We look back at the lessons learnt from our attempt at a fun viral video, from earlier this year.
Viral videos might just be the ultimate social media marketing coup. With a great idea, something can usually be made quite quickly – the shorter they are, the better. The video spreads across social media, blogs and more without the pain of worrying about distribution.
But, as anyone who’s tried their hand at a viral sensation before will tell you, it’s not that simple.
We relaunched our consumer site NewsWhip with the new brand of “People Powered News”. The site shows the most shared stories on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc) and ranks them judging by how fast they spread per hour.
NewsWhip’s idea is that the people now power the news by liking, sharing and retweeting the stories that matter most and spreading it to the masses. We wanted to express the ‘people-powered’ theme in a fun and relatable way – hence the idea of Flintstones-like taxi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62FC1zzGzTc
We wanted to promote NewsWhip’s new brand, so we decided to produce a video that shared this message and would drive people to the site. Here are some things we learned on the way.
1. Align the video with your message
The video should have a purpose – ours was to spread the message of People Powered News across social media and increase interaction and visitors to our new site. At the start, we didn’t recognise that we should include the line “People Powered News” and were just dreaming up ideas that we thought were interesting. Viewers had to come away with that message in their head, and you’re competing for limited attention spans.
2. Have the right equipment
Your equipment depends on what video you’re hoping to shoot. We were making a hidden camera prank video, so we needed a small lightweight camera that would be hard to spot – GoPros perfectly matched our specifications. We also rented a Sony PMW 200 for more reaction shots and filming outside of the car. For us, having the right camera was imperative for the superior quality that it brought to the video.
3. Test your equipment
When measured against your overall marketing strategy, testing equipment sounds so simple. The harsh reality of dealing with a faulty camera on the day of your long-awaited shoot is no joke however. After our own mishap involving wrong lead, we realised the hard way that it’s best to test everything possible, and no cutting corners!
4. Give enough time to editing
Once the filming is over then it’s all over to the video editor, make sure they have enough time to get the video looking good and that you’re happy with it. We had over 9 hours worth of video to cut down in to 3 minutes of quality viewing. The level of concentration and effort from the editor is huge and don’t expect a quick turn-around unless you want a low quality outcome. For non-video focussed brands, we recommend working out a prospective deadline with the editor and then adding on a week for unforeseen circumstances. After all, if you have great footage, why skimp on presentation?
5. Have an initial distribution plan
Once you have a video that you feel confident about, what way will you tell everyone about it?
The most popular videos are the ones that people want to share themselves after watching. If you put the video up on your own Facebook account and people don’t want to share it, then it’s unlikely to go viral, meaning you need to rethink the strategy. We built up an excel of general Facebook pages to target with user-generated content, and other specific sources that were suited to our video. In our case, we listed specific taxi Facebook and Twitter pages that would suit the message and humour of the video. In the end, our video failed to ‘seed’ sufficiently on these pages, leading us to rethink our distribution plan for next time.
Have you any experience or tips from producing viral content for you brand? What should you aim for or avoid? Let us know in the comments below, or on Twitter, @newswhip.
Here’s another great brand newsroom tip – try our content discovery tool Spike and get finding the stories that you audience are talking about, in real time.
