The traditional core tenants of what leads to a videos virality are:

• Hook - Initiate immediate curiosity gap

• Retention Architecture - Is the video engineered beyond the first 3 seconds to keep watch time high? Viewing the entire video is the #1 determining factor of whether it gets pushed to a wider audience

• Shareability > Rewatchability - Although both are great, 5 views from 5 people is a wider reach than 5 views from 1 person

• Audio Visual Cues - Native audio gets preferential treatment on platform, and classic retention editing tricks do lead to increased reach

• Specificity - Content that knows who it’s talking to or made for a specific archetype / community consistently outperforms attempts at mass market appeal

While I know you know all of that, there’s few elements I personally believe are undervalued when designing for reach: Authenticity, Absurdity, & Humor.

It is possible to go viral without any of these elements, but I’d argue these are more important than any of the 5 bullet points above.

• Authenticity - With how much content the average viewer consumes now, everyone’s BS detector has gotten extremely good. Authenticity = Trust. If it feels like the video is true to that person or brands voice, that will open the door for the viewer to watch longer, and if it seems forced or inauthentic, that video will typically die on the spot.

• Absurdity - People don’t typically go on social media to get lectured, so the more ridiculous the video is, the better. Fun, silliness & absurdity I believe directly correlates to share-ability.

• Humor - People want to laugh. Humor is often coupled with absurdity but in a vacuum, if the video can make you smirk or chuckle it has an significantly better chance of wider reach.

I believe architecting these three elements into videos is just as important if not more than the “traditional” rules.