By admin_Liquona

Viral Videos

Viral videos are a fascinating by-product of the modern age we live in. With cheap video cameras and the ability to share whatever you create instantly with your friends it wasn’t going to be long before something like this happened. There are some great virals out there that really defy any sort of reasoning as to why they’re so popular such as the Double Rainbow video

With that many views gained in such a short period of time it wasn’t going to be long before companies wanted in on this. Imagine the power of a viral video production for your company. American body wash company Old Spice did and created this classic advert.

It went completely viral and was shared around every social media site tenfold and led to sales of Old Spice body wash increasing by a massive 107%. 

But how can you make one for your company? Sadly there isn’t a written formula for viral success, if we knew that then we’d all be YouTube partners making thousands of each of the videos we made, but there are some conventions that people have picked up on that a lot of viral videos seem to share, so when thinking about making a viral video production for your company it might be worth following these rough guidelines.

– Don’t just make an advert. Sure you can have the product in the video but it doesn’t really need to be used and you don’t need examples of it being used or a voice over or anything like that. The reason the Old Spice advert worked is because the concept was both clever and the acting was completely over the top.

– Make it funny. The majority of all the great viral videos out there are humorous to some extent. A good example of a funny viral video includes this recent Ecotricity advert

But they don’t have to be funny, they can hold a poignant message like this Israeli advert for the International Alzheimer’s week

It’s been shown that virals that are funny or have a positive outlook have a much longer lasting impact than those that don’t.

– Keep it short. When making a viral video it’ll be very wise to keep the video less that 3 minutes as any youtube viewing persons attention will start to tail off after that and try your best to capture your target audiences attention within the first 5 seconds so that they don’t instantly click elsewhere. People watching videos have a very, very short attention span.

YouTube is still the number one source for online videos with over 60 hours being uploaded every single minute and boasts over a billion views every day. This may seem very daunting as getting your video production noticed amongst all that would be very hard but there are a number of things you can do to increase the chances of it getting noticed. You can and should place it on every social media site you can, get your friends to watch it and in turn, if they like it, they might get their friends to watch it. Go on Twitter and send it to everyone you know, maybe even send it to celebrities in the hope that the moment they tweet it, it then becomes famous. The Double Rainbow video would likely have never been famous at all were it not for American talk show host Jimmy Kimmel posting a link to it on his twitter. It then exploded. The same thing has happened a bunch of times as some videos don’t get big instantly.

There was a great TED talk recently from YouTube themselves about the nature of viral videos. Worth a watch.