A Systematic Formula To Make Your Videos Go Viral

what is one of the most valuable skills you can develop in 2024 I think that's a great question well as a business owner as someone who desires to build a brand I believe one of the most valuable skills you can develop is how to Garner attention of multitudes of people and one of the best ways to do that is to go viral so I have with me today the absolute most brilliant viral scientist I made up that name he didn't call himself that but that's what I call him the the ultimate viral scientist on helping people get their content to go viral on social platforms none other than two-time bestselling author Brendan Kane Brendon glad to have you here brother thank you IR appreciate it always a pleasure yeah give it up for Brendon give it up for Brendon so so this whole idea of going viral before we even get started into talking about how to go viral how would you define viral cuz for some people they feel like that my view my video got 100 views or a th000 view or 10,000 views it's viral so how would you describe viral well I think it's a great question and I love the way that you started off uh our conversation because I think some people misconstrue what virality means I think some people especially business owners they're like I don't want to go viral I just want to generate more business and revenue and customers because they think that they think that going viral is like a cat silly cat video or prank or like that their subject matter can't go viral well I can definiely tell you I've been doing this for 20 years any subject matter can go viral taxes go viral Finance Insurance real estate nutrition any subject can go viral with the right context to it we'll talk about that today but virality in in the context of what we look at it is is we're not talking about going viral for the sake of going viral we want to take your core subject matter your core expertise and make that go viral so it actually translates to scalable Commerce because if it doesn't Translate to any business goal and objective then why are you doing it and also you burn yourself out and get and there's a big thing with creater burnout and fatigue if it's not hitting your goals and objectives you're ultimately going to stop doing it so kind of the exercise that I like to do with people is uh people here in the audience or people watching one of the things that you can simply do is how many people does your average post connect with each time you post for some people it may be 100 some people may be a th000 10,000 or 100,000 whatever that number is I want you to pull out a calculator and multiply it by 10 and then multiply it by 100 and then multiply it by a th and just imagine that number of people whatever it is seeing your message your product your brand each time you post a piece of content what would that do for your business or your brand that is what viral is so I I I hate sitting there and saying oh going viral is a million views because it could be a million views on a prank video that has nothing to do with your business and it doesn't translate into Commerce for some people they don't necessarily need to get millions of views it would be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of of views on their content would be a massive boost to their business or brand so that's how I look at the concept of going viral wow that's so that's so cool because when I think about um like our YouTube channel for instance we've had a couple of videos that have gone kind of viral but like I think when something's viral in a niche it can be way more more profitable than just random virality am am I correct 100% And even somebody in your case because we've worked with you know people with millions of subscribers and hundreds of millions or billions of views is even if we take what you're doing today and you increase the effectiveness by like 20 or 30% in terms of growing that viewership that's going to have a huge meaningful difference in terms of 100 your business one in your brand and um I think that people also just get lost in again this concept of in order for me to go viral I have to water down my message and disconnect from the audience that I really want to connect with so it sounds like you're saying going viral is only part of the equation it's who are you going viral with like like who are you reaching and then why are you going viral like why are they watching and then what's the next thing that's going to happen as a result of that that's what it sounds like you're saying 100% so there's there's a few few different factors and I it was interesting because I was just having a a a conversation with a guy that uh runs a business a garage business that do about 200 million a year and he was like he wants to work a garage business he bu gares oh garage okay I was like what's he doing okay he multiple loc locations across across the US so what he hundreds of millions of dollars worth of garage do and he scaled it with paid paid Med but now he wants to get into or M but he said Brendon I really want to work with you I want to do this but I'm just scared because I see a lot of influencers out there generating millions or tens of millions of views a month but they're not generating any revenue and I said I said first stop here for a second you have a successful business so if you are generating more eyeballs on that brand on that content it's going to correlate to more business for you now the challenge comes is when you don't have a business you don't have a solid foundation it doesn't matter how many eyballs you because it's not going to translate into meaningful Commerce for you so that's a big element to it um the other aspect to it is again it's it and this is where kind of the science comes in is you do definitely want to be speaking to your