How To Make Any Short Go Viral · Contentpreneurship.com (FREE)

Wessel Koorn

Nov '23 in General

How To Make Any Short Go Viral

And how you can do the same with these 5 simple steps:

1. What makes a good short

2. Coming up with hooks

3. Story that pushes you through

4. Brainstorming ideas

5. Improving performance

This is the exact framework Jenny Hoyos uses for her Shorts, she has done over 600 million views in the last year alone, averaging 10M view per video.

## What Makes a Good Short

**Storytelling**

Tell a story with a twist. Make it personal, your “why” gets people invested. A good way to add a twist is to incorporate some irony.

**Ingredients of a Good Short**

- Strong hook to grab attention

- Foreshadow to set the expectation

- Transition to give people time to breathe

- The problem/solution/story you want to tell

## Coming Up with Hooks

**What Defines a Strong Hook**

- So good it can be used as title and thumbnail for long-form

- Can be understood without audio

- Very easy to comprehend (can be told to a 5 year old)

**Rules of Thumb**

- As if it was for long-form, decide what the “title” and “thumbnail” are.

- The visual part of the hook (the first frame of the video) is the most important. Figure this out first and then decide how to accompany that.

- A consistent first frame helps for bingeability - they know it’s you when they see that frame.

- What you’re saying should be as concise as possible, put it in a readability checker. It should be understandable to at least 5th grade or under.

**Inspiration From Other Creators**

To get started, or to try new things out, you can get inspiration from other creators. To copy other peoples hook, just ask the question “What would it sound like if ___ made this video?”. Do this for your top 10 creators, make a bunch of hooks per creator, pick your favorites and test them out.

## Story That Pushes You Through

**Setting Expectations**

To keep people interested till the end they need to have a good expectation of what they’re going to watch and what there’s going to be at the end. You set the expectation in the foreshadow. A couple examples:

Hook: “My mom’s never had a Mother’s Day gift. - So I’m gonna change that”

Foreshadow (expectation): “and buy her the best present with $5.”

Visual hook: Teasing giving the present to her mom, not knowing what’s inside the box.

Hook: “McDonalds BANNED this item.”

Foreshadow: “So I’m gonna make it at home to convince them to put it back on the menu.”

Visual hook: The banned item she cooked in front of McDonalds.

The hook and foreshadow are usually 2 sentences long at last about 3 seconds.

**Sense of Progress**

Besides giving the viewer an expectation, it’s also important they have a sense of progress and where they are in the video. The most simple way to do this is the 3 step framework. In the foreshadow you state the 3 steps that need to be done, and you just go down that list so the viewer knows exactly how far they’re away from the solution.

**Transition**

Short form is very action packed and dense with information. When transitioning from the hook/foreshadow to the body you want to give a pacing break without the pace actually breaking. For the McDonald’s example above, a bad transition would be “Let’s get started” because this breaks the pace. Instead use something like “So I cooked ILLEGALLY”.

**Body**

After the transition your main part of the video comes, the problems/solution/story you want to tell. If you’re telling a story you can use “but-therefore storytelling” to make it more interesting (”I went for a walk BUT it started raining, THEREFORE I needed to run home..”).

## Brainstorming Ideas

**Ways To Come Up With Ideas**

1. Watch other videos for inspiration that you want to recreate or twist

2. Ask yourself “What video do I want to watch?”

3. Ask AI / ChatGPT

4. Write down ideas that come from your lived experiences - these are usually the best ideas

Knowing your audience is very important. When brainstorming ideas, keep your client avatar in mind and try to think about a specific persona who you’re creating the video for.

**Distilling It Down**

Once you have a bunch of ideas you need to distill these down, you can do this with the following steps:

Let’s say you have 100 video ideas but only time to make ten of them. Narrow it down to 25-50 by asking:

- Do I want to make this?

- Is this logistically possible?

- Is the hook good?

- Is the story good?

- Are people going to rewatch this?

To get to the final 25:

- Where is the virality in this?

To get to 10:

- Get some outside perspective. Maybe your editor or someone else who knows your content very well. Ask them if they think it will go viral and if it’s shareable.

## Improving Performance

Here are some metrics to look out for when analyzing content. You’ll learn the most from analyzing your own videos.

**Retention Rate**

Retention rate is the percentage of watch time divided by the amount of people that opened your video. So if one person watched your video for 100%, your retention rate is 100%. If one person watched for 100% and one watched for 0%, retention rate is 50%. If one person watched your video 3 times, retention rate is 300% (it can go above 100%).

**Looping**

The average scroll-through rate (percentage of people who viewed vs swiped away) on YouTube is 70% (hers is 85%). Her average retention rate is 95%, which can only happen when people rewatch it. For a video to blow up, they need to rewatch it again.

Shoot for an 90% retention rate.

**Video Length**

Every second counts. She had one video that performed really badly (50k views vs usually 1M) and noticed that there was a big dip in retention (25%) in the last second (83% retention overall). She removed that one second, and the retention went to 88%. The video went viral.

Her average video length is 34 seconds, because her most popular videos are exactly that length. It’s different for everyone so analyze your video and test out what works best for your audience.

Virality = video length * retention, so if a video is shorter it needs higher retention. From her findings, if a Short is less than 30 seconds, it needs to have more than 100% retention. That’s why she likes to make them slightly longer. But not too long because she has a relatively young audience.

**Shareability**

It’s important that people share your content, which is an indicator to the algorithm to get it in front of more people.

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Like if you’re keen to see more posts related to this ✌️ If you’re interested in ChatGPT prompts to help you create these Shorts let me know in the comments!

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