A Youtube video entitled, “How Old Are Your Ears?” broke 6 million views in only 2 months.

Why do you think this is?

Were 6 million people actively searching for the answer about ear age?  Did people click on it because it was suggested to them on Youtube’s homepage?

Perhaps, but a more likely scenario is that the a few people watched it and shared it via their social media accounts and it quickly went viral.

Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have become the newest outlets for marketers and businesses to share their message with others.  The potential traffic is incredible, but it’s the ability to engage users that makes social media such a viable option for entrepreneurs.

Let’s look at this logically.  We’ll begin by using Facebook as our model.

There are over 1 billion active Facebook users worldwide.  Of those 1 billion, 76% of those users log in every single day (sometimes up to 20 times or more).  There was a study posted in 2012 that calculated that the average Facebook page has 229 friends.  Personally, I believe this estimate to be rather conservative, but for the sake of this article, we’ll go with it.

Now, suppose you post your brand new video to your business Facebook page and will appear in the news feeds for your 229 friends to see.  Of those friends that watched it, just 5 people shared it on their page because they like your brand.  Your video now has the potential to be on 1145 other people’s news feeds (5 people X avg of 229 friends each).  Out of those 1245 people, just 10 people decide to share your video and suddenly the amount of people that potentially see your video is is 2290.

So with just one posting and 2 rounds of shares, your video is exposed to a few thousand people from just a few hundred.

What’s scary is this could feasibly be done within a few hours of time.  The video you posted less than a day ago, using extremely moderate estimates, could draw more viewers from being posted on your social media site than anywhere else…

PLUS, you generated that much traffic without spending a single penny!

It’s fairly easy to assume that Twitter would produce the same results as our Facebook example or possibly even better.   There are over 500 million active users.  According to research provided by Emarketer, a market research company that specializes in digital marketing, of those 500 million plus users, 40% of them do not actually post.

This may seem like bad news as you’d want people tweeting your video, however, it shows that almost half of all Twitter users are rabidly following their favorite Twitter feeds.  If you have an audience built up, this will surely guarantee that your followers will actively view your video.

There is no surefire way to receive views for your video, but through the use of social media, the likelihood of your newly created video going viral increases exponentially.  After all, social media was created with the intent for users to engage with one another.  This includes sharing thoughts, ideas, and content that they found interesting, funny, or choose to support.

All it takes is a few friends to share with a few friends who share with a few friends to spark an entire chain of events that leads to your video receiving as many hits as the silly video about ears that I mentioned earlier.

There is no better free marketing tool in your repertoire for posting videos than social media.

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