In the current landscape dominated by social media, the ability to generate content with viral potential can significantly contribute to rapid brand growth and capture the attention of audiences. However, there is no precise formula for creating successful viral content.
Nevertheless, viral videos, in particular, often share common characteristics. Understanding these prevalent factors can assist you in crafting engaging and easily discoverable content.
Contents
- What is a viral video?
- Initiate with a comprehensive brief
- Gain a deep understanding of the target audience
- Define your objectives
- Commence the video with a compelling impact
- Telling a story
- Guidance for enhancing video discoverability
- Concise and compact video summaries
- Enhancing the User Experience: Captivating Captions
- Engrossing Epistles: Content that Resonates
- Harnessing the Power of Hashtags: A Social Symphony
- The Ascendance of Video: Aided by the Scales of Promotion
A piece of content is deemed viral when it appears across various social media platforms and rapidly reaches a large audience, generating substantial interactions and shares. A tweet, a Facebook post, or a video can all potentially become viral.
Read our detailed article on “What is a viral video?” here.
Utilizing their profound knowledge and extensive background in captivating and captivating massive crowds through the art of crafting compelling content, the proficient cohort at Sprout Social graciously imparts a handful of invaluable suggestions that you can employ throughout the conception and refinement of your very own videos.
Initiate with a comprehensive brief
The initial step in creating any potential viral video is meticulous planning, establishing a detailed brief and storyboard. The purpose of crafting a creative brief is to clarify realistic objectives, core messages, tone, duration, distribution channels, and other essential information.
Each brief serves to align the content and video production teams, ensuring that all brand-related elements are cohesive and share a unified vision. Thus, fortifying your brand identity.
Gain a deep understanding of the target audience
Without insights into the individuals you are targeting, your video will quickly falter. To genuinely produce content that resonates with your target audience and potentially reaches other demographics, you must discern what will resonate with them and compel them to share your video.
Creating an Empathy Map enables you to fully comprehend your target audience. This approach provides you with detailed information about what will captivate their attention, ensuring that your content aligns with what they seek online.
Define your objectives
Knowing what can generate virality is insufficient for a robust social media marketing strategy. You need to understand why you want your video to go viral.
Is your objective simply to increase brand awareness? Grow online followership? Or do you aspire to drive conversions through this viral video?
Each objective necessitates a distinctively creative video approach tailored to specific audience segments at different stages of the funnel. Hence, it is crucial to have a clear idea of your objectives before commencing production.
Commence the video with a compelling impact
Every successful viral video captures attention immediately. The best way to achieve this is by using the word “you” within the first five seconds of the video. Recent research by TubeBuddy and Hey.com reveals that videos incorporating words like “you” or “yours” in the initial five seconds experience a 97% higher view count compared to videos that do not mention these terms.
Some ways to maximize the impact of your video include:
- Creating an unpredictable or unforeseeable scenario
- Establishing relevance in your content
- Eliciting the viewer’s emotions
- Incorporating captivating audio clips or music
Telling a story
A final tip for making your video go viral is to captivate your audience through storytelling. You can narrate a compelling story within a concise timeframe (viral videos should not be lengthy) by selecting a common context for your creative concept.
Follow familiar narratives that your audience is familiar with so they can engage with the video immediately, without needing excessive background information. This is an excellent way to create relevant content that resonates with your audience, prompting them to share it with friends and family. It’s also a great starting point for building anticipation and attracting attention.
Guidance for enhancing video discoverability
Once you grasp the steps to create a viral video, here are some methods to increase video discoverability, from optimizing titles and descriptions to utilizing hashtags and planning advertising strategies.
Concise and compact video summaries
Avoid prolonging the video introduction, even if it may be captivating and engaging for the viewers.
Online viral videos are typically short. That’s why platforms like TikTok restrict video duration to around 60 seconds. Craft content that captures attention and conveys the entire story within 30-60 seconds. Failing to do so may result in losing viewers, and they are unlikely to feel compelled to share your video with others.
Enhancing the User Experience: Captivating Captions
Captions possess a transformative power that transcends mere accessibility. When sound eludes the ears, captions step forward to enrich the viewer’s journey through the video realm.
In the digital dominion, countless souls scroll through social media landscapes, bereft of auditory accompaniment. Yet, the inclusion of captions crafts an oasis of visual storytelling, drawing in a vast multitude of spectators from every corner of existence.
Engrossing Epistles: Content that Resonates
Within the tapestry of video dissemination, the art of composing captivating and optimized textual tapestries holds paramount importance. Titles and descriptions on YouTube, as well as captions on TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and their brethren, bear the arduous task of both elucidating the video’s essence and kindling the flames of curiosity that illuminate its visibility amidst the expansive terrain of search results.
Yet, let it be known that this noble endeavor does not necessitate the employment of uppercase dominion or the excessive resort to abbreviations, as some digital realms may imply. Nay, it is the labor of forging content with meticulous care, crafting a tapestry of utmost quality that serves as an enthralling companion to the visual splendor it accompanies.
Behold the mighty hashtag, an instrument of grand influence across the vast expanse of social media domains. From YouTube’s illustrious stage to TikTok’s resounding hall, hashtags wield their power, propelling videos towards the searching souls who yearn for kindred content.
Adorn your TikTok captions and YouTube video descriptions with the allure of popular hashtags, a beacon that guides seekers to your creation amidst the vast sea of digital treasures. Seek relevance in your chosen symbols, intertwining them with the current of trends and popularity, though with caution, for overindulgence shall lead astray.
The Ascendance of Video: Aided by the Scales of Promotion
In the realm where virality hangs as an elusive mistress, the ascent of a video often requires the guiding hand of strategic promotion. Merely birthing the content into existence and awaiting its meteoric rise shall prove an exercise in futility.
Instead, immerse yourself in the realm of comprehensive advertising strategies, the fertile soil from which growth emerges. Craft a symphony of cross-platform sharing, casting your creation across both public and niche landscapes where it shall first find breath.
For in this pursuit, the platforms of your target audience shall become your trusted allies, wielding their influence to maximize the chances of their witnessing and sharing your masterpiece.
In essence, to attain viral status, a video necessitates a concoction of ingenuity, novelty, and an emotional resonance that resonates deeply within its viewers. It’s akin to an infectious agent infiltrating the recesses of the viewers’ psyche, rendering exorbitant advertising expenditures obsolete for businesses. Consequently, astute marketers should diligently prioritize these constituents whilst crafting videos, thereby securing the coveted realm of optimal marketing efficacy.
