell very well;
people like learning how to do cool things.
world and it has a good chance at
getting a lot of views, because who doesn't want to learn a new trick to
impress their friends with in just a few minutes?
GET TOPICAL
Think of the
opening monologues on the late night talk shows. They're always focused on the
subjects that are on everyone's minds right now.
It's not the only kind of
comedy in the world, of course, but it is the kind of comedy that always seems
to get a lot of views.
THE
INTERNET'S FUNNIEST HOME VIDEOS
As you know,
one of the most popular types of video on the internet is the whole
funny-mishaps category.
Again, this may or may not be the kind of video you're
trying to make, but if you've got a hilarious clip of your dad falling into the
pool at the last family reunion, you can use that to draw attention to your
other videos.
ANIMALS,
KIDS AND BABIES
People love cute kittens, cute puppies, cute kids and
cute babies.
Look at Star Wars According to a Three Year Old.
It's just an
adorable three year old girl describing the plot of Star Wars, and it's just
about the cutest thing you've ever seen.
STAR WARS
And that's
the other thing that people love on YouTube.
Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar
Galactica, Doctor Who, if it has a huge sci-fi fanbase, then you can dip into
that fanbase for some fans of your own.
As an example, you've probably heard of
Chad Vader, a series about Darth Vader's less successful brother.
He's the manager
at a grocery store.
The internet series chronicles Chad's feud with his rival
manager The guys who make those videos have made several other videos, but
none that have received the kind of viewership as Chad Vader, which regularly
gets a few million views per episode.
THE VIEWER'S ATTENTION
Okay we lied.
There is one other thing that all
successful viral videos have in common, and that is that they grab the viewer's
attention within the first few ten seconds.
A common saying regarding movies,
"If nothing interesting happens in the first five minutes, nothing
interesting will happen in the rest of the movie, either".
Well, if your
video's only two minutes long, then you've really only got about ten seconds to
convince the viewer to keep watching.
Think of the whole internet video thing
as MTV after a few energy drinks, the audience wants something short, fast and
immediately gripping.
There are millions and millions of videos out there, and
the fact is that most people will just click on something else if they don't
think the one they're watching will be worth the time.
There are a lot of ways
of hooking the viewer right away, and it really does depend on what kind of
video you're making, but essentially you just don't want to take the viewer's
attention span for granted.
In short, viral videos are the pop song of the iPod
generation: Start with a something catchy and don't overstay your welcome.
make laughter video
If you're doing comedy, make sure there's a laugh in
those first ten seconds and then keep them laughing for the next two minutes.
doing an advertisement, the viewer should know
what you're selling right off the bat; show the product or service right up
front and spend the rest of the video explaining what makes that product or
service so great.
Not to say that there's no room for subtlety, but subtlety is
a tricky thing to pull off in those first ten seconds.
Start with a bang and
spend the rest of the video getting a little more in-depth.
An excellent
example would be The Angry Video Game Nerd, James Rolf. He makes a good living
reviewing bad video games on Youtube, regularly getting over a million views per
video.
His videos are insightful, humorous and nostalgic, really getting into
the whole philosophy of game design and why the one he's reviewing stinks, but
before he gets into all that, he spends the first thirty odd seconds of the
video using very imaginative curse words to describe the game in brief. Crude,
sure, but it's turned out to be an incredibly catchy hook for his viewers.
We're not saying you need to start swearing like a sailor in all your vids, but
within the first ten seconds, you should let the viewer know what you're all
about, and then spend the rest of the video getting a little more in-depth
about it.
TRIAL RUN
Now,
before putting your video online, show it to some friends.
Make a note of how
they react.
Tell them to be brutally honest with you and ask... was it funny?
Did it make sense?
Were there any boring parts?
The main thing is cutting out
the parts that are boring or confusing.
When you're just starting out, that may
leave you with a pretty skimpy video, less than a minute in length, but you
know what? That's a good thing.
The shorter the better.
If it's possible to get
all the information across in five seconds, then go ahead and make a five
second video.
TARGET
AUDIENCE
We said before that, no matter
what you're into, there's always going to be somebody else who's into it, too.
Well, if you really want to capitalize on that, then you need to get to know
your audience.
This doesn't mean selling out and just making whatever you think
other people will like.
