Studying Your Own Trends
It is important to study your competition, but it is even more important that you study your own video trends. Analytics, the science of studying and analyzing data to make decisions based on data analysis is a vital component in getting your video message to go viral.
Who is watching? Where? What comments are being made? All these data bites can help you build better videos and marketing campaigns.
Video Analytics
You can spend a lot of time watching video statistics across multiple video publishing platforms, (and uploading videos to multiple sites), or you can use one of the many services or software applications that can aggregate information into one convenient source.
A great place to start is with TubeMogul, a free service that provides a single point for uploading your videos to reach top video sharing sites. Their free service level allows deployment of up to 100. Their free analytics provide data on who, what, and how videos are being viewed, as well as per-second audience dropoff.
TubeMogul also publishes a list of videos submitted through their site that make the top 40. Top videos on TubeMogul are getting hundreds of millions of views (as of 01/17/2010, the #1 video is fast approaching 1 billion views.)
List of 10 Video Distribution Services to Try – and Some to Avoid.
Study Viral Video Trends
Study videos making "hot" lists on video publishing sites. Try to figure out what is trending (because you may never understand why>.) Look at thumbnails, titles, and content. Are there any common threads? Do certain keywords, images, or subject material keep appearing? This information can serve as an important tool in deciding what to include in your own videos – or, in how to present them.
Viral Viral Video Chart lists the top 20 viral videos. Included in data they provide are the number of views, blog posts, comments, tweets, and duplicate videos. Viewing statistics are showed in chart format so you can watch how each video is trending (including five day averages.)
AdAge’s digital section discusses trends and hot viral marketing videos. You need to create an account and purchase credits (or subscribe) to read the full articles, but they are usually meaty enough to warrant a paid subscription.
Tip: Many of AdAge’s articles come up in Google cached pages so you can view them for free. Google: “site:adage.com top video charts” and click through on search results to view them for free.
