It's Time For You To Go Viral

Alright guys, there’s no denying it anymore.

Short-form videos are today’s coke.

People can’t get enough of them.

Especially if you do it right.

One video blows up and it puts you or your business on the map.

But here’s the catch.. 

It looks easy on paper but it’s actually hard to do.

Except if you’re Jenny Hoyos.

And mind you, she only has 1.63M subs on YouTube and she’s hitting those views like it’s nuthin!

It’s safe to say that Jenny has mastered short-form videos.

She’s cracked the algorithm. She is the algorithm.

And luckily for you, I’ve spent hours listening to her interview to condense every strategy she shared into one email.

Let’s start.

1. Study The Numbers

In the world of social media, you’re NGMI if you leave everything to luck or the algorithm gods.

That’s the loser’s way.

What you need to do is study your data.

And for you to get data, you need to post a ton of content.

Three videos aren’t enough. Five won’t cut it.

Try 20.

When Jenny did the quantity part, she now had enough data size to go deep into what was working and what wasn’t. 

Here’s her process:

• She finds her top-performing videos and then understands what makes them different from the low-performing ones. 

• She takes the same top videos and finds the common factors among them. She needs to know why it blew up.

• Study low-performing videos and go deep into why it’s not working.

An example…

Jenny uploaded a short on YouTube and got 50k views in 5 days. 

To some of us, that’s a win.

But to Jenny’s standard, it’s bad because on average she gets a million views at that point.

She looked under the hood and went to the retention graph. She noticed that at the last second of the video, there was a huge dip in retention – from 70% to 45%.

Knowing how that part is affecting her retention rate, she deleted that last second.

The result?

Retention went to 88% and the video got 18 million views.

The magic of studying the numbers.

2. Readability Matters

Jenny is a student of the game. 

She’s not playing to participate. She’s here to win.

Most of you look at shorts and think it’s the editing that made it viral.

Although there’s some truth to that, have you considered the auditory element of it?

Did you ever think that the reason why you watched an entire short is because the creator explained it so well?

Jenny did and has gone down that rabbit hole.

She studied the shorts of the biggest YouTubers and found one interesting fact:

Most viral shorts are at a 5th-grade readability.

This only tells us one thing – the more concise a script is, the higher the chance for virality.

So Jenny aims for the same readability as well.

You can use Hemingway Editor for this.

Fun fact: Most Mr Beast shorts are at a 1st-grade level.

3. The Structure For Viral Shorts

Have a strong hook.

If there’s one thing you should learn from that Connor Price piece, hooks are vital to make people watch your content.

For Jenny, a good hook is..

• Visually appealing

• Easy to understand

• An overall story that pushes the viewers

Think Visual First

The “visual” here is the first frame of the video.

That first frame is your hook.

See that GIF above?

Those are hooks/first frames from three shorts that went viral.

1.) Finds gold in dirt

2.) Uses Logan Paul

3.) Shows Chick-fil-A

Why did #1 work? It shows something the viewers haven’t seen.

How ‘bout for #2 and #3? Jenny showed a familiar place and brand.

To not show her face in the hook of those videos was carefully planned. She knew that showing Logan Paul or Chick-fil-A was going to hook people more since they knew those faces/logos more than her.

Easy To Understand

I tested Jenny’s top three viral shorts and placed them on Hemingway.

And lo behold, the readability was at Grade 5 or lower.

4. Set the viewer’s expectation

Jenny reveals that her videos go viral because of good viewer expectations.

She added that having a twist works well on videos too.

In essence, the video unfolds like this:

WHY → EXPECTATION → TWIST

Let’s see this in play (only 40 seconds of your life):

Let’s break it down:

It might look simple but it’s a good enough structure that pushes your viewer to watch until the very end.

Don’t Drop These Gems💎

• Study your numbers. Find what’s working and what’s not.

• Aim for 5th grade or lower readability.

• Make your hook visually appealing or make it something they haven’t seen or read before.

• Don’t be boring. Use tension, conflict, curiosity, or rising action to make the audience excited.