Don't worry, you'll have plenty of time to sell out
later when you're rich and famous.
What this means is just bringing a sense of
focus and purpose to your videos.
Remember, the golden rule of making anything,
be it a video or a sandwich, is to make what you like.
That said, keep up with
the communities that revolve around what you like.
Say you're doing a video
blog about movie news.
Obviously, you don't want to be reporting as fact
something that was debunked as a rumor several weeks ago, nor do you want to be
reporting "Breaking news!" a month after it was already reported by
everyone else.
So basically all we're saying here is; know your stuff and stay
up to date. The same goes with using viral videos for marketing. Looking at it
from a business perspective, when high speed internet became more accessible to
the common user, a lot of dial-up moguls went out of business because they
didn't expect high speed to be as big as it wound up being, so they stuck to
good old 56k and wound up losing a lot of customers that way. The same can
happen to any business owner or marketer who doesn't keep up with their
industry.
STAY INVOLVED
Join some
online forums relevant to your subject.
Besides being a great way to keep up on
what's new, you've also got a guaranteed audience right there.
Even if you're
already making some news sites a regular part of your day, it's tough to keep
up on all of it all by yourself, so reading the message boards can help fill
you in on what you missed.
This would tend to apply to a lesser degree if
you're doing videos just for entertainment, but, again, this is where your test
audience comes in.
If a joke is funny, you'll laugh whether you're a coin
collector a video gamer or a movie fan, so there's no real news to keep up with
if you're just trying to make people laugh, but showing it to your friends to
get some test audience reactions can be immensely helpful. Once more, this
comes down to the golden rule of making videos: If your friends like it,
someone else will, too.
STAY TRUE
TO YOUR STYLE
It's not about
changing the content of your videos to please the masses. It's just about
getting focused and serious on what your videos are all about in the first
place.
Don't think that, because movie review videos are big, you need to make
movie review videos, or that you need to make any major changes at all, really.
So if you want to target your target audience, the main thing is to just remember
who your target audience is: Yourself.
This is true whether you're trying to
entertain or market. What makes you laugh?
What would get your attention and
make you want to support the company? Start from there and then see how others
react to the results.
USING SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES TO GET YOUR VIDEO OUT THERE
Social
networking is really the key ingredient to getting a regular audience for your
videos. The whole phenomena of these sites has been around since before
Live journal, and has since gone through a gradual evolution... We'll start with
MySpace.
A BRIEF
HISTORY OF MYSPACE
Yeah, MySpace
pages are kind of annoying. They auto play a really bad song for you as soon as
you load the page up, they're loaded with flashy graphics and they're mostly
just a bunchy of photos people took of themselves at a party.
But! It's still
worth looking into, because that's actually not what the site was designed for.
The site was actually created for the purpose of letting musicians promote
themselves, with or without a talent agent.
On that level, it's been an
incredible success.
Many musicians who might never have had a shot at getting
signed before MySpace have gone on to have incredibly lucrative careers by
selling their own CDs over the site, and in fact, most of today's record
producers are constantly sifting through MySpace with a fine tooth comb to find
the next big thing.
It just so happens that it was also a great way for people to
meet others with similar interests.
If you look at the fact that many on
MySpace have thousands of "friends" listed, then it also becomes
obvious that a side effect is that a lot of people simply collect friends almost
as a form of points...
MAKING
CONNECTIONS
The whole idea
of "friends" on MySpace is a little weird. When you look and see that
someone has over one thousand friends... well, nobody has more than one
thousand real friends, but a friend on MySpace is just someone who regularly
looks at your site to see what's new.
For an artist, a musician, a video maker,
this is great. This means that you're getting a bigger audience than most
independent filmmakers get.
MySpace is still around, but it seems that their
glory days have passed.
Today, everyone has moved on to Facebook and Twitter,
and what's more, YouTube has adopted the social networking of MySpace to allow
video makers to skip that process.
You can now "friend" people on
YouTube and similar sites, and there's actually something of a community on the
site now.
More than just a place to dump your videos and forget about them, the
site's focused has shifted to connecting video makers to one another.
And
here's the thing... if you want your videos to go viral, you really want to get
involved in that social aspect.
The video channels with the most subscribers on
YouTube usually have a lot of subscriptions and friends, as well. So the trick
to getting a lot of YouTube viewers is to watch a lot of YouTube.
