Following on from my last post on using video for SEO, here are some tips to help your video go viral.
If you’ve created a simple instructional video for your site then you’re probably not hoping that it will go viral. If on the other hand you’ve created something spectacular and want to share it with the world then you may need to give it a bit of a helping hand.
Over 80 million videos are watched on YouTube & millions more are posted online every day. The chances of your video going viral can be pretty low. Most don’t go viral by accident - it takes a lot of effort, time and perserverance BUT it is possible.
If you have a video that is worthy of going viral here are some tips:
- Once you’ve uploaded your video - share it.
- Reach out to blogs that will find the content interesting. Some blogs allow you to post video within the comments section.
- Be cheeky, label your title ‘unauthorised’, ‘leaked’, ‘behind the scenes footage’ or ‘exclusive’. Once it gets going and has more views you can update the title to something more relevant and findable.
- Use Twitter to share the video with your network.
- Forums - create a new posts on forums and discuss the video content. You may want to create several accounts to start up a conversation. This is time consuming but can have huge benefits.
- Post your video on social networks, as many as you can. Think MySpace, Bebo & Facebook.
- Encourage people you know to watch the video and share it.
- If your content is good (which it should be!) email the video to your friends and encourage your coworkers to do the same.
- If you’re a power user on YouTube you probably have several accounts - so use them. Comment away, have a conversation with yourself and get the discussion started.
- A great tip I read about recently is to use tags strategically. Create a set of unique tags that aren’t used by anyone else on YouTube and put these tags on all of your video content. Once people have seen one of your videos you’d really like them to move on to another of yours rather than random ‘related’ content. Done well, this allows you to have control over the videos that show up as ‘related’ on your video page.
