Transcription
Is there a formula for going viral? This is the million-dollar question I get asked by brands every single day, and the answer is yes. I've made over 300 videos; my viral hit rate is about 1 in 6. So I've had about 50 videos get over a million views or more, and all I've done the last 2 years is make videos and study virality. So I'm going to break down the full formula. It has six components, and all of these translate to long-form and short-form video.
First, you need to understand how virality works. The good news is it is very, very straightforward. All you need to do is get a lot of people to share your video with others. I call this share rate. That is literally all that matters in content: total shares divided by total views. If this share rate is above 3%, your content will go viral, as long as that share rate stays above 3%. So, in simple math, for every 100 people that watch, you need at least three to share that video with a friend. Now, it's simple and straightforward, but it's very difficult to achieve this consistently, and my formula—each of the variables—is designed and optimized to increase that share rate. That's all we're doing here.
So the first one is a unique content idea. To get people to share, you either need to be first to market with a common idea or have an uncommon idea. First to market with a common idea would be something like covering a new Apple product release event and being the first one to post your video. But this alone doesn't guarantee virality because, for one, lots of people are quick to react to the news, and for two, it takes a couple of hours for the algorithm to really heat up and start, start sharing your video. By then, other people will have posted, and you lose that first-market edge. So even if you beat the market by a couple of hours, you need a couple of these other factors to be true if you go the common idea route. The other route is to choose an uncommon idea. Now, this is something that people haven't really seen before; could be a story, a product, a concept, an idea, a framework—anything unique. To find uncommon ideas, you have to look in uncommon places. You need to find blogs or YouTube channels or newsletters that are super unique and weird. I personally spend a lot of my time hunting for these resources because having uncommon ideas is almost a cheat code to virality, and once you find a weird tree, that tree tends to bear fruit often. So to summarize for this first variable, you either need to be first to market with a common idea and have other things go right, or have an uncommon idea, and the best way if you're just turning this switch on is to go the uncommon idea route.
Now, to get more specific, what are some examples of uncommon ideas? Let's say you're a tech content creator. Maybe it's an obscure app that no one's heard about, or it's a new startup that just launched, or maybe you find a story that there was a third Apple co-founder that accidentally sold his stock for 2K. All of those would be uncommon ideas that you could use in the tech category. And the reason uncommon ideas work is because people share stuff when they feel like they can earn credibility or social status from either their friends or professional network. If it makes people laugh, if it makes people think they're smart, if it makes people respect them, that's why they share; it's a form of currency. Uncommon ideas are more sharable because people wouldn't have heard of them before, and if you're the fourth person sharing the same common story, you don't get that social credit. So you either need to be the first one to tell it or tell people something that nobody's ever heard. Okay, I think we hit unique idea enough.
The second variable is large applicable audience, and this is where they start stacking on each other. The reason common ideas, if you're first, often go viral is because there's usually a large applicable audience or TAM (total addressable market) of people that would consume and share it. If we use that Apple new product release event, there are a lot of people that care about tech that would be willing to consume that video, and there are a lot of people that, if shared to them, would consume it as well. That's a large applicable audience. The larger the applicability of the content, the more people you'll have that might like it. Now, like we said, the problem with common ideas, even if they have a large applicable audience, is that if you're not first to market and they've already been shared, all of those new eyes have already been sucked up. So there could be a lot of people you'd share to, but so many people have seen the story that if you're late, they won't share it. Now, on the other side, the problem with uncommon ideas is that usually they're so niche that they have a small applicable audience; there just aren't that many people that would be willing to receive and then share it again. And if you think about psychology, it makes sense: sharing an uncommon idea with your friends is a little risky from a social credibility perspective. It might be a weird rabbit hole that you're into that most people aren't, and so if you share that, it can actually be a social inhibitor. This would be like if you tried to share a video about the history of licorice; there's a chance people be like, "Oh wow, that's really cool," but for the most part, people will be like, "This guy's a weirdo." So to summarize so far across the first two variables, the highest probability of viral success is finding an uncommon idea with a large applicable audience; that's the sweet spot for me. An example in this bucket would be the video I made about Taylor Swift's Eras Tour stage construction. So the stage construction itself was super niched; I found it on a really small YouTube channel of somebody that recreates these 3D stages, but Taylor Swift as a concept has a very large applicable audience. So I combined uncommon idea with large applicable audience; that gave me the best surface area for luck for that to succeed. Another example is this video I just made about life-size floor plants. This company in Australia renders your home design floor plan on a projector and blasts it in a one-to-one scale on the warehouse floor so people can actually walk around and move furniture around. That inherently is a very uncommon idea, but there's a large applicable audience of people that care about home design. That video has done 8 million views in 6 days, and I knew that combination had the potential, if executed well, to go viral. So this is what you're looking for: uncommon ideas plus a large applicable audience.
