How do you make a video go viral is a question that has been tossed around quite a bit since the advent of video outlets such as YouTube. I am a Co-Founder at Givit and recently had a video go viral on YouTube and decided to share my experience. The video was of San Diego State University star basketball player Jamaal Franklin doing what people are considering the dunk of 2013 and possibly the dunk of the century.

The story goes I was sitting at home watching the SDSU basketball game against Fresno State, which was a close nail biter of a conference game, not to mention SDSU was ranked 15th in the nation and Fresno was unranked. Then it happened the SDSU star player Jamaal Franklin had a fast break with three defenders on him, and while running full speed he threw up a Alley-oop from the three point line against the backboard, leaping into the air like a long jumper and catching it for a slam dunk through three Fresno state defenders.

I couldn’t believe my eyes, so immediately I rewound my DVR and whipped out my iPhone and using Givit recorded the dunk on my TV. Using Givit within about 1 minute edited a instant replay slow motion effect and posted it to YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. I started seeing immediate views! And as I write this 1.5 days later have 132,006 views of my 17 second Givit video on YouTube. The video was embedded on Sports Illustrated, LA Times, the Union Tribune, and a slew of other sites.

Link to Video: http://youtu.be/0-stx17fY-I

So some key points I learned:

1) Have a App like Givit ready on your iPhone to capture an amazing event, Givit works great because you can edit and add effects combining multiple clips in minutes.

2) Share it to all your social media sites, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Google+ etc…

3) After sharing to YouTube make sure you have a good title but more importantly for searches YouTube cares most about the Description Section, even more then Tags. So make sure your description has good key words that you think people will search with.

4) Upload your video as soon as the event happens, when the buzz goes out people will start searching for it immediately and the person with the most plays gets the viral effect, later videos of the same event will seem not as good just from the play count number.

5) Add effects to your video to make it better then the others that will follow, with Givit I used the slow motion instant replay effect

I am by no means a expert at creating viral videos, however what I wrote above is all it took for me to have a popular video that has 130K views in 1.5 days and is on track to get 300K views in the next several weeks.

Phil