Here’s the “baby monkey” riding backwards on a pig song on YouTube… the one for which you’ve searched your whole life. You can buy “monkey on pig” song on iTunes too, and I did so just to support the singer (ParryGripp). Note that he’s not riding on a dog, which might have been your impression when you first saw it last fall. It’s clearly a pig, which brings it to a special level of humor. The retro 1970s Partridge Family and Brady Bunch-like arrangement also helps.
It’s been a while since I’ve summarized some of the most important factors to getting your videos seen. This post is based on my own YouTube creator experience, my work with big brands, and my book (Beyond Viral). I’ve also written a free eBook called “How to Get Popular on YouTube Without Any Talent (version 2).”
I’m sure I missed some current best practices so please add your own thoughts below!
1. Hook viewer in first 10 seconds (teasing highlights)
2. Keep it short. A one-minute video will almost always trump a 3.
3. Encourage interactions- get people commenting and, like Facebook, your YouTube video will rise higher. Controversial questions to viewers can jolt views.
4. Personalize it. Look at camera as if it’s a friend’s eyes and don’t assume your viewer knows you.
5. Include real laughter. Laughter induces laughter like yawns influence yawns. Get a sidekick who has a contagious laugh.
6. At the end, provide something unexpected or bedbug. See how you didn’t expect the word “bedbug” there?
7. Include animals. We humans like animals more than humans. Babies are clinchers too. Giggling baby with an animal? Golden.
8. Take the “road less travelled.” Sure, boobies get views but if you base your video on something already seen, your video is less likely to break through clutter. Show us something we’ve not seen (or rare to see) and people will share.
9. Real trumps script. Almost all of my top videos are not scripted bits but real, candid moments.
10. Appeal to heavy video viewers. Teenagers drive significant views, and even adolescents and Tweens (Annoying Orange). Test your video on this audience and note when they laugh or get bored.
11. Post regularly. The most popular and most-viewed YouTubers post daily or on a predictable schedule. Fresh outsells good.
12. Flow with current events. Selectively parody topical news or “Memes” and you’ll be topical and more relevant.
13. Take the title, tags and description very seriously so your video can be found easily on search engines like Google (and don’t think YouTube isn’t a search engine). You can even transcribe the video and add the text. Important terms: “how to,” “why does,” “who is,” “when is…”
14. Watch top creators for new ideas. For instance, most top web stars are providing thumbnails of other videos at the end of their video. This keeps a viewer from wandering off to “related videos.”
15. Post at right time. Stay away from weekends and Friday afternoon (when there’s a lot of viewing but heavy competition). Mornings are good and Tuesday is a heavy consumption day.
16. Someone once said a new blogger focuses on their blog, but a seasoned blogger is roaming. Likewise you want to appear in videos by people getting more views. The kind plug by PrankvsPrank for my recent “Itchy Butt” prank drove more views that from my base of 250K subscribers.
17. Chill out on “subscribers,” which is as meaningless as “likes” on Facebook. 100 fans are more valuable than 10,000 subscribers that accidentally subscribed from the stupid “box for box” feature (where if you subscribe to one channel you can passively subscribe to their friends.
18. Jump start views on other social-media channels like Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and Reddit (watch out for being seen as just tooting your own horn though).
19. Listen and talk back to your audience. When a creator acknowledges a viewer comment a bond is formed that is the lifeblood of a recurring audience.
20. Go for quantity not obsessive quality. I could never have predicted which of my 1000 videos would get tens of millions of views, and there’s a lot of power to trial and error. There’s almost an inverse relationship between the time I spend on a video and the views it gets.
Finally don’t judge success by total views alone. Whether you’re a marketer or entertainer, not all views are created equally. Focus on engagement, comments, view duration, and getting to the right audience. A niche show meeting an unmet need is going to work more effectively than trying to please broad audiences.