core audience but in order to meaningfully grow your audience base grow viral to whatever extent that means to you you need to widen it out to the general popul and the reason you need to do that is because of what controls whether your content generates 100 views or 10 million views and that's the algorithms and there's a lot of misinformation and demonization frustrated content creators of oh the algorithms are suppressing my reach to get me to pay for reach that's not the case because then nobody would ever go viral you wouldn't generate views or I'm Shadow band you know 90% of the time that's not the case or 95% of the time what does Shadow band mean I've heard people say that that basically they're suppressing your reach on purpose because they don't want audiences to see it because of the subject matter that you're talking about okay um so 95% of the times that that's not the case so what does the content is just not good exactly okay and and it's not the and I want to just preface it by saying it's not the content it's the context of it because it's typically it's not the message that's a problem it's just the way that we're presenting it and we'll get into that in minute I just want toing down like what is the algorithm what is it meant there to to do well the algorithm is very simplistic it just plays to the overall business goals and objectives of these platforms meaning how does a social media platform make money by serving ads sure so the more content people are watching the more ads they can serve the more profit they generate so what happens when you publish something to your social media profile so let's just um give an example is like let's just say you're starting out maybe you have have tens of thousands of followers so when you post a piece of content it's going to se it to 100 people and it's going to measure two things how effective is it in stopping the scroll meaning stopping people from going on to the next piece of content and then how effective it is in holding attention once they've stopped the scroll and they'll SE it to 100 people measure those two things and if it does a really good job it'll SE it to another 100 people and if it does a good job another 100 another 100 and keeps scaling out that way but if that first 100 people it doesn't do a go good job in terms of stopping the scroll and holding attention it's just going to cut the reach right away why because if any one of us opened up our favorite app today there's probably 150,000 pieces of content that could seed to US based upon the people that we follow and the content that we've engaged with so it has so much content it could seed to people and if their core goal is to keep people on the platforms longer they're just going to cut reach to anything that is not playing to that business goal or objective now you will see certain content basically basically if I I want to make sure I'm understanding what you're saying if we give the platform what they want they will give us what we want 100% okay and if you think about any of these platforms it's not like Netflix where they invest billions of dollars in original content they rely on us we are the fuel that runs these platforms so ultimately they want us to succeed they want to partner with us they're not out there to get us they're not out there to to to to kill our business or anything it's just we have to prove that we are great storytellers and that we can grab and hold attention longer than the other content they have available at their disposal wow so good okay so every time I talk to you my head turns into a popcorn machine and all these ideas start popping in my head so um be I know you a lot of people watching us may not know you so tell us like your origin story how you got started in this whole viral thing and you know if you want to talk about like 1 million followers that's how I heard of you cuz when I read it I said there's no way like when I the title 1 million followers and you got a million followers on Facebook I think it was wasn't it in 30 days and I'm like no way so I'm like I'm I'm gonna see and then I saw it I'm like okay I'm gonna read his book and I read your I was like that was really good so like how did you get started in this whole on this whole journey to be in my mind ultimate viral scientist so initially I wanted to be a film producer so I went to film school on this was around like 2003 2004 and at the time they it still hold true to they don't teach you anything about business in film school and I wanted to be a film producer was so you I thought you needed to have some foundational aspect of what it means to run a business if you're going to contribute to the business side of the entertainment industry so I just figured while I was going to school is just to create a few internet companies just to learn an experiment to understand what does it take to get something off the ground what does it take something to run something uh so I did I started a few internet companies while I was in college and then I moved to uh La in 2005 to pursue a career in film and like everybody else you start at the bottom I was making coffee copy deliveries all the grunt work just like they show on TV when they're doing film making movies okay uh so uh when I obviously I was working for a movie studio and you want to connect with the the studio Executives The Producers the directors to get your foot in the door and and scale those relationships but when people would ask me why did you move to LA they would say I would say I want to be a film producer and I could see everybody's eyes glaze over CU I was just one of a million people trying to do the same thing so I had to take a step back and analyze well how can I provide the most amount of value to the higher up so I can build those relationships and I noticed