Creating an online video that goes viral is a marketing and public relations dream.
What’s the secret to some videos getting shared so much?
Entertain
Here’s the primary secret: Entertainment.
Even educational videos must entertain to be successful. Online videos without entertainment values attract miniscule audiences.
It’s not a new principle, but it’s more important than ever in today’s highly competitive online environment that contains hundreds of thousands of readily-available and entertaining videos. People share what they like; they like online videos that entertain them. They also share videos that inspire them.
Amuse or Astonish
Unreel, a consultancy that tracks viral videos, says it analyzed the viewer comments from about 52,000 of the top viral videos this year in an effort to determine why some videos are so much more popular than others.
Finding #1: Comedy is king. It dominates comments. The most common words used in comments about viral videos were LOL, song, haha, face, love, laugh, holy, funny and hot in that order – though “holy” and “hot” certainly don’t imply comedy. Humor represented 35% of overall comments. Unreel cited eight ways people express appreciation for humor: LMAO, LMFA and ROFL join the more common LOL, haha, laugh and funny. (Facebook recently reported that haha has replaced LOL as the standard laugh response.)
Finding #2: Astonishment accounts for 25% of comments. The terms epic, OMG and fail made up the bulk of what Unreel calls the epic category. Other major groups were sexy and music.
Finding #3: People prefer positive to negative. The positive words – love, cute and awesome – were in 151,692 comments. The top negative words – WTF, fail and scared – were in 84,762.
Finding #4: Brands were mentioned in just 1 percent of comments on viral videos, with Red Bull, Halo, Coke, Gopro, Pepsi and PS4 the most commonly mentioned. Brand names alone can’t cause a video to go viral. Comments on brands lost out to cats which produced 17,720 comments, which beat out 12,890 comments on canines.
Conclusion: Brands attempting to produce viral videos face an uphill task, but focusing on humor, excitement or other positive emotions is the best route to creating videos the public will share.
Corollary: Avoid dull formats like talking heads. Possible exception: the Pope.
Inspire
A StreamSafe analysis of 100 of the most popular videos shows that inspirational videos are the most likely to be shared. Forty-eight per cent of the 1,000 UK residents it surveyed said they would share videos that inspire them, beating both happiness (chosen by 43 per cent) and excitement (41 per cent), according to B2B Marketing.
The survey also revealed that excitement is the most important emotion for people over-65, as 58% of that group said they would share videos that make them feel excited. However, emotional motivation was far more varied for 16-24 year olds, with happiness, excitement, affection, and inspiration all proving to be equally strong reasons for sharing a video. People in the 25 to 34 age group are most likely to share amusing videos (selected by 28 per cent).
Interestingly, the research indicates that video sharing does not decrease with age — 45 per cent of those aged 65 or above said they would share video content.
The StreamSafe study contains a hopeful insight for marketers. Almost a quarter (24%) of the 100 most shared videos were advertisement or promotional clips.
Key point: Marketers can substantially increase video views by portraying emotional stories that engage the target audience. Emotion increases social sharing.
“Shareability sits at the center of the online video marketing equation,” said StreamSafe Director John Harrington. “Taking the viewer beyond passive consumption and encouraging them to interact with a brand’s content is a critical step in effective engagement. Provoking an emotional response is the key to this and how you do that differs between demographics, making it vital that marketers and content producers understand what drives sharing for their target audiences. Emotional tone and content have been revealed as more important to this than brand.”
Be Positive and Well Timed
Who is Hosting This agrees that videos with positive emotions, especially humor, are more likely to be shared than serious, sad videos. It also offers these recommendations and insights.
• Length matters. Videos that are at least two minutes, but hovering just over four minutes are the most likely to be shared.
• Release times matter. Engagement rates are 18% higher on Thursdays and Fridays. However, brands may prefer to post on weekends when engagement rates are 17% higher for them. Release your video on a Thursday or Friday, when engagement rates are higher on Facebook.
According to TubeFilter, the best times to post videos on YouTube are 2 to 4 p.m. on Mondays through Wednesdays, 12 to 3 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays, and 9 to 11 a.m. on weekends. Daily online video viewership peaks at the same time as prime time television viewership peaks. By posting a video slightly before that time, video producers give YouTube viewers enough time to index their videos and make sure their videos have time to get into their subscribers’ feeds before peak viewing begins.
Producing an entertaining video is only the first step in going viral. Distributing the video on all available platforms (including but not exclusively YouTube) and promoting the video on each of the platforms are essential to fulfill the dream of going viral. We’ll look at promoting online videos in a subsequent post.
Bottom Line: Producing videos that will spread across social media and even go viral is the ultimate goal of many marketers. Although the research generates slightly different results, marketers can conclude that consumers are more likely to share humorous or uplifting videos. Videos that go viral – no matter the purpose — have one paramount attribute: They ENTERTAIN.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
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