The Secret to Viral Videos, as Told by YouTube

Everyone wants their video to go viral, but is it really possible? According to Margaret Gould Stewart of YouTube, people need to, first of all, understand what types of videos go viral.

As she explains, most viral videos happen by accident. There is, however, another category of content that could go viral. People producing this type of content create it on a regular basis in order to build a sustained audience.

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When it comes to actually creating viral content, Stewart says, “It really is about great content. It’s really difficult to make content that is not interesting or exciting go viral.”

Another factor in creating viral content is knowing your audience. Content producers need to understand who their audience is and build sustainable relationships with them. In addition, Stewart points out the importance of attaching metadata to the content.

Just as SEO is important for Google, it is also important for the second largest search engine, YouTube. Ideally, the best content is at the top, but you can help it by making titles clear and direct and putting in the right tags. If you do this, searchers will be able to find your content easily when they search for it.

Lastly, content producers need to make sure they are enabling the embedding capability on their video. Stewart says that as a video starts to go viral, the largest amount of traffic comes from other sources in the first 48 hours.

In the end, all viral videos do not receive one million viewers. For businesses especially, a video can be viral as long as it reaches its target audience.