The viral video is an elusive creature, set out to be found by every executive or board of directors who have no marketing experience whatsoever. If you’re a marketing person and you report into director level, there is a strong chance that you’ve heard the phrase “make it go viral”.
No doubt if you have heard this then you have also needed to battle back the urge to roll your eyes and scream it doesn’t work like that to them. If you are reading this and still need to know the difference between these two things and why they might not matter, then read on.
What is a viral video?
Smosh. That’s where it all started. To many people they are the first bonafide viral video. They created a quick, funny, video on the small platform called YouTube and all they did was lip sync to the Pokémon theme tune. The rest is history, the video blew up overnight and they became one of the first two people to be internet famous.
The question many people have after this is, how did they do it? You’d think to amass that many views overnight they’d likely have an ad budget or a crack marketing team sharing the video across platforms to get traffic in. But no, at this point they were just two boys in their bedroom and they made a funny video. The video could have been up for weeks, days, months, or even years before it became a hit. This is an important piece of information for viral video knowledge.
Viral videos are known as such because they have a rapid increase in views in a short space of time. They can go from one to one million in a matter of hours. Sometimes there’s no explanation behind it, sometimes it’s because they are famous, and sometimes it’s because there’s a really obscure but funny moment in it. They are essentially a flash in the pan moment, some creators use this to stick around but most fall into obscurity pretty quickly – Tay Zonday, Rebecca Black, smpfilms, etcetc.
Viral is not what you want if your aim is to grow a consistent presence.
What is trending?
Trending and viral have some common threads, a trend can become viral. If enough people get involved in it a trend can hit overnight popularity – the Harlem shake is 10 years old, it seems fitting to mention the speed at which that grew.
Few businesses can understand or jump on the trends with effectiveness, Oreo is one of the greats that used the blackout trend during the Superbowl to get some views but most just check what’s happening, don’t understand the context, jump in and get themselves into hot water.
This is yet another marketing word that gets thrown around the boardroom without care. People want to trend, they want to be down with the kids, their brand needs to be one trending every week. If you are a director or a manager and this is one of your go-to words, cut it out. Your marketing teams do not want to hear it.
What should you be looking for and does going viral matter?
Let’s get one thing straight. Viral does not matter at all. If your aim is to “go viral” on social media then you need to rethink your marketing strategy and if you are telling your team to jump on the trending topics then stop. This isn’t the way to go. Social media does not build your sales pipeline.
Neither of these terms matter. You probably won’t go viral nor will jumping in on trending topics help you. The best way to build your social media is to work at it. It can take years to build an effective presence but it’s worth it.
So instead of viral or trending focus on these things instead: relevant, reliable, or factual. These are the three corners to build your audience
Relevant: the content you build needs to be understood and linked to the work you do. If you sell t shirts then make content about them.
Reliable: keep a consistent schedule. Do not post once every 6 months or twice every decade. Get to grips with when your audience is around and post then. Usually about two to three times a week is good.
Factual: like any form of marketing, social media is an advertising platform. Your content should be true. Tongue in cheek is fine, but the internet is full of fact checkers. Either, make it so absurd that it’s not believable or make it true.
We’ve all been around social media for long enough for these terms to not be bound around in board rooms and we’re wise enough to understand the likelihood of a post going viral. Let’s make 2023 the year these terms disappear from marketing for good.