YouTube offers businesses the ability to connect meaningfully with their audience and build an engaged base of customers and prospects. The video sharing website has never been more popular. Today, over three billion hours of videos are watched per month, with an additional 300 hours of videos being added each minute. Yet, out of all the videos uploaded to YouTube, only a very small percentage generate more than a few hundred views; and only an elite few of those ultimately end up going viral.
The reason that some gain significantly more views than others is often down to the nuances of how they are presented. The audio of the video can be more telling than simply looking at the images flickering before you. By truly listening to what is being said, including the tone and context found between the simple lines of speech, channel owners can predict which videos will be ignored and which will become top of the viral charts.
Even if your video has top-notch production value, this doesn't guarantee an audience. In our experience, videos containing strong emotions on one side of the scale or the other - such as excitement, enthusiasm, fear or disgust - have more potential to reach a large audience than videos that contain emotions such as panic or boredom. Having a video that is based on strong positive or negative emotions means that it will garner the most social interaction through comments and sharing.
Put simply, enthusiasm is contagious. This is, perhaps, typified most by the hugely popular unboxing or haul videos. Whilst it is simply a video where the audience watches someone open a box, the person is generally very excited about the content.
It is not a case of what is spoken, but how it is spoken. In the future, savvy businesses should run an automatic emotion classifier on their videos prior to uploading them into the ether. The natural successor to the speech recognition technology we have seen vastly improve on our mobile devices during the last decade; the technique for applying automatic emotion recognition is becoming increasingly popular in many businesses applications such as customer satisfaction analysis, call centres optimisation, targeted advertising, and automated media classification.
By applying automatic emotion classification, YouTubers will be able to ascertain how positively the video is likely to be perceived by the audience and how much potential it has to turn viral. This way, they can maintain the brand they are trying to purvey and ensure that they are expending energy and marketing dollars in the right areas.
In 2017 for a video to become successful, it should offer the right content and hit the correct emotional sweet spots. Further, for the maximum chance of your video going viral, make sure the emotional classifiers that are identified are clearly highlighted in the text that accompanies that video, so that it will come up in YouTube's search feature or a Google search.
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