I’ve been thinking about the steps of the viral video before it reaches the final one of being viral and here’s what I came up with. This list is based on the observation I had with a few of my own videos that went viral and after making a few viral websites too.
1. Content
As usual it all starts with the content. It has to have a viral hook, which is something like a hook in a song – a catchy part that will get people “hooked”. So if you’re planning to go viral with a video it has to have at least one moment that others will want to share. It can be a funny moment, a scary one or just plain out of the ordinary. Take note that if you’re making a video about for example skateboarding, it’s rarely enough to be just good at it. If you’re good you will only reach a small niche. So there has to be something else for other people to want to watch your video. In such a case – a not-so-nice conversation with a cop, running away from cops, falling down, whatever. But remember it has to be addictive. It needs to be interesting enough not only for the viewer to send it out but also for the viewer to want to watch it again. Oh and as said before it’s best if it was around a minute in length.
2. Points of spread
We need to figure out how (and most importantly where) to spread the video. Youtube is an obvious start but the high saturation of videos there means that it’s harder to find yours in the pile. Consider services such as tubemogul.com which allow you to upload one video and post it to all of the main video sites (including youtube). You just need to make an account on each one of them first but that’s not really a big price to pay. It also keeps track of your overall video views so you won’t have to look for it on every site. Quite often you can get more initial views from a less known site than from youtube. But the main reason is that you’ll never know which video site your potential carriers visit.
3. Carriers
As the name suggests, those are the people who carry your information (or in this case the information about the video on to others). This is usually a group of less than a 100 people even for most popular videos. This is probably the most important part, because if you won’t reach the carriers it rarely goes to the other step. Carriers are people who are influential enough amongst their peers that anything they send out will have plenty of exposure. They’re also pretty popular online, so they have many friends to share it with. Quite often they manage a popular blog or a website on which your video can reach a larger audience. Unfortunately it’s not really easy to predict anything. Either some carriers will like your video or not. What you can do is try to interest potential carriers by finding blogs and websites on a similar subject (or just with funny videos if it’s just a funny video). Tell them to post an embed of your video on their site. That would be a carrier action as well.
4. First wave
This it the initial wave of users that finds your content. It’s not massive yet but it’s usually around a 1000 people. Out of that 1000 you should get at least half who like your video enough to spread it. Sure in normal cases a positive (meaning “hey, a cool video!”) message is shared with about 3 to 5 people while a negative one is shared to 7-12 people. But in case of videos people don’t really send out links saying “this is a shitty video”. So it’s only two ways – either they like it and share it, or not. But for the video to go viral you need to take into account the fact that if you won’t get half of the first wave then it will just slowly die out until (if) it reaches another group of carriers. But if you get the half or more it can lead to the last step.
5. Viral spread
This is the stage everybody craves to reach. I think it can be said if a video reaches over 10,000 views a day, but of course it can reach much, much more. This is mostly a measure of success that already is a success because it is a viral video. From this point on you lose most of the control over what’s going on. The waves of people are coming in and leaving comments, rating, posting it on blogs, sites and instant messengers. Don’t be surprised that you’ll also be getting many hateful “voices” in the comments saying that you suck and your video is worthless. The ratings will probably go down a bit (or a lot, depending) and there will be some comments advertising either a product or someone else’s video. But that’s how it is, and if you reach that stage you’re a winner anyway!