Riding the Wave of a Viral Video—An Insider’s Perspective

We know to never trust anyone who says they can promise to create a viral video. There is no silver bullet or magic formula. A lot of it is just luck. This Friday the 13th proved to be very lucky for my family as we achieved something that most say is just dumb luck. We created a viral video.

On January 13, 2017, my truck-driver husband was glad to finally be on his way home before the ice really hit. While he was driving, he started to think about how he was going to fill his day. As a big Facebook Live fan, he thought that was it—he would create a video that would entertain people who were living through the same media-hyped ice storm. As soon as he arrived home, he recruited our teenage daughter and started the video.

He posted the video around 9:30 a.m. Of course I laughed (I’m his wife, that’s what I’m supposed to do, and it was funny.). And of course I also shared it (I’m his wife, that’s what I’m supposed to do with his funny videos.). But none of us were prepared for what was coming.

Within 45 minutes, the video had 730 views, and we were all really happy with that. But then it really started blowing up. More and more people were sharing it. And we were addicted to checking the stats. By the time we sat down for lunch, we were all rooting to hit 10K views. We blew past that and by the time I returned to my desk, we were sitting at more than 17K views. It was about 45 minutes later when we hit 50K views that we realized that the video was viral!

We watched in anticipation that whole next hour waiting to see if it would continue…would we hit the big 100k views. Within the hour we hit that 100k. We all felt like we won a prize! We waited for the balloon drop, a phone call from someone famous, something, but alas we just high-fived, and I went back to working.

It was an exciting couple of hours. I’m not even sure how we ate dinner; our phones were all on the table, and the video dominated our dinner conversation. By the time we were done eating, the video had surpassed 200K views. We were all flying high on the adrenaline of the day, and by the time we decided to go to sleep we had 266K views.

When I woke this morning, the first thing I did was check on the video. It had nearly 325K views. The excitement was still there, but was replaced by ideas of how to follow it. How do you follow something like that? Is it even possible? Well, we posted another video, and it’s doing pretty good so far. I don’t think we will replicate the first video’s success, but when a good idea hits you, and the iron is hot, sometimes you strike it and see what happens.

Now that I have gone through it first-hand, I am inclined to agree that there is no silver bullet when it comes to creating a viral video, but I do think there are some things that can help (without the use of babies, puppies or kittens).

Here are a few reasons why I think this video was so successful:

• It was less than 2 minutes long. (People have short attention spans.)
• It was funny. Like laugh out loud funny. (I actually cried I was laughing so hard, but then again I knew it was my daughter throwing ice at my husband.)
• People could relate to it. (The big bad ice storm is going to destroy us all!)
• It was posted around 10 a.m. on a Friday…with lots of schools closed…with lots of businesses closed…on a long weekend.
• Sharing! (As I watched it all unfold, it became clear that the increases in shares was key.)
• Maybe, just maybe, because my husband was responding to every comment…until he couldn’t keep up any longer.

Maybe it was just luck…on Friday the 13th no less. Or maybe my husband is a genius (he made me write that). But I think the magic of the video is that it was genuine, funny, and wasn’t created with the idea of becoming viral, but to entertain people…to make them laugh. It was the right content, the right audience at the right time. The content marketing trifecta.

And that video…it has more than 412K views at the time I published this, and it just keeps climbing.

If I have piqued your interest, watch the video here!