What did I miss? Obviously the most popular videos are those involving dancing, music, comedy, satire, politics, sex, babies and animals. Don’t underestimate the power of the thumbnail (image representing the video) too. But any general tips I missed?
The kid who stole Mark Bao’s laptop made two mistakes beyond “Mac-larceny.” He recorded himself dancing on the stolen laptop’s webcam, and failed to realize that the victim, Mark, had installed recovery software on the machine.
So Mark, an 18-year-old student at the University of Massachusetts, connected remotely to his Macbook Air laptop, retrieved this video, and shared it with the word via YouTube. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, about 85% of readers think he should leave the clip online. A perpetual sentence of the crook’s poor judgement. We agree.
The thief returned the laptop to university security and apologized. But we think he should dance, dance, dance in shame for eternity.
Then there’s the burning question. Is this a viral stunt by a software-security service? One can’t discount that theory in the “age of viral.”
Says CBS News: “He had taken the precaution of installing online backup software (called BackBlaze) on the computer and that now allowed him to gain entry into the purloined machine’s browser history as well as to view its hard drive where he could track any updates.”
I recently found this collection of entries to the Poptent.net “Sour Then Sweet” campaign for Sour Patch Kids. While I can appreciate why cannibalism might have been too risque for the folks at Cadbury, I think they’re certainly bold, entertaining and memorable enough to get the WillVideoForFood “honorable mention” award.
If I was Ray William Johnson or Sxephil, I might keep this coveted “fountain of delicious video” to myself… featuring them on my own videos, with perhaps a brief credit to the creator but not the source. Alas, I lack the good sense of my big brothers on YouTube, having been cursed by an impulse to share, even when it is against my better interests.
Meet one of the best-kept secrets in non-viral video curation: Reddit’s videos. Thanks to Mark and Tim from Poptent for turning me on to Reddit.. perhaps we’ll call it the Digg for underdogs.
That tiny, unassuming Reddit icon sits on my Chrome browser shortcut panel, smiling upon me. My little alien friend patiently beckons me (sometimes two or three times a day)m promising to fulfill my insatiable appetite for rare and wonderful video gems. Not the most popular or most current, but a collection of clips that are insanely aligned with my eclectic taste… as if the folks giving it an “up” arrow are telepathically tuned to my preferences. Here’s me on Reddit. I have no friends.
What’s lovely about this “crowd sourced” collection is that it’s not only unique and interesting videos. It’s almost always called out with a unique headline that provides an additive level of humor (it would be lazy to use the real video’s title, right?). I was recently taunted by a headline, “I don’t know what it is, but I want one.” The video featured an obscurely named video of a freaky bird/rat pygmy that falls off a scale (it inspired my recent video montage titled “epic battle of the cutest and weirdest pets“).
The Reddit picks are not always fresh, hot, trending February 2011 picks, but does that really matter? Sure if we cluster around the “most recent” and currently popular videos we build a common and uniting vocabulary. My children, for instance, surf iTunes most-popular knowing that they’ll hear it discussed at school and on the radio. That’s a social/cultural bond not known to the Insulated iPod Playlist Generation. Still, just as the dusty shelves of remaining Blockbusters hide some classic films in the “not new releases” isles… there are mounds of classic, vintage online videos from 2007-2010 that deserve a second chance. For example, remember Marcel the Shell With Shoes from Vimeo (I wrote about it on October 7 last year). It was posted on YouTube a week later, and now has 6 million views (worth maybe 3-4K to its creators, and growing). While I imagine the artistic Vimeo crowd will no longer invite Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate to their wine tastings, the duo deserved more recognition for a meme that Daneboe might have turned into a $500,000 franchise.
I don’t know much about this mysterious army of Reddit curators, but they have a knack for finding often obscure and unseen videos (several hundred views) that deserve the honors otherwise left only to “dramatic chipmunk” or “Star Wars Kids.”
The Reddit Video collection is, I’m convinced, unviral in our world, but viral videos from a parallel dimension. That makes them even more special.
