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 six 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 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 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 currenty 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 n 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 on Australia renders your home design floor plan on a projector and blasts it in a onetoone 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 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 inner Miami video which is the biggest one I've ever made 17.5 million views on Instagram 11 million views on Tik Tok certified Banger why did that one work it was a common idea Leo Messi signing with interner 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 then 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 Medi performer six figure views maybe small seven figureure 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 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 a 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 is 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 a software that will extract all of my storytelling Frameworks into a simpl to use SAS 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 sand castles it's not ready yet I'll link the weit list 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 sever 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 sayanora all right that's all I've got for this video that was a jamack 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
