29 Minutes of Virality Secrets That Will Explode Your Business in 2025

everything that we're going to cover today works for people with no social media experience so if you have no social media experience on the organic side this will still work for you so we're going to break down our guide to going viral so this is what we will be covering today creating viral content isn't luck there's an actual science today and we're going to break down that science that we've uncovered over the past 18 years we're going to dissect how the social media algorithms actually work how to make content that the algorithms will love a

simple truth to consistently going viral and then we're going to walk through our hooko viral content model so let's dive in so after 17 years going on 18 years of canvasing the entire social ecosystem analyzing billions of views and tens of thousands of videos we have cracked the code on content creation and what we have found that most brands have been doing it wrong for the past decade and if Brands don't fix this they're going to struggle to be relevant in 2 to 5 years from now so what we're going to do is today is

to avoid that now the question is why would throwing things against the wall just work with human beings that's often what we see with our clients as it pertains to organic social and going viral and this is a really important thing everything that we're covering today is it's not about quantity it is about quality so these myths about frequency and posting multiple times a day and everything that is not the model that we're going to break down today and that's not the success that we've had so content doesn't go viral when a Creator gets lucky

and I know it seems that way when you have these Tik Tok influencers or these you YouTube Stars building a massive audience but content goes viral when a Creator truly understands the science behind virality this is a staggering fact there's now over 4 billion content creators on the planet myself and all of you here we're fighting for the same attention we no longer live in a world where we're just competing against our direct competitors we're competing against every piece of content produced we're competing against ESPN Netflix Kevin Hart Kim Kardashian that pesky teenage influencer down

the street Cat Williams Cat Williams another good um we're competing directly with all of it let's break down how we can actually win this fight cuz it seems pretty daunting but it is winnable so let's Dive In First with the algorithms because this is a big thing algorithms control reach and distribution of content so an algorithm determines whether your video is seen by a thousand people or 10 million people and they are favored to only do one thing there's a lot of Miss that oh the algorithm are suppressing my reach on purpose to get me

to pay for boosting my post or my account is shadowbanned or those things but the reality is is you're not playing to what the algorithms want and what they want is One Singular thing that is retention how do these social media algorithms make money well the longer you spend on the platform the more ads they can serve the more profit that you will generate so they are always going to favor content that plays to that fundamental goal of holding people's attention for as long as possible possible so we can't beat the algorithm we're not talking

about hacks here to beat algorithms but we can partner with them to play to their business goals and objectives so that we can get that scale and reach that we're all looking for and the truth is it is pretty simple but it's not easy we just make content that the algrims love that's all you have to do that's how you content get your content to go viral I know that's probably not helpful we're going to die into the science of how to do it in a minute but learning how to do this isn't easy but

the process that we're going to walk through today is very simple so our model is built to understand and adapt to how the algorithms work and we have the data to prove it so for the content that we've worked on our team has generated over 60 billion views and 100 million followers and a billion in Revenue off of organic social media and and some people ask well how does this how does playing going viral play into my business objectives how does it generate Revenue well let's just say that your average video today is generating 10,000

views a post imagine if it was 10 times that size 100 times that size a thousand times that size what impact would that have on your bottom line that is the real opportunity here and this is how you work with the algorithms to see results so there's three core pillars so the first one is grabbing attention grabbing attention you're able to rise above the noise because if you think about it if we can't get somebody to stop in the first 3 seconds to stop the scroll click the thumbnail and headline well we have no chance

attention with substance attracts the most value from your content we're not talking about clickbait here we're not talking about tricking people there actually has to be substance to the content and then the third is monetizing attention attention is monetized once or maximized once you monetize it now that's not saying every post should be selling something because we have to get people to know like and trust us first but there has to be a solid business foundation and business model on the back of it so these three things equate to viral marketing at scale and one

of the important things I want to just stress is I'm not talking about prank videos I'm not talking about silly cat videos or doing things that are against your brand or your subject matter because then that third third chord pillar would fall apart if we're just going viral off of content that's not related to our brand it's not going to translate into Roi and revenue so creating content that grabs and holds attention is your goal as a content creator now let's break down exactly how we do that mastering creating content that gets people to stop

scrolling and watch it longer than your competitor's content we do this by constantly creating content that performs up to the algorithm standard so again that we make the algorithms our partner because we're playing to their revenue goals so they will serve it to as many people as possible we've seen this time and time again we are the algorithm's product Facebook Instagram Tik Tok YouTube they're not Netflix they're not investing billions of dollars in original content we are their business model so they want to help us succeed in our experience of doing this since 2005 there's

really only one proven model for becoming an expert at creating content that the algorithm will love and this is our process so there's three elements to this process our viral content model a qualitative analysis for viral formats and our communication algorithm so let's dive into the viral content model so this is the frustrating thing that we find with creative if we look at any other in Industry like science or the the medical industry or even nutrition you're leveraging centuries of trial and error and data to advance the innovation in that specific field but when it

comes to content creation all those valuable data points are essentially thrown out the the window in the pursuit of originality why because most people think that originality funks or overcomes functionality and performance and it just doesn't you do not have to be extremely original as we go into this and to make matters worse the traditional creative model that most brands are following today is completely outdated so this is what we find in working with most companies the creative model that they're following they have brand guidelines typically they are very formal sometimes they're just in a

