Virgin America is Taking Social Media to The Next Level! (PART 1: Branded Viral Video)

Virgin America is taking social media to the next level. Recently, the brand has found a way to keep its travellers aware of the flight-safety guide using a video. The video was a great success, and received 4 million views in just a few days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtyfiPIHsIg

So how this flight-safety guide video went viral in just a few days?

The video is unique. Since 2007, Virgin America has started to make flight-safety guide through a funny animation video, and has became the first company in airline industry who used branded viral video. Being the first among the others benefits Virgin America to be the leader or the benchmark of branded viral video in the airline industry. Thus, making Virgin America a tougher competitor.

It is also an interesting, entertaining, and fun way to inform passengers about the flight safety guide by using catchy music and presenting cool dance moves in the video while informing the flight safety guide through the lyrics. From Hip Hop genre to Pop genre to Broadway genre all are in the video.

Not only it is interesting, but the video is also engaging. As you can see through the video, Virgin America is not really targeting the video to specific audience. It is clearly that they are trying to target this video to every customer, from children to elders. Through this visual video, Virgin America is trying to engage to all this diverse age groups. To engage more, Virgin America also use humour in some scene of the video. In fact, being funny or humourous is the most successful creative strategy for viral videos.

According to one of the Forrester report, celebrity might not be the main cause of videos going viral. However, in this Virgin America case, I believe that using famous or known artists had helped the video to go viral. The first time I knew this video is not from the official Virgin America YouTube channel. Instead, I knew this video from Todrick Hall’s YouTube channel. He used to be in American Idol show. You can also spot most of the Step Up casts dancing in the video.

Having to analyze the video attributes carefully, it is not surprising that this flight-safety guide video from Virgin American can go viral just in a few days. Although most travellers know the safety guide, Virgin America is making this “boring” guide into an interesting video, triggering people want to share this video to their friends.