Posted 01.25.2012 @ 8:51 pm by Brittany L.
647 views 7
Okay, so I’m not really an internet superstar, but I did recently make a video with friends that “went viral” (I guess I am kind of a big deal). It all started one night, sitting at home curled up with my cats, drinking wine and watching House Hunters on HGTV. I was chatting with one of my other single friends about the wildy popular “Shit Girls Say” video. My friend says, “We should make a ‘Shit Single Girls Say’ video” and we instantly start to rattle off all of the ridiculous/sad/pathetic things we’ve said to each other over the past two years. Then, a quick text to one of our funny male friends and it was set – we were making this happen!
We had a small “production meeting” soon after, picked out locations, wardrobe, and made shot lists. We planned to meet at 8am on a SATURDAY morning. A SATURDAY morning during CHRISTMAS BREAK. That’s how excited we were about making this video.
The whole video took about 4 hours to shoot, and about 8 hours to go through the footage, trim it down, and fine-tune it. We uploaded it on a Monday night, posted links on Facebook and Twitter, asked people to share, then we waited.
Thanks to friends sharing the link, we reached a couple hundred hits within an hour or so. I quickly developed the habit of checking the view count every few hours and immediately when I woke up in the morning. On the 2nd morning I sent an email to my video making partners titled “30100 – that’s not a zip code”. We had already received over 30,000 hits in less than 48 hours. I submitted the link to popular sites like BuzzFeed and StumbleUpon. Someone (a stranger) posted it on Reddit. It was linked to on the Huffington Post, reblogged a couple thousand of times on Tumblr, and showed up on countless other blogs. It made #3 on Adult Swim’s Internet Treasures the week it came out. Random people were making animated gifs. We kept hearing things from our friends like “one of my friends from New York just posted it on Facebook!” and “Wait, YOU did this?!” Yep, we did. The view count kept climbing. 9 days after we uploaded the video, the video hit a million views. At the time I am writing this, 21 days after uploading, we are at 3.5 million views.
I’m not dropping all of these facts to brag (I mean it is pretty awesome), but to point out how powerful social media is. We made a hilarious video but a lot of people make hilarious videos and not all of them get millions of hits. It thankfully caught on, and now I’m set for LIFE!
…Not really.
