Viral Videos - How The Pros Do It

Viral videos don't just happen. There is a lot of work to do if you want your video to be seen globally by a big audience. Have you ever wondered how those people on YouTube get so much views?

Dan Ackerman Greenberg wrote an interesting post (The Secret Strategies Behind Many Viral Videos)for TechCrunch. These guy has a team that actually made a business out of viral marketing knowledge. They shared some of their secrets. These are the critical ones:

1. Not all viral videos are what they seem
2. Content is NOT King
• Make it short: 15-30 seconds is ideal; break down long stories into bite-sized clips
• Design for remixing: create a video that is simple enough to be remixed over and over again by others. Ex: “Dramatic Hamster”
• Don’t make an outright ad: if a video feels like an ad, viewers won’t share it unless it’s really amazing. Ex: Sony Bravia
• Make it shocking: give a viewer no choice but to investigate further. Ex: “UFO Haiti”
• Use fake headlines: make the viewer say, “Holy shit, did that actually happen?!” Ex: “Stolen Nascar”
• Appeal to sex: if all else fails, hire the most attractive women available to be in the video. Ex: “Yoga 4 Dudes”
3. Core Strategy: Getting onto the “Most Viewed” page
• Blogs: reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.
• Forums: start new threads and embed videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if you get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect.
• MySpace: Plenty of users allow you to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of their MySpace pages. Take advantage of this.
• Facebook: Share, share, share. Sharing a video with the entire friends list can have a real impact. Other ideas include creating an event that announces the video launch and inviting friends, writing a note and tagging friends, or posting the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.
• Email lists: Send the video to an email list. Depending on the size of the list (and the recipients’ willingness to receive links to YouTube videos), this can be a very effective strategy.
• Friends: Make sure everyone you know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least share it on Facebook.
4. Title Optimization
• It seems obvious, but people see hundreds of videos on YouTube, and the title and thumbnail are an easy way for video publishers to actively persuade someone to click on a video. Titles can be changed a limitless number of times.
5. Thumbnail Optimization
• If a video is sitting on the Most Viewed page with nineteen other videos, a compelling video thumbnail is the single best strategy to maximize the number of clicks the video gets.
6. Commenting: Having a conversation with yourself
• Every power user on YouTube has a number of different accounts. A great way to maximize the number of people who watch videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video.
7. (Not) Releasing all videos simultaneously
• If you have multiple videos, post all of them at once. If someone sees the first video and is so intrigued that they want to watch more, why would you make them wait until we post the next one? Give them everything up front. If a user wants to watch all five of your videos right now, there’s a much better chance that you’ll be able to persuade them to click through to your website. Don’t make them wait after seeing the first video, because they’re never going to see the next four.
8. Strategic Tagging: Leading viewers down the rabbit hole
• YouTube allows you to tag your videos with keywords that make your videos show up in relevant searches. For the first week that your video is online, don’t use keyword tags to optimize the video for searches on YouTube. Instead, they’ve discovered that you can use tags to control the videos that show up in the Related Videos box.
9. Metrics/Tracking: How we measure effectiveness

Here are some examples:




There is also an article on NewTeeVee about the topic (Master Viral Video Advertising in 3 Easy Steps).
And finally a presentation about Viral Marketing. Enjoy ;)

I also posted a related presentation (Word Of Mouth Marketing (How to Get People to Know You Are Funky))a while ago.