WORD OF MOUTH: HOW VIDEOS GO VIRAL
Question: If you could take a piece of paper, 0.05 millimeters in thickness, and fold it in half fifty times, how big would it be?
Answer: It would be so big it would pass the moon and keep on going for several hundred thousand miles.
If you think we're making that up, grab a sheet of printer paper and see how many times you can fold it. Now, after the seventh time, it's about a half an inch thick, and it's pretty much impossible to fold anymore.
If you could fold it again, it would be an inch thick, then two inches, then four, eight, sixteen inches thick. Fold it again and it's thirty two inches thick, then sixty four inches thick. Fold it one more time and it's a little over ten feet thick. At this point we've only folded it fifteen times. Fold it five more times and it's hundreds of feet thick. By our thirtieth fold, it's in the area of two miles thick. By the fiftieth fold, we've got hundreds of thousands of miles of paper to deal with.
This is the same idea behind word of mouth and social networking. One person tells two people, two people tell four people, four people tell eight people and so on and so on. Only this happens on a much larger scale because of these social networking sites.
Say you have just twenty friends on Facebook. You post a video, and ten of your friends like it enough to post it on their own pages. They each have ten friends who like it enough to post it as well. Each of those ten friends has ten friends, and each of those ten friends have ten friends, and so on and so on. You're multiplying your viewers by ten every time your video makes the rounds this way. For an example of what that can do for you, check out a video on Youtube called Powers of Ten, showing that, by multiplying and dividing our distance from a man in a park by ten a few times, we can zoom right into the cells in his body, or zoom all the way out for a wide angle shot of the entire cosmos.
Of course, you might not be multiplying by ten. Maybe you're only multiplying by two, but as we've already seen with the paper exercise, the power of two isn't to be trifled with.
So what can you do to encourage this to happen?
Hopefully, it's out of your hands as soon as you debut your video to your Facebook pals, and they've already got it making the rounds. However, that doesn't always work. Sometimes a video just plain doesn't catch on at first.
When that happens, just post a link to it wherever you can, on relevant message boards, in your signature on those forums, or even in your "away" message on Gmail chat, and see what happens. Sometimes all you need is one person with a popular blog to like your video, post a link to it for their readers (and again, their reader's readers might like it, and their reader's readers might like it, and so on and so on), and before you know it, all your self-promotion has been done for you.
The main thing is to just keep posting it until you get tired of posting it, and then post it a few more times. Your video won't go viral unless thousands of other people on the internet like it enough to share it, but how can they share it in the first place if they don't even know it exists?
Luckily, all it takes is one lucky bit of exposure to get the ball rolling in your favor. If you can break the million viewer mark once, you're bound to get some regular viewers as a result, and they'll likely keep your view count multiplying for all your future videos.