Leave a lot
of comments on popular videos, because people will often follow those comments
back to your channel.
request to
the ones who cover similar subject matter.
GET TO KNOW YOUR FELLOW
VIDEO MAKER
If you ask any of the most
popular YouTubers, they'll tell you that being an active member of the
community is a bigger part of getting views than anything you actually put in
your videos themselves.
Using Twitter and Facebook is another great way to
get your stuff recognized. These are basically blogging sites have character
limits, so you can't post more than 150 words on Twitter, for example.
Back in
the Live journal days, somebody might have, say, twenty or thirty friends, since
their posts were longer so, any more than thirty and you'd be spending all day
catching up on the posts.
Now, since the posts on Facebook and Twitter are
always pretty short, most people on those sites have hundreds of friends who
they actually do make a point of keeping up with.
On Twitter, it's actually
quite easy to read a list of several hundred friends posts. While the character
limit is set at 150 characters, most posts are actually shorter, usually being
less than ten words in length, and it's actually quite easy to breeze right
through, say, three hundred friend updates in an hour. That's fewer than three
thousand words.
So the point is that you can easily get on these sites and
start exploring. Friend every user you like, and then start posting your
videos.
If you friend, say, ten people a day for a week, that's seventy people.
For two weeks, that's one hundred forty people. That may not seem like much,
because what's a mere one hundred forty regular views? But... that brings us to
our next chapter.
5WORD OF MOUTH: HOW VIDEOS
GO VIRAL
Question: If you could take a piece of paper, 0.05 millimeters in
thickness, and fold it in half fifty times, how big would it be?
Answer: It would be so big it would pass the
moon and keep on going for several hundred thousand miles.
If you think
we're making that up, grab a sheet of printer paper and see how many times you
can fold it.
Now, after the seventh time, it's about a half an inch thick, and
it's pretty much impossible to fold anymore.
If you could fold it again, it
would be an inch thick, then two inches, then four, eight, sixteen inches
thick. Fold it again and it's thirty two inches thick, then sixty four inches
thick.
Fold it one more time and it's a little over ten feet thick. At this
point we've only folded it fifteen times.
Fold it five more times and it's
hundreds of feet thick. By our thirtieth fold, it's in the area of two miles
thick.
By the fiftieth fold, we've got hundreds of thousands of miles of paper
to deal with. This is the same idea behind word of mouth and social networking.
One person tells two people, two people tell four people, four people tell
eight people and so on and so on.
Only this happens on a much larger scale
because of these social networking sites.
FACEBOOKIN’
Say you have
just twenty friends on Facebook.
You post a video, and ten of your friends like
it enough to post it on their own pages.
They each have ten friends who like it
enough to post it as well. Each of those ten friends has ten friends, and each
of those ten friends have ten friends, and so on and so on.
You're multiplying
your viewers by ten every time your video makes the rounds this way. For an
example of what that can do for you, check out a video on Youtube called Powers
of Ten, showing that, by multiplying and dividing our distance from a man in a
park by ten a few times, we can zoom right into the cells in his body, or zoom
all the way out for a wide angle shot of the entire cosmos.
Of course, you
might not be multiplying by ten. Maybe you're only multiplying by two, but as
we've already seen with the paper exercise, the power of two isn't to be
trifled with.
So what can you do to encourage this to happen? Hopefully, it's out
of your hands as soon as you debut your video to your Facebook pals, and
they've already got it making the rounds.
However, that doesn't always work.
Sometimes a video just plain doesn't catch on at first. When that happens, just
post a link to it wherever you can, on relevant message boards, in your
signature on those forums, or even in your "away" message on Gmail
chat, and see what happens.
Sometimes all you need is one person with a popular
blog to like your video, post a link to it for their readers, and before you know it, all your self-promotion has been done
for you. The main thing is to just keep posting it until you get tired of posting
it, and then post it a few more times.
thousands of
other people on the internet like it enough to share it, but how can they share
it in the first place if they don't even know it exists?
Luckily, all it takes
is one lucky bit of exposure to get the ball rolling in your favor. If you can
break the million viewer mark once, you're bound to get some regular viewers as
a result, and they'll likely keep your view count multiplying for all your
future videos.
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