How Not to Make a Web Video go Viral

 Email

By Matt Clark

So my Web video experiment did not start well. I’m not upset though, it can still turn around. The best thing about this video starting poorly is learning what not to do in the future. That’s great for you, my loyal readers (all five of you… hi mom). You get to learn not to do without investing the time and money that I did.

Quick background first. My friends and I wanted to create a funny video because we were bored. I decided to put my social media skills to the test and see if I can make the video go viral to drive traffic to a Web site.

So here it is, the ten mistakes I when launching the video:

1. No plan. We didn’t put one thing down on paper. Good start huh?
2. No strategy. We didn’t map out what steps we should take to ensure success
3. Missed deadlines. The video relied on a particular event to build buzz. We didn’t get the video out until a week before the event took place. This cut down our lead time for a successful video.
4. No call to action. That’s right. How the hell did I forget to put a call to action in the video to drive people to my site?!?!?!?!?! So we got lazy and just put it in the “information” section on YouTube.
5. We panicked and just put the video on YouTube. What we should have done was create profiles for all video sites available and use TubeMogul to distribute it to top video sites. TubeMogul would have aggregated video-viewing data from multiple sources to give us improved understanding of when, where, who and how often videos are watched… demographics anyone?
6. We launched the video at 10pm. Not what I would call a peak time. All our Facebook and MySpace messages probably went unseen.
7. We had to manually upload it to other video sites. Again this was a waste of time that could have been put to use elsewhere is we used TubeMogul.
8. Not spending all day pushing it out to our friends. We just told a few people, and changed our Facebook Status and MySpace bulletins.
9. We didn’t directly ask our friends to post the video or push out the link… or vote for the video… or leave comments. Or anything you need to do when it comes to social media.
10. I don’t have a tenth mistake, but a list of nine just seemed weird.

So we have 600 views in 24 hours and the sites Web traffic increased from 50 visitors to 150 visitors today. Not bad if I wasn’t trying to use the video to drive significant traffic to another Web site. The great news is that we are only one day in. That is way too soon to judge a project like this. We need to increase views soon and we need to rely on help to do that. I will take my own advice and put a plan and strategy together now to do this.