These 4 measurements determine if your video goes viral or not

1. Retention

The first measurement is retention. How many percent of all viewers that watch your entire video from start to finish. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and similar platforms roughly function in the same way. Their goal is to show viewers the best and most interesting videos possible. How do they determine what makes a good video or not? The first thing the app can technically measure is how long you capture the viewer's attention. If the viewer gives you their attention, it must mean you are doing something right. Therefore, the number of people who watch your entire video, or the retention rate, is the first important metric. The goal is for all viewers to watch from the beginning to the end. Imagine that you post a video that is 10 seconds long, but everyone stop watching at 5 seconds. In that case, you have not succeeded in holding the viewers' interest, and half of the video is wasted because no one watches it. All apps show a graph in their analytics tools indicating how long people watch your video. By studying that graph, you can understand why viewers stop watching and try to improve for your next video.

2. Engagement

Watching the entire video is not enough. Viewers must also interact. For example, by liking, commenting, or sharing the video. Picture this. If you post a video that says "here you will see the craziest thing you have ever seen", and then nothing happens and the video ends. Then many viewers will probably watch the entire video. But is it a good video? No. The viewers were left disappointed. They wasted their time. We see that retention is not enough. You must have engagement as well. Engagement means that the viewer interacts with the video in some way. It can be visible engagement, such as liking the video, writing a comment, or maybe sharing it. But also engagement that is not visible to you as a creator. For example, the user clicks on your profile and watches your other videos, or they expand the caption to the video and carefully read through it. Engagement is something you can rarely fake your way to, so focus on creating genuine and interesting content, and your engagement will increase.

• Likes
• Comments
• Shares
• Number of people who read your caption
• Number of people who visit your profile
• Many more...

3. Target group size

The number of views also depends on how large your target group is. A video about for instance gardening tips cannot get as many views because the target group is small. A video about something funny you saw on the street has a larger target group and can get lots of views. It may sound obvious, but sometimes you forget about the size of the target group when studying your statistics and wondering why the video did not get more views. If your video is in Swedish, the target group is at most 10 million Swedes, but if only 1 million Swedes use TikTok that same week that you publish your video, you have already slimmed down your target group and your views ceiling is 1 million views. Let's say that you talk about a quite niche topic, then it decreases even more. Therefore, remember that if a video gets, for example, 30,000 views it could still be 100% viral if your target group size was only 30,000 people. In that scenario, you reached everyone in the video's target group. By analyzing your videos and considering how you can make them more interesting for a broader target group, you can increase your target group size and potentially get more views.

4. Subject longevity

The last measurement is the subject's longevity. How long the subject of your video is interesting. A selfie of yourself only lives for a few days. While if you teach something, the video can live and be relevant for several years. Is your subject something that will be interesting next week? Next month? Next year? Many people have seen their views on platforms like TikTok stop at a few thousand views the first days, and then a few weeks or months later, they suddenly get a lot more views. This is due to the subject's longevity. The longer the longevity of your subject, the better. Content with low longevity is often linked to a current trend or something that will be replaced by other similar content tomorrow. If your video is about a trend, for example a certain filter that is trending on TikTok, the trend will die out and the views will stop. Or if you for example provide a recipe for a pasta dish, there will be a new recipe for another pasta dish tomorrow. But if you were to make something more unique that stays relevant it could live much longer. So things you can do to increase your longevity is to choose a subject that lasts over time, but also focus on being unique and posting content that not as many others talk about.

5. Summary

The four measurements that determine if a video goes viral or not are retention, engagement, target group size, and longevity. You can optimize retention by planning and editing your video correctly. You achieve engagement by creating content that resonates with your target group. If you also plan ahead to broaden your target group and longevity, you have a great chance of ending up going viral. In upcoming articles we explain in detail how to improve and optimize the four measurements to maximize your chances of going viral.