that every time we finished a film a piece of content that we would spend tens of millions of dollars producing and then we would spend tens of millions of dollars promoting there would be a sense of anxiety would came come over the office because it's different than any other business you don't have years or decades to build a brand you're literally taking this piece of content and you need hundreds of millions of people around the world to know about it in a matter of months and I noticed at the time they were still just so Reliant in traditional advertising mediums like television radio print things like that and digital was just starting to reemerge after the. com bust and social media was just coming on the on the scene you know Myspace and friends who were the predominant players in Facebook and YouTube had just launched uh so I just went to the head of the studio I said listen I know how to tap onto tap into these online sources for a fraction of the cost or no cost at all for example we did the first ever YouTube influencer campaign for a movie uh with Jason Statham called Crank and through that we just had started seeing success with that so I started building digital divisions for movie studios and I had to just analyze myself as like do I really want to go down this corporate route you know because the mov Studio system is very corporate it's very slow lacking Innovation or stick with kind of the social media route so I just stuck with the social media route and started building kind of more technology and um strategies around it so I created the first uh influencer technology platform on top of Myspace because I just noticed that they were reliant on just bottom basement banner ads and cpms uh so I built an influencer technology platform to help kind of monetize uh that Network and just continue down that path to uh the next kind of role that I had was building a social media paid optimization firm because it was I don't know the exact date but people don't realize that like YouTube and Facebook specifically because they're the first kind of the big players in the space initially didn't start with their own advertising networks and advertising platforms so that launched I think it was like 2011 2012 so I helped form one of the first advertising agencies that was optimizing that spend for fortune 500 companies wow but what I saw is we got it up to managing about 100 million a year and paid advertising was that these Fortune 500 companies were just using traditional creative assets on social media so they would take a TV spot and put it on like YouTube and expect it to perform so I knew there had to be a better way to go about it and that's where I left and started building the foundations of the creative model that we use at hooko which is our viral content model uh because I just saw so much time energy and money wasted on not really having the right creative process to really scale whether it's your ad spend or more importantly the creative resources and the Creative Energy that you're putting into it so that's where I started building the foundations and it was outlined in my First Book 1 million followers and Then followed up with hooko and then in more depth uh the guide to going viral which which just recently launched wow all of that like is this amazing y'all like Make some noise Make some noise from SP so so when I started and you can tell like you can you can put me on blast in front of the whole world and I'm okay with it okay so I'm just telling you right now you can like shoot straight so I got started I started my YouTube um Channel March 15 2007 um I uploaded my first video that week right and I was on YouTube and I know you're going to think man this guy really didn't get it and I really didn't I was on YouTube for 14 years before I knew that YouTube paid people for videos when I turned on monetization I had been on YouTube for 15 years when we turned on monetization and I had already been monetized for over a decade I had already been monetize a ball for over a decade but I was at a confererence heard a guy speak blah blah blah I just decided and I want you to tell me whether this was a good decision or not but I I feel like it was um I decided when I found out how YouTube worked that I'm going to go all in on this YouTube thing what I mean when I say Allin I am going to do at at least one I'm going to produce at least one YouTube video a week for the next 10 years and see if I can get good at it I don't care how many subscribers I get I don't care how many and when I say I don't care I do care but that's not going to be my primary focus I want to get better with every video and and I heard MrBeast talk about that and that's why I said well that makes sense because 10 years is going to go by whether I get better at it or not I might as well get better at and and I'm being really transparent now I don't feel like I'm good yet I feel like I'm getting better though I don't feel like I'm good at YouTube but we've had some success with YouTube and it's really Amplified um our our message it's really multiplied our reach but I'm not not I don't feel like I'm good yet so I thought I had an idea what it meant to have a video go viral right so we've had we've got and I just looked the other day I think in total we have five videos since April of 2022 that have over a million views one has almost four million okay and I thought man this is really good it was really good for me because we only had like 10,000 subscribers why that year right so um here's what here's here's here's what happened recently I got interviewed getting out of my car in front of Eddie's that was 10 days ago I think 10 or 11 days ago just on Instagram that video now in 11 days has 68. 