Now, the third variable, which can change things, is a unique point of view. The best way to make a common idea go viral is to apply a unique point of view on top of it. I call this a story lens; it's the lens through which you're going to tell the story. And this is important because it's really hard to find these uncommon ideas consistently. So a lot of my mega-viral videos actually come from common ideas with a large applicable audience but with a unique point of view, story lens on top of it. A good example of this is my Leo Messi signs with Inter Miami video, which is the biggest one I've ever made: 17.5 million views on Instagram, 11 million views on TikTok—certified banger. Why did that one work? It was a common idea: Leo Messi signing with Inter Miami—biggest news in soccer. It was a large applicable audience—both soccer and Leo Messi—but I put a unique point of view on top of it; talked about the business impact of the deal. A non-unique point of view would have been just to report on the news and say that he signed; lots of people would do that, and that's not going to cut through; you'd have to be first to market with all of those and execute it well. What I did is take a unique point of view, a unique story lens at the intersection of culture and business, and that's why my video cut through. What I find is that people are willing to share a common idea if it has the unique point of view layer on top. Interestingly, the unique point of view or the unique story lens actually acts kind of like an uncommon idea in a weird way. And this is even more interesting: I found the uncommon idea plus unique point of view actually doesn't work as well as a common idea with unique point of view or an uncommon idea with a normal point of view. It's weird; you would think uncommon and unique point of view would have a multiplier effect, but it's actually too niche, and there aren't enough people that would react. For example, it'd be easier to go viral with a video about Taylor Swift plus her business strategy or Taylor's dad and something he said to her verbatim than would to be about Taylor's dad and his business strategy. It makes sense; you're getting too niche and cutting it too fine when you go uncommon uncommon. So the best-case scenarios of the three variables so far are common idea plus large applicable audience plus unique point of view or uncommon idea plus large applicable audience plus normal point of view. Those are the two sweet spots.
Now, the fourth variable of the formula is a world-class hook. If you nail just the three variables we've talked about so far, you should guarantee at least a medium performer—six-figure views, maybe small seven-figure views. But if you're trying to go Super Saiyan and have one video completely change your business, you pretty much have to have those three variables tied and a world-class hook. The hook is probably the most important aspect of going viral. When people share your video, they either repost it as a story or send it in the DM, and when it gets reposted as an Instagram story, it only plays the first 10 seconds. So it's critical that those first 10 seconds actually rehook someone who it's been shared to. That plus the viewer curve is an exponential decay, so you're going to have the most eyes at the beginning, and in order to have the platform algorithmically boost, they want increased average view duration; the hook will hold people longer. So the hook is critical. If you spend 80% of your effort on the first 5 seconds, that's probably the right mix; that's how important a hook is. Now, I've talked a lot about what makes for a good hook in the past; I've got a bunch of videos on that; I will link those at the bottom, and I'll link them in this upper right corner. I also share a lot about my latest learnings and trends and insights around hooks in my content newsletter, which I'll link below, but I'll share a couple of things that could help. The first thing is you want to open a curiosity loop. After one sentence, ask yourself, "Is the viewer curious enough to want to continue watching to find the answer?" If not, you need to remap, rewrite the hook and go again. The second piece is actually to design a visual hook. Turns out that if you just write and speak a compelling first line, even if it opens the best curiosity loop in the world, that's often not enough. You need to add a visual hook that usually includes B-roll with motion and text on the screen. People can read faster than they can hear or consume the context of a visual scenario, so you want to actually put the text on the screen for every video. This takes the visual hook and combines with the curiosity loop, and this should accomplish the goal. And the last little quick tip on hooks is quick delivery. You want to concisely and as short as possible deliver the words so you can show the visual hooks; you can get out of the way and get into the body of the video. You don't want to linger and spend too much time on the hook; you want to go as quick as possible in a normal rhythm. Again, if you want more tips on how to write these hooks, I'll link my content newsletter; this is where I go really in-depth on the things I'm seeing that are working, how the trends are changing, and exactly how I'm applying it video to video.
All right, the fifth variable is to have a compelling story. Now, it's interesting: if you've nailed the first three and you have a compelling hook, you almost don't even need that good of a story; those will carry you for the rest of the way. You just need a decent enough story to keep the viewer kind of entertained. And the best way to do this is to hook, rehook, and rehook throughout. You want to think of the body of the video like a dance with context and conflict: give a little context, add a conflict, rehook them, add a little more context to solve that conflict, add a second conflict; you just go back and forth with the dance. It's interesting, but the story is actually not that important if you've nailed the others. If you haven't nailed the others—you have an average idea, you have a good hook, but you have a low applicable audience size—you need a great story to make it go, and people will share it just because the story is so good. This is more of an outlier strategy though; I wouldn't try really hard to optimize for this type of storytelling; just get the viewer from the beginning to the end. I'm actually working on software that will extract all of my storytelling frameworks into a simple-to-use SaaS tool where, once you identify the uncommon idea and you add your lens on it, it will go ahead and write the hook and the story for you. That's called Sandcastles; it's not ready yet; I'll link the waitlist below if that's interesting. I'm trying to abstract away a lot of the additional effort to write the story because that's not really the highest leverage thing to spend time on.
All right, and the last variable is, of course, luck. Nobody wants to hear it, but a lot of what virality is just comes down to luck. And if the right people share your video initially to get that viral crank moving, one reshare from somebody with over 100,000 followers can mean the difference between a 10,000-view video and a million-view video. And so if you have friends with big accounts and you see something breaking out with a high share rate, go ahead and DM them and ask them to share it; that will really add gasoline to the viral fire because big accounts sharing your video both mathematically exposes it to a lot more people, but also psychologically shows that it's something that should be watched. It's a coign to other viewers that they should take a look, and both of those things matter. But luck is huge. The truth is you could post the exact same video seven different times on seven different days, and only one or two of them would go crazily viral. If it's a great video, the other five will do pretty good, but the absolute Super Saiyan outlier returns are fairly luck-dependent. So to revisit the formula as we wrap up: virality equals unique idea plus large applicable audience plus unique point of view plus world-class hook plus compelling story plus luck. If you have those six and all switches are turned on—sayonara.
All right, that's all I've got for this video. That was a jam-packed tactical session. So if you like that and you want more like it, drop in the comments what you want to see for me next. I'm trying to figure out how to map my kind of content ideas on YouTube—where can I add value, what do people need? So drop in a comment what you want to see from me next time, and we will see you then. Peace.