Google doc sometimes they're just in in in the head and those brand guidelines then dictate the ideas that we pursue the ideas that we pursue to try and go viral then typically it goes to monthly and quarterly content plans so we're batch producing content for the entire month the entire quarter and then we batch produce it and then post it and then if you do your reviewing results monthly or quarterly and then you start the process all over again the problem with this if you're trying to consistently go viral is it minimizes the impact on

data in research if we go back where does the data and research come in well there's no research in here and the data comes in at the end we're letting brand guidelines dictate everything it pushes content creators to chase Trends burn themselves out producing hundreds of pieces of content that underperform not achieving their goal and it's completely reactive there is no process in place for accountability for iteration for learnings on each piece of content produced and this is where your chances of going viral is highly dependent on luck and this is where most people are

failing in terms of really scaling Their audience and breaking through with content performance so what does work so this is the viral content model that we developed it starts with research and I'm going to actually walk you through an exercise today of how we actually do this research we're essentially looking at the larger social ecosystem to understand what is working what is not working so that we can identify what storytelling patterns or structures are best fit for our brand that will knock out a lot of time so when we come up with ideas those ideas

are based upon our learnings of what is working today and what is not working so we can knock out a lot of time a lot of energy a lot of resources wasted on producing 10 20 100 videos that we could have just already seen it wasn't going to work in the research phase and then another important part is s single production iteration this means we produce a single piece of content at a time why do we do this because we want to review the granular results we want to understand in our research did we understand

what was working did we live up to what the research told us because if you follow this model your content will not work for only two reasons one in the research you paid attention to the wrong things or two you just didn't execute the things proper l in what the research showed and again I'm going to break down what this means in terms of research in a little bit so why this works as I mentioned the foundation is based upon research it's not about our our affinities as creators of what we want to do obviously

we need to be passionate about the content we're creating but we're letting the data and the research guide us on what is the best way to express the message that we want to share with the world um it provides datab back competitive analysis that is required for consistent content breakthroughs and it avoids this common boardroom conversation that we see all the time is we have really smart people we have a lot of great ideas but nothing's breaking through what is wrong and as I mentioned a few times this significantly saves you a ton of money

a ton of time and a ton of resources because you're only producing content when you know the principles that are going to cause it to work so as I mentioned this model has been successfully applied to creating content that has generated 60 billion views and 100 million followers and I just want to point out that this has consistently worked for people with zero views and zero followers it's worked with Major Brands and celebrities as well but you don't have to be a major celebrity a brand a notable figure in order for this to work so

that's the massive opportunity for for all of us today so now I'm going to dive into our qualitative analysis of viral formats and what I want to do is Define the difference between a trend in a format because I'm sure a lot of people in this room have heard the word trend so a trend is a post or a topic or an idea that's hyped or popularized for a limited period of time so it has a limited shelf life versus a format is a storytelling structure that is designed to work for any subject matter and

it can last for years or decades I started my uh career in the film industry and if you think about any movie it uses the same 3x structure doesn't matter the genre action horror comedy drama sci-fi the past 80 years has been using this same format to create content so if you think about stepen Spielberg when he's making a movie he's not Reinventing the 3x structure because if he did he wouldn't be a master Storyteller so this is the simple truth about going viral it's mastering a single format going viral isn't about producing as much

cont content as possible the right hashtags the time a day how many times a day you you post it's about focusing your time and energy and resources on becoming worldclass at executing a single top performing format and you see this across the board with the top influencers and content creators in the planet if you look at a Mr Beast a Vox Vice magazine any of these companies they have mastered their format and they keep using it year after year after year because that allows them to become a worldclass storyteller let's dive into our research and

qualitative analysis so one of the big mistakes that we see people um doing is they're focused just on the quantitative meaning over the past decades Brands just really look at their views their likes their shares but that's simply not enough because it tells you whether something has worked or hasn't worked but it doesn't tell you why and that's what our process does is the why behind it so at hooko we spent we have a whole team of researchers and all we do on this research team is we research top performing formats to gleam these qualitative

