Concocting Viral Videos
One day, a friend of mine who works as a social media strategist told me that his employer was instructing him to “create a viral video for us.” This is a worthy goal, to be sure, but it’s an almost impossible one to achieve.
If I knew how to reliably create viral videos, I’d be too busy counting my money to write a book on online reputation management.
Forty-eight hours of content is uploaded to YouTube every minute of the day. How can you get your video to go viral? You may not be able to do it reliably, but you can at least improve your chances by using these tips:
Drop your video on Friday: Most videos that go viral peak the highest on Fridays.
Appeal to tastemakers: Many of the most popular viral videos are first uploaded in obscurity.
But then something awesome happens. A late-night pundit or tastemaker, like Jimmy Kimmel, Jon Stewart, or Stephen Colbert, gets wind of this video and shares it with his or her own particular perspective on what it means.
Suddenly, thousands of people who are watching this on TV check it out on their mobile devices, laptops, or desktops and then share with their friends on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter as fast as they can with their own comments. (An example, the “Double Rainbow” video, appears in Figure 13-7.)
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