Yes, it’s a motley collection with one unique and common thread: I’m glad I watched at least 72.4% of the top videos, which is more than I can say from any other aggregated source.
The "coalition of the willing" of online video has been assembled
It took hours, but I’ve compiled the definitive Twitter list of those hungry for web-tv and online video. In once click, you can follow reporters, CEOs, new-media gurus, events, groups, authors, techies, potentially some annoying vendors, select creators, speakers, experts… and, well, even me.
It is, dear reader and confident, “The Coalition of the Willing” of online video.
They Cambridge “Who’s Who” of the video revolution is talking about and shaping things like time-shifted DVRs, hidebound MSOs, PayTV’s adapting, Sandy Bridge, Honeycombs (yeah), clouds, BestBuy, video portals, more clouds, video search (SEO), Slings, Netflix, Roku, iTV, Jinni, Clicker, Boxee, YouTube, video trends, user adoption, mobile video, web-TV, Videoscope, Xoom, CES, TV Everywhere, viral video, 2011 predictions, and other exciting dynamics of the unique time we’re in.
There are 350 million web-enabled TV devices projected to be sold by 2015 (source). That’s a whole lot of puddin’.
You may chose to follow the online-video coalition of the willing. Or you may wish to ignore this list, swing your head away from the accident, and wait to be surprised. But it’s going to happen whether you’re watching or not. It is happening. Toss your Blueray DVDs in a garage-sale bin, and buckle up for a ride.
Some of these hand-picked, platinum-covered cyber-humans are twitter-thorities sitting in their basements and offices 24-7, thinking about and building a future where video… Where video, damnit, dances majestically from laptop to smart phone to HDTVs. Where it’s not free, but it roams freely. Where crap and great live together in perfect harmony.
And some of these moving-picture “future builders” remain so dedicated to the cause they’re immune to nearly anything that spews from the archaic “television machines” you caveman use. Like AskANinja co-founder Kent Nichols, who just tweeted: “First time I’ve listened to the news live in a while. Amazing what a bubble that the web and DVR is.”
Oh it’s a bubble, alright, Mr. Nichols. And when it bursts, your brain’s going to explode right out of your f’ing skull.
Well we did a recap on the worst corporate egreeting cards, so it’s only fair to share the winner of the 2010 WillVideoForFood Best Agency Holiday Greeting Video Award. I just made that award up, but it does come with a trophy and a piece of cheese.
Some of these spots are good enough to stop you from fast forwarding TiVo. Maria Bamford has a wonderfully crazy and self-deprecating style that makes even ME feel sane. She’s not new to Target — check out her subtle “Target” reference in this video from years ago (below). She’s funny in standup (effinfunny.com), but translates even better to web video and was a perfect fit for this wonderfully insane Target campaign.
I hope to see her back, since I think she’ll appeal to Target’s target customer. We’ll still need our “cool” target ads, but this is distinctive and fun, and a refreshing departure from me-two department store ads (wow we’ve got deals… zzzzz). I could honestly see the Target Lady pulling a mini Old Spice video-reply campaign with personalized videos… the mad rush for holidays is far from over, but there’s not likely time for a new campaign. Hey Wieden & Kennedy- if she’s answering questions I’d like to know how many cups of coffee she drinks a day and how many hours of sleep she gets. I’d also savour, like fine wine, some behind-the-scenes outtakes from the commercial shoot.
Thanks to Think Media TV and Life in Student Ministry for reviewing my book, Beyond Viral, and how the tips can help non-profits, charities and ministries not just corporate promotions. It’s nice to hear how Sean and Tim (their YouTube accounts linked by name) are using my book for good not evil. 🙂
Click below image to hear what parts of the books they found useful for non-profits and faith-based education. I’m really excited to think about the book helping such worthy causes as the spiritual development of kids.
Thanks also to Buddha Charlie for documenting his purchase of the book!
Ministries use youtube promotion to help charities and non-profits