insights so that our clients can have the consistent results breakthrough results so we're going to actually do this we're going to break this down so you can actually visually see this so there's hundreds of formats Out There Our team's probably done analysis of 150 different formats at this point it takes us about two days to do this process so this is an example of a format it's called the visual metaphor format so in this visual metaphor format there's three major elements there's an abstract or complex topic there's a visual representation of the topic with physical

objects and then there's a verbal explanation of the topic so we're going to watch a video from uh Dr Julie Smith this generated 9.3 million views this is on Tik Tok so if you think Tik Tok is just about teenage influencers dancing this is a clinical psychologist killing it on Tik Tok so let's watch an example of the visual metaphor format don't make this mistake when you're working on your own happiness imagine this is you and this is your life but like most people's lives there are problems that can make it toxic if a fish

is living in a toxic environment eventually it gets sick so you take her out of the dirty water and put her in a new tank for a while kind of like how you take a break you go on a holiday for a few weeks into a new environment and it helps everything gets better and feels great for a while until you return and go right back to that toxic situation again and it doesn't matter how clean the water was on your break or how refreshed you feel eventually you will get sick again if you want

to thrive in the long term you have to focus on cleaning up the environment that is affecting you every day I'm a psychologist follow for more so again this is an example of a storytelling format visual metaphors and there's hundreds of these formats across each platform so she's using an abstract or complex topic she's using a visual representation of that topic with physical objects and then she's explaining it but now we're going to do a fun little quiz exercise here so we're going to go through her content through our process our qualitative process and we

call this gold silver bronze so what we do is we look at a Creator like this look at the format that they're using and we put it in an Excel spreadsheet and what we do is we look at their highest performers their average performers and their low performers because most people would look at a successful content creator and just say oh I see what they're doing I'm just going to do that but if you just look at the successes you won't gleam the insights of what is actually driving the performance so we cross analyze the

high performer against the low performer to identify what is the difference in the way that she's telling these stories so what we're going to do now is I'm going to play two videos same Creator same format and what I want you to do is as you watch these think about which one performed best imagine this is you and these are all the bad things that happen to you so each one represents a memory of traumatic experiences that you've been through and as you go about your life the things seems like it's overflowing memories just keep

falling out when you don't want them to emotionally overwhelming you and you can't seem to focus on the rest of your life so what can we do about it well I'm a psychologist and this is what happens in trauma therapy first of all a therapist would gear you up with all the skills that you need to manage just how painful those memories can be and then you take one memory at a time carefully open it up at your own pace and allow you to process that memory and then you can neatly Fold It Up you

do the same with the next one and the next one until what you're left with is a neat little pile of memories that fit neatly at the bottom leaving you more capacity to focus on the life that you want to have today so that's the first one as you watch a second one just think about which one perform better imagine for a moment that you're stood in front of a busy road with traffic going both ways and each of those Vehicles represents a thought or a feeling coming in and out of your mind now you

might be like most other people and spend a good deal of your time in the middle of that road trying to direct the traffic there are some thoughts you want to hold on to right and there's others that you want to push away but doing that causes more stress because the traffic just keeps on coming now if I asked you to just step back from the curb and watch the traffic instead of trying to control it just allowing it to pass and watching as it goes that would be the process of mindfulness when you notice

that you're trying to hold on to certain thoughts and push others away see if you can step back from the traffic and let it pass okay great so let's see a show of hands how many of you think this one performed better okay great how many people think this one performed better okay well most of you got it right the one that was on your left generated 12 million views the one on the right generated 13,000 views now the important thing is this is the exact same Creator the exact same St storytelling format so what's

the difference so let's go through this qualitative analysis process well on the first one the high performer there is a clear visual story that involves manipulation of the object demonstrating the topic of the video she's actually manipulating the object in the papers in the trash bag versus in the underperformer there's just cars sitting there she's not doing anything with it she's not leveraging it she's not doing anything she's asking you to imagine it there's a clear tension in the high performer just having the basket on the screen overflowing subconsciously that's creating tension that's holding our

attention what is going to happen something's going to happen with this trash can I don't know what but I am going to do it and a lot of the stuff that we're talking about happens subconsciously happens within seconds then the potential energy within the first second the basket and pile of papers hint to the viewer that there will be some type of interaction with it versus with the cars there is no promise of interaction with those physical objects the high performer is very clever they're using everyday items in terms of paper and waste baskets something

that we use every day versus the other one not so clever there's just a bunch of toy cars that are sitting there on that so this is the process that we go through and identifying what's the difference between a high performer and a low performer that gives us Clues and indications of what is going to work when we try and tackle the same format now the interesting thing about this is I'm not talking about her content and what she's talking about this is all contextual this format could be used for any genre any industry she's

