Viral Videos

We’ve all done it – clicked on a link to Maru the cat in the box or Baby monkey on a pig – and then inexplicably lost 20 minutes of our time.

Importantly, we’ve probably received the link from a friend and – equally important – we probably sent it on to others.

These videos went viral. How do you make your video go viral?

It’s what everybody who’s involved in online marketing would like to know. The answer isn’t easy and it’s not a predictable process – but there are a couple of things you can keep in mind to improve the likelihood of it ‘going viral’.

We’ve put together some ideas from our experience:

Work with the news cycle. This requires you to be speedy. Any video that is a reference to (or parody of) what’s currently on your viewers’ mind has a higher likelihood of being shared on. Think about your own behavior: you when you share you want your friends to be able to relate to it (… and not think of you as being behind)

Be emotional. Your video needs to speak to people’s emotional side to have a chance to go viral. This is probably the most obvious piece of advice. But how do you do this? Here are a couple of ideas: work with music, show people (or, yes, animals), make sure there’s suspense and it ends on an energetic note that encourages viewers to instantly share it on.

Test, Analyze, Iterate. That’s the counterpart to the emotional side of a successful video – you need to analyze and tweak and then analyze and tweak some more. If you are hosting your videos on YouTube (like most), then you have a whole arsenal of tools at your disposal in the form of YouTube Insights. Make good use of it. You can check how people discover your video, where during the video they lose interest, and what actions (such as liking or sharing) they take next. In particular the ‘Hot Spot’ tool lets you measure audience attention at every second of the video

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Keep tweaking your video based on these insights – small (and cheap) changes in the editing can make a big difference in the video’s capacity to go viral.

Dr. Jens Riegelsberger

User Experience Researcher

(Guest Contributer)

Get in touch with Kartoffel Films we have a great deal of experience in both video production and its applications.