I recently had my most viral YouTube Short by far.
While two weeks ago I wrote my philosophy on how I created it (use validated topics and execution styles), at the time I didn’t expect it to go as viral as it did.
It just kept on growing on YouTube Shorts.
And performed well on other platforms too.
So in this article, I did something I never do.
I made an infographic!
Full resolution image here.
And here’s the video, below.
Here are three things that stick out to me:
- Retention is sooooo important. If you watch the video, you’ll notice it’s 4 marketing stunts all in one 59 second video. This keeps it moving fast. When you combine this with the general audience subject matter and interesting activities, retention is kept high.
- People liked the video right away on TikTok. Something I’ve noticed is TikTok is one of the best testing grounds for hooks. My hook in this video was negative (negative hooks perform better than positive ones), even though I kept the rest of the video positive. I also had a good music-to-visual match right at the beginning. As a result of all this, you see most viewers liked the video right away on TikTok + the good hook helped with retention, above.
- In fact this is a quote from MrBeast’s internal company handbook: “Say the negatives. Don’t just tell people on your team or me why something is good. It’s infinitely more valuable to tell us why it’s not good. I FOUND THE CASTLE WE NEED FOR THE VIDEO! But it’s booked all year, over-budget, and someone died in it last week.” The same principle applies to engagement.
- TikTok top words in comments shows a range of topics. Everybody knows the eight brands in this video + the stunts are dramatic. As a result, there’s something for everybody to remark on. Rather than telling people to comment/like, I make it easy for them by giving things that are relevant and polarizing. You see this in the engagement stats too – there’s correlations between views, and likes + comments.
I think there’s a ton more lessons in these stats, but those are the biggest ones that stuck out to me.
Optimize for relevance, get people to like right away, and give something polarizing to engage with.
