Case Study on Engineering a Viral Video

6 | Posted In Marketing by David

A good friend of mine, Ryan Wade, made a video. He and I have talked about it a few times. It really isn’t something that spectacular and he will freely admit that. The question is: why did this video get so many views on Youtube? But, here is the video:

Now, why am I even mentioning this? Well, as of the time I am writing this post, this video has been viewed over 322,000 times on Youtube. It is increasing quickly. I checked it about a week ago and it was about 314,000. So in the course of about a week, it has increased by 8,000 views.

The question is: WHY?

The video is nothing fancy. Ryan doesn’t go very in-depth into the Iphone or the Blackberry. All in all, it is a pretty superficial review. But, here is my take on why it went viral. It is really simple:

He made a video which deliberately catered to an EXTREMELY popular topic.

There are a lot of people searching for information on the Iphone. There are a lot of people trying to decide on whether to get an Iphone or a Blackberry. If I go to Google and search for “iphone versus blackberry”, Ryan’s video comes in as the THIRD result!

So, what can this video teach us? That a very simple tactic to making a viral video is simply to cater your video to a popular trend online and deliberately target your video to those keywords.

It is so simple.

You’ll also notice that Ryan deliberately inserted a photo of him holding up both phones as the half-way point in the video. This way, whenever the video shows up on Youtube or in search results on Google, users will see a big, fat picture of Ryan holding both phones. Youtube, by default, uses the frame half-way into the video as the thumbnail. Ryan’s photo is extremely relevant. And it entices people to click.

So, there you go. A tactic you can use to deliberately engineer a viral video.

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  • http://www.millionairemamas.info/ Malaika Morris

    Thanks for the tip about the thumbnail for the video.
    Do you know if most of his traffic to the video came from the Google search or from your websites? Just curious.

  • http://www.millionairemamas.info Malaika Morris

    Thanks for the tip about the thumbnail for the video.
    Do you know if most of his traffic to the video came from the Google search or from your websites? Just curious.

  • http://ryanwade.com/ Ryan Wade

    Sweet dude!

    I am actually working on some other viral videos … :)

    Talk with you soon,

    Ryan

  • http://ryanwade.com Ryan Wade

    Sweet dude!

    I am actually working on some other viral videos … :)

    Talk with you soon,

    Ryan

  • http://www.storyboardlife.com/ ATLANTA WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER

    yeah,,,thanks for the tip b/c I would like to start putting more vids out there on the site. Even if it’s not professional a viral vid on youtube can get some much needed clout!

  • http://www.storyboardlife.com ATLANTA WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER

    yeah,,,thanks for the tip b/c I would like to start putting more vids out there on the site. Even if it’s not professional a viral vid on youtube can get some much needed clout!