Viral Videos- from zero to 30 million views

Usually when I hear the word viral I have a negative connotation that gets tagged with it. Then all of a sudden people start talking about “viral videos” and how great it is. My first thought is, “But its viral? That’s bad.” I can say I am happy to be proven wrong.

Mashable gives a great definition of what makes a video a viral video. It is through the process of sharing a video electronically. Most common methods include sharing websites, social media, and email. So how do you diagnose a video as “viral”? How hast it spreads through out the web. The article describes that some viral videos get 30 million views in the first 30 days it was posted on YouTube  It definitely blows my mind how fast things travel. 

In an article on searchenginewatch.com, the author gives tips that can help your own video, whether for a business or personal use, become “viral”.

!) Arouse your viewer- positive and negative emotion linked to arousal will lead to one more likely to share a video.

2) Avoid sad emotion- when content evokes a sad response from viewers this is less arousal and will lead to a viewer being less likely to share the video.

3) Don’t worry be happy! The article does state the positive and negative extremes lead to video sharing but positive beats negative almost every time.  The study conducted by the site reinforces this tip; when deciding what emotion to go with, positive should be your default.

4)Negative can be positive. Yes in the last tip it says to default to positive every time but negative content can go viral too. Emotions include shock and anger among many others.

The author gives one final tidbit of information with regards to the results from the study mentioned. It says that content created by women went viral more often than content created by men. As a guy I want to disagree with this but, where women are men will follow.