5 million views and over 24 million views on Tik Tok now I feel like I have an understanding what viral is that I didn't even know that was a possibility for anything so why did that video get so many views so there's a few elements to it let's let's look at the macro level so what you're talking about is the the account School of Hard KN School hard KN and it generated it on um Instagram they do really well across Instagram Tik Tok and YouTube they do so one of the the reasons that they do so well is they focus on a single format okay so what is a format at the end of the day so the format that they use is called man on the street so you approach Co and engage with a random stranger on the street and interact with them to some kind of reveal or end result there's 10 different versions of this like I have a friend that we've worked with um his name is Alex stemp that's a photographer that does it that approaches random strangers on the street offers them professional photo shoots and uh reveals results at the end he's he's amassed an audience of 20 million people with that single format a photographer with 20 million wow that's crazy so so that's an example of one format now our team or like I've seen this kid goes up and says says to people can I sing you a song and he's got his guitar that's man on the street or there's a lot of ones of people playing a piano in public and capturing reaction that's that's another man on the street okay now he's not like really approaching people people are kind he's measuring their reaction there's many different versions of it okay um but the that's an example of of a format now our team's done about 10,000 hours of research across 220 formats so I don't want anybody how many formats 220 and we do about research on like three to five new formats each week so the reason I say that is I don't want people to think I have to use man on the street format in order to go viral because when we work with clients we want people to be excited about that so going back to your original question is they're focusing on a single format and mastering that single format a man on the street is a very powerful format um to grow views and audience now translating into business depends on the business and how you kind of sure uh leverage it there's another guy uh Simon squib that does this really well he he approaches random strangers on the street and ask uh what is your dream and then he tries to help them achieve their dream by investing in their company or giving them some advice or things of that nature so the first step is they have a single format and they've mastered that format now most people will look at a format like that and say oh I see what they're doing I'm just going to approach a random stranger on the street and interact interact with them 99% of people that will try that will fail because they don't understand the context of what makes that successful so the process and we've done this with your YouTube account that we would do if you want to tackle that man on the street format is we would take five to 10 of the the top performers so like in School of Hard Kno that's actually pretty high for a format it's like 5 to 10 million views plus now yours got close to 70 million it it's got more than any I've seen on the channel which blows my mind yeah so we'll get into why in a minute so we would take 5 to 10 of the high performers 5 to 10 of the average performers and 5 to 10 of the low performers and see what's happening in those High performers that's not showing up in the low performers from a context perspective okay meaning what you know it's not about really the content but the these contextual elements such as like it could be like the pacing the tonality what happens in those first three seconds what's happening in the captions the title cards the hook the facial expressions the body cues in case of the um School of Hard Kno the reaction what's the reaction of of you what's the reaction of the person because we want to really understand the storytelling elements that actually drive performance of that format versus drive down the performance because that's where you get a fundamental understanding of that going back to my experience of going to film school and I'm sure you've seen this expressed in other types of medium what happens when you go to film School you sit down and you break down classic films you you watch Alfred H Hitchcock you read screenplays you you break these elements down because you need to understand what it means to tell a story through the medium of film but the reality is with social media it's no different it's just another communication method but what people misconstrue with it is anybody can pull out their phone press record and post it thus they think that there's not a lot of science Nuance to how you tell stories so that's a true blessing in that it's completely democratized communication meaning anybody can reach the masses it's not about how fancy your setup is how fancy your camera is how much how much money you have or your your your team size it's really about your ability to communicate now the downside is most people see it so easy to post something that they don't put a lot of thought into it so going into kind of the video that went viral with you like what were the elements that caused it to go viral okay so the first three seconds are critical as as because as we were talking about in the beginning what are the two things the algorithms are looking at how effective are you at stopping the scroll and how effective are you in holding attention so in the first few seconds it it's very clear this guy is approaching you now the audience doesn't know who you are in this case and he says excuse me sir and you're getting out of the car and he ask is this your Rolls-Royce and then you kind of like laugh and you're like of course this is my roll so in the first three seconds it's