How to Make a Facebook Video Go Viral

I like to think of the phenomenon of “going viral” akin to being struck by lightning. In the past, it was a completely random event, an act of god or the whims of fate. In recent history, understanding of lightning allowed you to make certain choices to change the chances of being struck. You could go outside during a thunderstorm, climb on your roof, and raise a metal pole into the air.

Now, with modern technology, you can harness the lightning. You can direct it with batteries and wires, generators and arcs. You can even play with it, like a tesla coil.

Facebook videos – to bring this back to a topic that makes sense and isn’t an abstract metaphor – are the “you” in this analogy. The lightning is going viral, and you want to do everything you can to make it strike. You may not be able to harness your very own viral tesla coil, but you can at least get your metal pole and start climbing.

Step 1: Define Viral

What is “viral” to you? If your videos get an average of 100 views each, posting a video that pulls in 1,000 in the first week is a very good viral response. For a business that routinely posts videos with 100,000 views per day, an increase of 900 is hardly noticeable. Before you can make a video go viral, you need to decide what viral means to you. Realistic goals are the best, here. You can always exceed them and feel pleased, but reaching for the stars only to land in the next back yard is supremely disappointing.

Step 2: Consider the Math

One interesting essay to read is Dan Zarella’s hierarchy of contagiousness. It’s a bit of mathematical thought experimentation that helps you figure out what you need in order to go viral with a given piece of content.

By using this math, you can get a decent idea of how many people need to see your posts – and by extension how many people you need to have following your Facebook page – in order to receive a certain number of shares. While this isn’t necessarily useful in a practical sense, it can tell you whether your goals are reasonable or not.

Step 3: Promote Sharing

Every video you post needs to be sharable in order to go viral. If your video is behind a wall, even the lowest of the low, it won’t go viral. At all. It’s like a bit of strewn rubble in a video game making a wide hallway impassible.

We’re talking about Facebook videos specifically, here, which means one thing. When you post the video, it needs global targeting. You can’t restrict it to just your followers. You can’t target it to certain demographics. You need it to be as broadly exposed as possible, with a few barriers to re-sharing as possible. Ideally, the amused user will only have to do one thing to share your post; click the “Share” button and click “ok.”

Step 4: Length

How long should your video be, if you want it to go viral? Some great viral videos are only seconds long. Just look at Vine or Instagram Video for examples. On the other hand, some great emotional viral videos stretch five or more minutes long. What works best, though? What length is ideal for the highest chance at viral success?

Studies performed by StumbleUpon indicate that videos of length are actually better. A video longer than four minutes has as many as five times more shares than videos of shorter durations. The hook to this, though is that you need to make use of that length to tell a narrative. That lengthy video needs to catch the user’s attention and make them watch it all.

Step 5: Market

Marketing makes the world go round. Facebook specifically has a Video Views objective in their PPC ads. Run those, with specific targeting, with oCPM to keep your budget optimized.

In this case, you very likely want to run several ads, each of which targets a small, narrow demographic. The reason for this is a study Buzzfeed performed, mentioned in the link above. Buzzfeed determined that single influencers are not the best way to get a video to go viral. That is, getting a celebrity to retweet it will give a burst of activity, but not true virality.

True virality comes from small circles of people acting as seeds for sharing the post. Have you ever seen three different people share the same video on Facebook, even though none of them know each other? It’s the same theory, only widespread around the world.

Put your video in front of as many different circles of people as possible, with as many vectors as possible. If you’re promoting your own video to Mashable and HuffPo, they’ll look at it and shrug. If you and six other potentially unrelated people give them the video, they’ll be more likely to look at it. If one of your “seeds” happens to include influential contributors to those sites – hint: Reddit is a great seed – you’re set for a viral explosion.

Step 6: Make a Good Video

Your video needs to be good. It needs to be great. It needs to have emotional power behind it, even if that emotion is pure comedy. Cat videos are popular because cats are adorable, and they squeeze out feline emotions of love. Drama videos are great because they forge an emotional connection that people want to share with their friends.

Avoid bad emotions. Don’t make everyone content. Don’t make them angry, except in a “so angry I want to do something about it” kind of way. Don’t make them sad, unless you’re going all out, like Sarah McLachlan.

Step 7: Repeat

Your first video probably won’t go viral. Neither will your second, or your third. Maybe not even your tenth or your twentieth.

Believe it or not, this is a good thing. It means that when a video does go viral, everyone coming in to watch it will have plenty more to watch from your feed. This gives other videos a second chance to go viral, possibly even more so than the first one. Just keep trying, keep at it, and your videos will explode. Eventually.

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