Why Videos Go Viral

It’s a question I hear all the time. “How do I get my video to go viral?”, “I want my video to get millions of views, how do we do it?” In fact I wrote about it over two years ago in a post titled “How many views make a viral video a success?“, this post is still one of the top traffic generating posts on my site and in two years my advice hasn’t changed.

The fact of the matter is that right now over 48 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. Think about that. While you were thinking about it…another 48 hours of video footage just got uploaded. Of those a tiny fraction of a percentage get over one million views. So how do you stand out in that sea of content?

I recently watched Kevin Allocca’s TED talk about this very subject. Kevin is YouTube’s trends manager, and he gave a very clever and insightful talk about silly web video. It’s only 7 minutes and it’s funny, watch it:

He had a great quote at the end:

“Tastemakers, creative participating communities, complete unexpectedness, these are characteristics of a new kind of media and a new kind of culture where anyone has access and the audience defines the popularity.”

You can have 50 million views of a video by teenage boys but if ultimately the purchasing decisions for your product or service are largely made by female engineers in their 40s and 50s, how effective was it really? There is one simple thing to keep in mind when you are developing your online content strategy: the videos you are producing must be relevant to your product or service and you need to make it informative to the audience you are looking to attract. It doesn’t have to be wildly funny, it just needs to be attractive to the people who were searching for your content. Be more targeted and creative in your core messaging and don’t worry about getting a million views. If it is engaging to the core audience who leverage the purchasing power around your product or service, then that is ultimately all that matters.