an amazing stoppage of the of the scroll cuz he's like excuse what how are you going to react the audience is know you could just be like get out of the way like move away like um Alex St the photographer he had a video that went viral um where he went into uh a retail store and asked Can I do a professional photo shoot in here and they said no and then he moved on to the next one and to the next one because with man on the street one of the powerful aspects of is you don't know what's going to happen and man on the Street's been along way before social media was in the late night talk shows he would do you remember Jay Leto would do man on the street segments and things of that I do remember that yeah so so in those first three seconds he's setting a a clear expectation of excuse me sir and he says is this your Rolls-Royce and you you make a funny joke which engages the audience further and of course this is mine and then he's like um you know what do you do for business and then the the important aspect is the pacing and the tonality uh is structured in a way that people can clearly follow it now in some of his low performers the pacing is all over the place it goes from question to question it's like super rushed now the other aspect that actually because remember again the two things grab attention so we talked about grabbing attention and holding attention the other amazing aspect that that uh unfolded in that he then asked you what was the most amount of money that you made in a year which was 15 million but then the next question he asked you has have you ever been broke have you ever been broke so what has that ever been broke do to the audience following the 15 million relate they can relate because if it was just the 15 million nobody can relate nobody can relate and they would just move right past it but then it was have you ever been broke and you said yeah I've been broke two times so now the audience can relate and be like well maybe this guy can teach me something and then the um and I forget his name the guy that interviewed you James James asked well what would be your advice for somebody that was struggling and then you could give tangible advice for that person so in those first few seconds again this interaction what's going to happen what's going to happen funny joke reveal that the most amount of money you have you can relate to the person because you've been broke a few times and then you get into tangible advice versus an underperformer with him and we've done the breakdown of it is a guy was was in the wine business um and he was just talking about uh you know that he flies all over the world he's in the oil and the wine business and all these and there was no tangible aspect to it and it just jumped from think it just felt very disjointed versus if you go and watch that video there is a very clear story that's being told and there's very tangible and actionable advice that you're providing and it's all easy to follow even though you're at a completely different level than 99.

9% of people watching that video people can relate to you you and take tangible advice from you so that is one of the the or a few of the different reasons that that video generated close to 70 million views okay cool I'm stupified but but what I would recommend is like just as a pure exercise for people to take away is go find your video on the school of hard kns and then go find one of their lowest performing videos for them it may be like five or six ,000 views that's not the point just find one that is low performer and put them side by side and watch your video versus a low performer and just see if you can spot the difference because it's the same Creator it's the same account same same format same number of followers but you'll have a 70 million view one and maybe like a 300,000 view one wow and then that's where you start understanding kind of the difference between what it means to go viral with that format and not and that doesn't mean that your goal has to be I'm going to generate 10 million views with a format it's just like I did in film school you're learning from Al Alfred Hitchcock I'm not going to be Alfred Hitchcock but you can learn nuances about storytelling from those from those different elements now I also want to just point out uh and you're a master of this is mindset some people would be like I can't be in front of 10 million people that's not the that's not kind of the the thing to focus on the thing to focus on with social media and this is one of the um elements that that I learned from working with Taylor Swift very early on is social media is not a on to many platform even though you had 70 million people watch that video I was talking 95% of people watching that are are watching it by themselves so you're communicating to one person not to many people and that helps overcome kind of some of those mindset aspects is understanding that you as you're creating a video are just communicating to one person if you're communicating to one person it makes it a lot easier from a mindset perspective to get going and and move forward with it does it also make it easier for the people watching to feel like you're talking to them yes got it because I you know one of the things you'll see a lot with underperforming videos it'll start out with hey everybody hey everyone well who is everyone cuz people are sitting on their couch or in the bus or in the train watching watching their their videos or content wow so are there formats that are better than other formats for social media for business so it's a very um nuanced question um so when we work with people there's kind of like beginner formats and then there's Advanced formats so kind of understanding kind of where you're at can you give me an example of three beginner formats and three Advanced