The Magic Of Viral Videos & A Food Court Disaster

It’s so funny to me how people always want to know the step-by-step plan for making a video go viral. It’s like they think a few people out there are keeping this big secret about it, and they will do anything to find out what it is.

What some people don’t realize is that you cannot force a video to naturally go viral. Sure, you can make sure it’s funny, short, clever etc.. but once that video is posted to the Internet, it’s out of your hands. It’s very similar to a trending topic on Twitter. Many people think if they just use a hashtag over and over and get their friends to do the same, they will trend, but it doesn’t exactly work like that. I recommend you be very careful before paying someone money if they “guarantee” your video will become viral.

My friend Shelly Kramer recently wrote a blog post about this topic called How To Make A Video Go Viral.  Another thing to note here is that for a video to be considered viral, it doesn’t just mean that it has a lot of views. Sure, that is one component; however, viral is a word that comes from “virus” implying that it spreads to many different sites and shows up in many different places. In other words, it gets around. If your video is only in one place, even if it has a ton of views, it may not be considered viral by many people. This is an example of a video that went viral recently. I’m trying to decide whether or not I think it’s staged. I haven’t figured it out yet. It looks real, but if it is, it’s sooooo harsh. Omg, I wonder if this really happened. Wow, poor guy.

Via: [Social Tech Media]