oday’s social media is flooded with video content that successfully reaches millions of viewers in minutes. From a business perspective, creating short videos has worked out to be a good marketing strategy. Videos help in building brand awareness, increasing website traffic, generating leads, and growing sales. As per the Forbes report, within 4 years, video traffic will be over 80% of all consumer internet traffic. Despite this potential of video, many companies find it hard to build an audience and make their videos go viral.

What goes into making a globally viral video?

Content

Your content is critical to your success. It must capture the interest of the viewer and hold it till the end. There is one thing that video can do better than any other medium, it evokes emotions. Inculcating stories into the video is a good way to hit the emotional chord with your viewers.

1. You need to be up-to-date on all trending events and topics. You could also use them as the fuel to create viral content.
2. Keep the video precise, short and simple. With such massive amounts of videos on the web and an average attention span of 8-9 seconds, the viewers want to watch something that’s simple and easy to understand.
3. SumoMe found that videos up to 2 minutes get the most engagement. People prefer watching videos, but only with a short attention span. Often, viewers skip through long videos after 2 minutes. Hence, it is important to edit the video to ensure the optimum length of the video.

Quality

It is always the quality of the video content that keeps the viewer engaged. In the literal sense, there is more to quality than what meets the eye!

1. Always use the right equipment as per the kind of video you are planning to make. Aim at providing your audience with the best viewing experience. The best videos are always steady and clear in terms of the picture quality. As over 50% of the videos are watched on mobile devices (wordstream), always ensure that the video quality is mobile friendly as well.
2.  One of the most important part of a video is the sound. It is always the sound that explains and gives life to a video. Use an appropriate voice. Always remember that the voice should match the content. For example, it is unacceptable to show a teenage character and make him sound like Sylvester Stallone. That would be funny, but in a bad way.

Localization

According to an experiment conducted by Niemen Journalism Lab, content that is locally targeted has 6× more engagement than content designed for the global market. Hence, it is always important to talk to your customers in the language they understand and not the language you’re comfortable with especially when taking your business global,

1. Localize the video according to the market where it is meant to make a positive impact. For instance, Chinese people are not going to understand a video that has a voice-over with a Norwegian accent.
2. Voice-over of the video will not only help you convey your message effectively, but also increases its engagement on social media. Native videos on Twitter drive 2.5× replies, 2.8× retweets, and 1.9× favourites than third party players (Twitter, 2015).
3. Subtitling is also an option to consider along with or instead of voice-over to ensure your viewers understand what the video is about. Apart from conveying the message, the words in subtitles are also picked by search engines. This increases the visibility of the video.
4. Dubbing is another technique that could help a video go viral. The authenticity and emotions are retained when a video is dubbed. This is useful especially in the context of infomercials and commercials.

Channels and Promotion:

1. A video can never go viral if it is not on the right platforms and is not interactive. A video must be on the platform where the target audience can access it.
2. It is important to ensure that comments and share-ability are enabled to increase promotion on all relevant platforms.

Always remember that there is no right formula for making a video that will drive engagement. Apart from following these guidelines, it is vital to have a marketing strategy with your videos. Build a personality for your brand with a series of videos and build a community out of your viewers to take things to a viral level!

(Credit: Creating Video Content that will Go Viral Globally – Mayflower Language Services )