formats forance um so beginner format we just talked about man on the street very format oh yeah I mean because if you look at um School of Hard Knox they're probably shooting that on an kn phone you see his microphone it's not inexpensive microphone there's not a lot of that's going into that um there's another one that is uh called two characters one light bulb where it's the same person playing two different characters they play the expert and they play the novice and they're breaking down a misconception about a subject matter it's used for law law like Erica Colberg the lawyer she does an amazing job with it does a great J Mark Tilbury uses it for finance it can be used for any subject matter but that is a format that you can do on your own with an iPhone um there is it's called two what two two characters one light bulb two characters one light bulb um another beginner one is called uh walking listicles there's a guy named Robert croak that does this that has a million followers on Tik Tok that's basically walking around the block talking into his iPhone breaking down business advice into kind of like three or four different action items it's kind of very easy to kind of shoot uh on your own more advanced ones uh there's one called the visual metaphor um one that's DrJulie Smith uses it she's a clinical psychologist on Tik Tok that breaks down complex topics like PTSD anxiety panic attacks where she's using props and elements um there a visual metaphor it's a little bit more that's a little bit more complicated a little bit more complicated because you're kind of manipulating objects you have to have to set up um things of that nature um long form is can be more complicated so there's like explainer videos that break down so those those three formats that you just named are all short form yes okay PL uh short form short form video uh formats formats formats that's the word I was looking for okay um YouTube can get a little bit more complicated um or a little bit more advanced I should say before you go to YouTube though if you or is that what you're doing now with the advanced um going more advanced um I'm just trying to think of if there's any more so the visual metaphor format is one that is a little bit more advanced um reaction like we do a reaction format um that can be a little bit more advanced from a Nuance perspective um but it can also be e so there's different levels to some of these formats as well like seeing people to react to content it can be um a beginner it can be Advanced at the same time I'm just trying to think of other uh short form that are a little bit more advanced I think more of the advanced stuff comes on the long form side of things Okay and like you were saying with YouTube exper video like veritasium doesn't a great job of of this like their most viewed video is like why are there 99 billion um black balls on this Reservoir like if you watch it it's you know a 10 to 12 minute video so it gets more a little bit more advanced in terms of the retention side of it like how do you hold attention for as long as possible there's more variables and areas to kind of uh skip up with you know MrBeast has a format that was actually created by BuzzFeed is like one versus a million where it's you know what does a $1 hotel room look like forus $1 million so that's another format of of YouTube it just takes a little bit more of a a skill set there one other format that we helped actually de develop with a client that actually can be both beginner or Advanced depending on the uh level that you do is it's called is it worth it so we worked with the leather Craftsman um that literally had no social media experience and I want to just say this for everybody watching is like it's not about how much experience you have often times when we work with people with a lot of experience it works against them because we have to untrain things but he was an example of somebody with little to no social media experience uh stuck at 2,000 followers so using this concept of a format uh he wanted to talk about his expertise of weather Goods so he could sell more of his handbags briefcases wallets things of that nature but his idea of social media before was I'm going to create a commercial for my products of like showing the features and things of that nature but it just didn't gain any traction nobody logs onto social media saying well I want to see a great ad so um we helped develop this format called is it worth it we help take like a $1,200 Chanel handbag deconstruct it on screen and tell you whether it's worth the money that you're paying for it so that format that single format took him from 2,000 followers to 2. 5 million followers across his social media channels generating hundreds of millions of views and again because he had the foundation of a business his Revenue uh took off so that's another format that he shoots on his own on his iPhone that's a little bit easier to um to to uh pull off now it can be more advanced depending on the subject matter that you're you're working with I have so many questions we have so little time but I have so many questions so I think what I'm going to do is um I'm going to ask you one more question and then I'm going to segue the title of my next video that I was going to do live into a conversation with you if you're okay with that yeah absolutely okay cuz and I also just want to say like we're covering a lot of ground here and we're kind of scratching the surface so just for your people watching this um anybody can get my new book for free absolutely free the PDF for Kindle by just going hook. com golden so that they can just dive in deeper there congratulations for being in the right place at the right time thank you for that by the way give it up for Brandon Brandon y'all I mean wow I I am more so hook point.