Viral Videos Archives - Page 6 of 7

How To Dominate 2017 With Viral Videos

post-2017-viral-video

An amazing year comes to an end, with mobile numbers sky-rocketing, viral videos breaking the internet, organic reach nose-diving and content marketing becoming mainstream*. If 2016 saw the rise of online video, 2017 will see the explosion of video content on tiny mobile screens. It’s raining videos everywhere, from Facebook news-feeds to family groups on WhatsApp.

More than 50% of mobile data is already dominated by videos and this trend will see sharp rise next year.

NASSCOM estimates India to have 700 million smartphones by 2020, and 2017 will see the curve climb north, with majority of those consuming video content. With 4G expected to become the norm, we’ll be getting a lot more videos in our news-feeds.

From Branding To Kick-ass ROI

Facebook is planning to add a dedicated video tab in their apps in a major redesign, aiming to become the home of videos on the internet. That’s just Facebook, YouTube is paddling hard to stay relevant, new platforms like snapchat are right at the border and LinkedIn has jumped in the race with native video for B2B.

For me, this year videos came full circle, from just being conduits of branding, to impacting ROI. Just this year, we experimented with share-worthy videos, which reached millions (one almost broke the internet), drove massive app downloads, and even had impact locally, where a viral video increased footfall and enquires at a local restaurant.

Uphill And Against The wind

The challenge for creating branded video content would be to tailor the videos for short attention spans for the mobile only generation, make them native to tiny mobile screens, be free of blatant brand promotion and provide value. With distribution of videos becoming expensive (Facebook organic reach nose-diving), the content will need to work harder, coz it’s not the views we’re after, but organic, earned ‘shares’ from users. And organic shares help in beating platforms at their own game, as the content gets shared like wildfire, be it on Facebook on WhatsApp.

Views can be bought, but shares are earned! And that’s how you beat the big guys at their own game!

This is the time when brands become their own media companies, creating and distributing content to their own communities on Social. When users are migrating to tiny mobile screens, so will the budgets from TV ads to online video. All in all, exciting times for India and opportunities for marketers and storytellers. With eye balls migrating to tiny mobile screens and time spent on social rising by the year, video will be a phenomenal growth channel for 2017.

My Seven Secrets of Viral Video Marketing

And slide-deck for reference :)

7 Secrets of Viral Video Marketing from Aashish Chopra

One More Thing..

If you would like to be in the know about my ongoing content experiments and learnings in viral marketing… join my mailing list, tweet me up, connect on LinkedInor check the blog :) An FYI for 2017, ixigo is taking limited clients for videos, Happy New Year :)

* As confirmed and validated at DMAi’s Content Marketing Council Leadership Breakfast, December 2016

Most Shared Facebook Video With Highest Engagement!

So, Campaign India released the Facebook Top 20 videos this week, the best list of branded videos competing neck-to-neck for engagement rates. The video we did for ibis hotels ‘How to speak Hyderabadi’ hit the top spot with 43,000 shares in a week. The next best was at 25k shares (Johnson’s Baby India) then the list nose-dived to 7k shares (Bewakoof.com) and below.

Shares are the magical metric for viral videos, period.

Made on low budget, with kick-ass execution and focussed distribution, this video has created it’s own benchmark. Storytelling beats production value, and that’s evident from the phenomenal reach of 10 million this video got, imagine reaching 1 crore news-feeds in a few days, all organic, zero boost spends.

Shares are earned, views can be bought!

A Content Experiment Which Broke The Internet

This is the story of a content experiment which grew so big, it smashed our benchmarks and created a whole new level of ‘Crazy’. It was early January and from the trends predicted for 2016, we knew this year belonged to videos. Videos are raining everywhere, from Facebook news-feeds to family groups on WhatsApp. More than 50% of mobile traffic is already dominated by videos, coupled with sky-rocketing mobile users in the country, it’s not just about videos but videos made for mobile. This is the story of how we took an innocent little content post and packaged it into a short and crisp video which hit 50 million views in under 3 weeks! (Learnings from experiment below)

Are You Kidding Me?

The challenge was to take a listicle with interesting content and fascinating pictures and convert it into a video. It had to move fast and engage and not look like a slide show (hate those lousy slideshows with cheesy animations). The strategy for a video listicle was born. Little did we know that this little experiment done on near zero budget, will catapult our reach, engagement and conversions to mount everest.

The Results – Beach Please!

We know from experience if something has viral potential, the numbers snow-ball, shares and views accelerate by the hour. The video hit a million views in ten hours, and on Day 3 the views were accelerating at a staggering 11,000 views per minute! Here’s the video

In One Week:

The video hit 40 million views
Shared by a million users
Received 300,000 comments
Reached 150 million news-feeds on Facebook
Added 200,000 new fans to our Facebook page
Made ixigo Facebook page the fastest growing in the country on that day
Got 20,000+ additional app installs for ixigo apps

“A travel video that broke the internet”
– Gizmodo

“ixigo proves Facebook (not YouTube) is the place for video marketing”
– Tnooz

“ixigo lists world’s most unusual beaches”
– Inshorts

All In One Week – Look Closely!

“The power of content marketing is the fact that a near zero budget video can compete with a TV Ad and beat it with numbers!”

Learnings – From The Trenches

First 3-6 seconds are the most crucial: News-feeds are getting chaotic, human attention spans are dropping. First impression is crucial (thumbnail image), but the ‘second first impression’ is the first 3-6 seconds, we need to move fast, engage and get them to hit ‘share’, the magical metric for viral content.
Sound elevates: Even though Facebook auto-plays the video, music/sound plays a big role. Bad quality video I’ll watch but bad sound is a deal breaker. The sound / music must elevate the visuals.
Move fast: Nothing must be static even for one frame: we panned pictures, added fast moving globe transitions. Videos are called moving pictures for a reason ;)
Square videos: The vertical/square videos which vine/instagram started work well for mobile audiences, since the format is native to mobiles. You don’t have to tilt the screen and they take up more real estate on the phone. And it’s no rocket science to know that mobile traffic is killing desktop in India!
Facebook video: Facebook has sharing in it’s DNA, not so much on YouTube. Facebook videos work when they are short, fast moving and tell the story in moving picture more than dialogues. You can use call to action buttons on videos and most importantly Facebook provides kick-ass distribution for video content compared to YouTube.
Keep Experimenting: We replicated the practices into a Republic Day video, which hit a decent million in 3 days. Operate like a movie studio, do ten experiment, two will work :)

One More Thing, Seriously!

In the last two years it has been a roller coaster ride in producing, distributing and decoding viral content. I’m compiling it all into a non-nonsense book. It has the stories of learnings from the content marketing trenches, of how experiments became best practices for multi million views viral videos. About creating viral-worthy content, the art of news-jacking, earning users’ trust and coming up with topics for the next game changer. Join the mailing list and I will update you when it comes out :)

Oh BTW Here’s The Video

[fbvideo link=”https://www.facebook.com/ixigo/videos/10153882474313270/” width=”500″ height=”400″ onlyvideo=”0″]

And This One Hit a Million in 3 Days, Same Learnings, On India’s Republic Day (News-Jack)

[fbvideo link=”https://www.facebook.com/ixigo/videos/10153904020683270/” width=”500″ height=”400″ onlyvideo=”0″]

A Million in 10 Hours!

A Million in 10 hours! This is a whole new level of craziness! India Rising! :) Here’s the video