The ugly true about viral videos

Or the new tactic to make videos stand out from the crowd. 

Not a long time ago Internet was full of articles about viral marketing tips. Most of them talked about how to go viral with your video and make it noticeable and attractive. To go viral seemed to be pretty easy; you just had to follow some rules which were and still are more or less the same: the video should be short, funny, compelling and entertaining. in some cases educational. But the most important tip was and still is that it's all about emotions. The creation of video was the key factor of its success. Time changes and now the creation of it is just a start to reach audience. Why? Because now the war about getting attention is growing enormously. Web has changed the way people communicate and now it's all about interactive dialogue. If there's a successful dialogue, you get clicks, raise brand awareness, increase traffic to your website and if you are really lucky- you increase sales. 

So, how to bring audience to your video, because most of the time the audience is not aware of it, so no dialogue can be started. The magic words are- you need to seed your video. You can hire agencies who are working to get traffic to videos. They will send your masterpiece to online influencers and publishers on the web. They build a strong relationship with a certain number of online distributors in a different range of areas. Agencies place your video on top blogs, social network and video sites etc. Video seeding is like a combination of Digital PR and word-of-mouth marketing. They are also taking care about titles, tags, descriptions and search engine optimization to get sure that your video gets the much organic traffic possible. 

most of the time agencies offer guaranteed number of views for your video and creativity in this case doesn't play an important role. You will get your guaranteed views anyway, but you might be loosing your brand credibility. So, in terms of budget it's important to find a balance between these 2 things- video creation and seeding. Now they are going hand in hand. 

Let's make an experiment with a stop motion video I just made. It's pretty much following the rules of engaging video; it has a good content and credibility (I hope). I'm a quite active social media channel user and I will place the video on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Blogspot and in the biggest social networking website in Latvia- draugiem.lv. Let's see and make an analyze how many views I will get in one week time and from which channel is coming the biggest traffic. In general, statistics is not inspiring; experts say that 95% of videos places on YouTube, doesn't reach 500 views. Let's hope for the best! Click here to see my masterpiece!