Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
Lately I’ve been researching different ways to shoot videos and I came across (Broken link) 8 YouTube video tips to go viral. One of the best ways to get more traffic to your website is to make videos that get a lot of views. Some of the tips to making a video go viral are pretty simple but very important. These tips are universal so they work great for all the video sharing sites. If you were to research all the top videos on YouTube you’d find at least one of these eight video tips being used but chances are you’ll probably find all eight.
The first viral video tip is one of the most important and the most obvious and that is video and sound quality. Clear visibility is a must, while a video may get a lot of views even if it’s not clear rest assured it would get even more views if the video quality was high. The clarity of the sound is also important. Unless you’re doing a silent film the sound should be clear and un-garbled. When you get ready to shoot your super cool viral video just remember to have good lighting and a decent camera with good sound quality.
The second tip is to use emotion. It’s easier for people to relate to your videos if they invoke some sort of emotion. Using music is a good way to stir emotions or you can show some kind of emotional picture or clip. One of the top viewed videos on YouTube is a mother cat holding her kitten, so just remember to hug a kitten and everything will be cool. No. Seriously just talk from the heart and be yourself.
The next tip to make your YouTube videos go viral is to catch people’s attention and keep it. Having an eye grabbing background can help get people’s attention but most of all you should make your videos unique. What I’ve found is that changing the video in some way every 30 seconds or so helps to keep the viewers engaged in what they’re watching. A few tips for doing this is to change camera angles, zoom in or out, or you can change back and forth from color to black and white. Using these techniques to engage your audience is a great way to keep them watching, but don’t overdo it.
YouTube video tip number four is to use humor. Most of the people on YouTube want to be entertained. They’re either looking for something cool to watch or something (or someone) to laugh at. A good way to keep people from watching your videos is to be boring and monotone. Again I have to say be yourself and talk to the camera like you would another person. If you’re reading from a script write a joke or some sort of witty line into it. Humor goes a long way so be creative and tickle your viewers’ funny bone.
In Prosperity,
Eric & Lauren Kalberer
Comments
Elaine Harper, November 12 2011, 02:54
Great info! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKveNzHxEW8
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Michael Jones, October 22 2011, 14:30
These tips are really useful. I’ve been trying to improve my video quality and this helps a lot. Thanks!
Sarah Conrad, October 23 2011, 09:15
I never thought about the importance of sound quality before. Great tip!
Jason Lee, October 23 2011, 11:45
Using humor in videos is something I’ve always struggled with. This gives me some new ideas. Thanks!
Linda Michaels, October 24 2011, 08:00
I love the idea of changing the video every 30 seconds. Makes a lot of sense. Great post!
David Smith, October 25 2011, 10:20
The emotional connection part is something I’ve been missing. Definitely going to try that out.
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Sorry if this is a dumb question but tip three, changing something every 30 seconds so people stay engaged, that sounds like real editing work and I’ve never edited anything in my life. Is it just simple things like zooming in, or do people actually mean cutting the footage every half a minute?
Does ‘change something every 30 seconds’ mean an actual cut, or just changing your gesture or tone? The post never says which, and that changes the editing workload a lot.
I don’t think the workload is the real problem, Ivy. Every one of these eight tips assumes you’re comfortable being looked at and are willing to perform emotion on cue for a camera. ‘Talk from the heart’ is easy to write and much harder to do the first fifty times you try it. Some of us built an audience without ever appearing on screen, and the post doesn’t leave room for that being a legitimate choice rather than a failure of nerve.
Is there retention data behind the 30-second rule, or just observation? I’d want a real number before rebuilding an edit workflow around it.
Forty five minutes a day and tip four wants me scripting jokes into a script I haven’t even finished writing. Sound and lighting I can control before I leave for work. Comedy timing at 6am with three kids yelling? That’s asking a lot.
What tip two is circling without naming it is parasocial connection, viewers responding to a person as though they know them, which is well studied in media psychology going back to Horton and Wohl in the 1950s. But the cat-video example undercuts the point rather than proving it. A viral clip of an animal isn’t evidence that ’emotion’ as a category drives views; it’s evidence that novelty and a very specific kind of cuteness response do, which is a much narrower mechanism than ‘be yourself and talk from the heart’ implies. Cass’s actual constraint, forty five minutes and an audience she has to build cold, needs the narrower version of the claim, not the inspirational one. The research here is thinner than the post assumes.