9 Secrets for Viral Videos
We know YouTube is launching a revenue sharing program, we should take a look at some effective strategies to get viral.
“Not all viral videos are what they seem. There are tens of thousands of videos uploaded to YouTube each day. No matter how “viral” you think your video is; no one is going to find it and probably no one is going to watch it.” -Dan Ackerman, co-founder of viral video marketing company
One man by the name of Dan Ackerman has created a marketing company named The Comotion Group. They specialize in making sure videos “go viral”. In a way what they can be thought of as gaming the system and could even be considered cheating, but the internet has and always been the wild wild west. Mob rule is the rule of law and if you have a group of dedicated, motivated individuals you can make sure your blog/video/product gets in front of millions of people.
The truth is the majority of people upload their videos and wait too see what happens. Dan has come up with 9 strategies for giving your videos the extra boost to stardom.
9 Rules Summarized:
#1 Content is NOT King
The quality is not as important as these few simple rules. Make it short, design it for remixing, make it shocking, use fake headlines, make views say did that really happen, appeal to sex.
#2 Getting onto the most viewed page
Go to blogs, forums, email your video to friends, use facebook, and email lists. Tell everyone you tell to send it to someone else.
Each video has a shelf life of 48 hours before it’s moved from the Daily Most Viewed list to the Weekly Most Viewed list, so it’s important that this happens quickly. As I mentioned before, when done right, this is a tremendously successful strategy.
#3 Title Optimization
Once you get onto the most viewed page, chage the title. make it catchy, misleading, use words like exclusive, behind the scenes, never before seen, or leaked video. You want to catch peoples attention once the video is getting exposure.
#4 Thumbnail Optimization
Youtube takes the exact midpoint of your video to make the thumbnail. go back into you video and place the most interesting visual at the midpoint of your video or just throw in a sexy photo even if it has no relevant point in your video. Videos with more interesting thumbnails will always get more hits.
#5 Commenting: Have a Conversation with Yourself
Engage readers in the comment section. reply even if the comments are negative respond say somtehing nice. Get your friends to comment, if you have no friends open a bunch of names and coment back and forth with yourself
Every power user on YouTube has a number of different accounts. So do we. A great way to maximize the number of views is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section. We get a few people in our office to log in throughout the day and post heated comments back and forth.
Also, we aren’t afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, we just delete their comment. We can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.
#6 Release Videos Simultaneosly
If you are launching an ad campain with several videos. rather than release them one at a time release them all at the same time. viewers are more likely remeber your product and click through to your other videos.
#7 Tagging Lead Viewers Down A Rabbit Hole
Each video allows you to add tags. dont use obvious tags. instead use unique tags no one else would think to use.
YouTube allows you to tag your videos with keywords that make your videos show up in relevant searches. For the first week that our video is online, we don’t use keyword tags to optimize the video for searches on YouTube. Instead, we’ve discovered that you can use tags to control the videos that show up in the Related Videos box.
I like to think about it as leading viewers down the rabbit hole. The idea here is to make it as easy as possible for viewers to engage with all your content, rather than jumping away to “related” content that actually has nothing to do with your brand/startup.
We choose three or four unique tags and use only these tags for all of the videos we post. I’m not talking about obscure tags; I’m talking about unique tags, tags that are not used by any other YouTube videos. Done correctly, this will allow us to have full control over the videos that show up as “Related Videos.”
When views start trailing off after a few days to a week, it’s time to add some more generic tags, tags that draw out the long tail of a video as it starts to appear in search results on
#8 Use Analytics
The only way to measure success is the use of tracking. Since google and YouTube partnered there are lots of good analytics data for you to use in your user panel.
#9 Summarize
If you have no other ideas for a video just take something popular and summarize. if its innovative people will watch it
Conclusion
You simply can’t expect to post great videos on YouTube and have them go viral on their own, even if you think you have the best videos ever. These days, achieving true virality takes serious creativity, some luck, and a lot of hard work
I will make a promise here at Zero 2 Hero now that if you friend me, I’ll friend you back. If you subscribe me I’ll subscribe you back, and if you comment me I’ll comment you back, and this goes for more than just videos too. Until the day I am simply overwhelmed with the volume of people wanting to work with me, I will keep this up, and when that day comes, I will make a forum so everyone else work together collectively. I don’t encourage cheating. However there is alot of strong comepition out in the web today so the more a community of people can work together the more they can achieve. Much more than any one person could ever do on their own.
The orinal interview with Dan can be found here at TechCrunch
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Did you deliberately post this in the hope you’d get a lot of comments? Pretty controversial ideas here. “Using fake headlines, misleading the public.” This is certainly not a one-size-fits-all approach to “getting the word out”. If your intention in creating such a video is simply to shock and surprise I think this could be very successful. But I wonder, how well such “misleading” videos perform at bringing cash-in-hand visitors?
Reminds me of a quote I heard somewhere: Freedom of speech doesn’t give you the right to shout “fire” in a movie theater just for kicks. Not the actual quote but close enough. love your blog though.
1The main idea behind posting this video, was to show people that there are alot of ways that other people out there get their video to the top. Sometimes in unfair ways, but the fact remains that these techniques work. Not only did this guy do something less than what most would consider ethical, but he also got paid lots of money to do it.
If you have a real need or desire to put your videos in front of a large group of people it would be important to know what you’re up against.
Personally I only have one account, and I don’t try to game the system, but I do want to point out that I think there is nothing wrong with a group of people working together to maximize each others exposure.
2Also I would point out, that these are pretty basic marketing practices. Nothing different than you would see on tv.
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