a clinical psychologist but the same visual metaphor format could be used for nutrition it could be used for Fitness it could be used for entertainment any type of Industry out there so this process that I just took you through is when we're analyzing content we look at over 50 different performance drivers and we typically dial it into like four or five of the most important ones so we look at visual elements storytelling elements delivery en environment facial cues body Expressions all that so we go super deep into this qualitative analysis This research that allows us

to truly understand what makes something go viral so another interesting thing that we have is the communication algorithm that I'm really excited to share with you today so it's based on a proprietary data set that we have access to of 1.5 million communication assessments done worldwide and what it shows us is that most content that Brands produce is connecting with less than 70% of their core target audience so they're only connecting with 30% of the people that they're trying to convince to to perform some type of action so this is causing Brands to lose millions

and millions of dollars whether it's paid or organic so our communication model turns communication into a mathematical formula and this is what it looks like but don't get overwhelmed I promise I'll break all of this down so there's six different ways that people perceive your content and brand today and you'll see these percentages next to each of them so the largest subset of the population is feeling based it's 30% so this subset of the population is going to connect with your brand buy your products or Services follow your account based on how it emotionally makes

them feel the second largest subset of the population is fact-based it's 25% it's not about how it feels for them they want it to make sense they want data information time frames who what when where why the third largest is fund based 20% so for them they just want to be stimulated they want excitement they want engagement with the content 10% is value based for them it's do I trust this brand do I believe in what they're saying are they dedicated to me as a consumer 10% is Imagination based they're reflective on the world so

the best analogy I could give you for that is Albert Einstein if you've ever read biographies on him he would stare out the window for hours on end reflecting on the world and everything that he was working on to come up with his best theories so these people like to take they like Direction given to them and then the smallest subset of the population 5% is action based so the best analogy I can give you is if anybody has seen Tom Cruz in Mission Impossible what is he doing he's not feeling he's not thinking he's

not believing he's running he's jumping off the side of airplanes buildings he's just going going going going so imagine this scenario you have your marketing director and you have your customer and on paper they look the exact same both female same age range High income earners University educated however if we look at their communication structure it's different so as you'll see there's different lengths of bars so the length of bar dictates their strength and the short of the bar dictates their weakness us as individuals we have access to all six different ways but we predominantly

communicate and create our content based upon how we perceive the world so in this instance the marketing director is perceiving the world through action remember action's 5% and the consumer that she's trying to connect with is feeling based so the marketing director will probably create content that is move fast get it now this is the best you're going to miss out versus the customer just wants to know how this product is going to make them feel so it's no fault of the marketing director because she doesn't have the level of awareness once you have that

level of awareness you can overcome this core problem most of us as content creators again are creating content based on how we perceive the world instead of the largest subset of the population as a result we're typically alienating a significant percentage of our core customer base by communicating just in the way that we like to communicate because the goal is how do we take it from inbalanced communication to balanc communication now if you want to do a fun little homework uh Pixar uses this in all their movies they don't talk about it so if you

watch one of their movies for example inside out with the the characters in the girls head they have designed a character for each different way that people perceive the world and that is one of the reasons that Pixar is so successful because you go into a Pixar movie and there's such a diverse audience there so having this level of balance in your communication your content allows you to go back to where we started of grabbing attention holding attention and monetizing attention with Clarity purpose and intent so just some quick case studies um as we wrap

up here to give you an example as I mentioned this works with people that have no social media experience so we worked with a lather Craftsman no social media experience 2,000 followers on Tik Tok and we took them through this process of doing the research understanding what would be the best format for him and we designed a format with him called is it worth it so he was a leather Craftsman very Niche multigenerational and in this format what we did is again it's called is it worth it he would buy a 500 Chanel handbag or

a PR handbag and he would deconstruct it on screen and tell you whether it was worth the money that you paid for it this simple format took him now he's over 850,000 follow on Tik Tok he's probably going to hit a million in like two months but it also was a massive translator into Revenue so he did no ctas in any of his content he just had a link in his bio and from that link he started generating 100,000 organic visitors a month sold out all of his inventory and it was so successful that he

actually created a subsequent business out of it so again you don't have to have the experience you just have to understand and follow this process um a vitamin supplement company that we worked with took them through the same process took one of their business lines from 10,000 a month to 8 million um brand new YouTube channel um one of the First videos generated 10 million views Instagram followers exploded and the most important thing is their revenue increased by over 30% so this is what we covered today as a wrap-up creating content isn't lock it is

a science we talked about understanding how the social media algorithms work how to make content the algorithms will love we talked about a simple truth to consistently going viral mastering a single format and we broke down our hooko viral content model so again content does not go viral when a Creator gets lucky content goes viral when the Creator understands the science behind virality so that's all I got for you today if you guys want to shoot the QR code I'll move out of the way and you can get access to the the slides we went

over today than you that was great thank you