That’s right. Let’s say you want to go viral with something, not commercially yet, but just for yourself. What do you need to consider? Well there are a couple of factors.
First factor is – you need to understand that in viral videos there’s the main “pillar element” that is drawing the people to watch and share it.
What will your pillar element be? The way you shoot the video? An odd performance that’s either impressive or silly ? The less ordinary the better. You can do talking cardboard boxes, bottles drinking themselves, people doing some funny or skillful things etc. The list goes on, but you can be pretty sure that a video of you standing by the wall juggling with three oranges won’t go viral.
The second factor, almost as important as the content itself is how are you going to seed it. Rarely viral videos go viral because someone just finds them on youtube. No, you need to start the process somehow. You probably have friends and/or family, don’t you? Well start off with them, but I know for a fact that they won’t spread it as much as a complete stranger would, especially if it features you. That’s how it works, sorry.
So what can you do? Well video aggregating sites are a good start – there’s a bunch of them, and since most virals qualify somewhat as a “cool thing to watch” sites like that can be useful for planting the video there. If you can suggest it by yourself after registration that’s fine, sometimes an email or two (or a thousand) to the site admin will yield better results. Don’t be afraid to use social networking, tweet it, facebook it, post it to digg, stumble-upon and others. Anywhere you can think of.
The third factor is posting of the video itself. If when asked for a video site you say “youtube” and that’s all that comes to your mind, then it seems that it’s time to crawl from under that rock finally. There are at least 20 big video hosting sites out there, and you can post to all of them using services like tubemogul and similar. The more places the video gets, the more possible views it can have.
What else can you do?
Well if you have a blog or a website of your own, be sure to post it there as well, since nowadays 99% of video sites allow you to embed the video anywhere on the web.
But is that really it ? Can’t we be more creative and think a little bit outside of the box (which is the internet) ?
Sure!
In most cases people like mystery of sorts. Why not print out a bunch of cards with the url (shorten it if it’s long, tinyurl.com should do) and some odd announcment like “this address will change everything”.
And since most viral videos are addressed to fairly young adults, go to a few clubs and either hand the cards around, or just put them on the tables (but do it discretely or the club might kick you out).
Any other frequently occupied places would be good too. Like schools, universities, malls. Just leave it on a bench somewhere too. And if you attend some type of school, why not tell about it to the people in your computer class. We know for sure that in those classes everyone does ANYTHING but what the teacher says, so they are likely to check out your video there.
After you’ve completed all the steps, stop and think – what else can be done? How else can I promote the video? What can I improve in the video itself?
Watch a few viral videos of the type you’re planning to do (see my post about types of viral videos ) and think why were they a success. Then analyze and think some more. Then make another video and repeat. Virals are unpredictable, and that’s what’s best about them. So if it didn’t work the first time, try again, just improve something first.