As a UGC’er I have one ground rule: “if it goes viral once, repeat it a thousand times”.
Something I like to do to find viral videos is look at other UGC creators, and during the summer Cluely was hard to miss. They just hired a huge team of creators and were pushing new UGC formats out en masse.A big opportunity that I, of course, couldn’t let pass.
So let me explain how I used their content as inspiration, successfully created my own videos based on their format and how you can use this strategy for infinite viral video ideas.
A quick rundown about Cluely
The AI startup Cluely was basically founded on virality. When one of the founders, Roy Lee, used his newly created AI tool to ‘cheat’ his way through job interviews he got expelled from University, tweeted about it and blew up on X. From then on he went all in on Cluely, an AI assistant for meetings.
Past summer Katie Xu (@katiexsocials on X), the head of marketing at Cluely, started a huge UGC campaign, hiring around 100 creators. Each creator had a 30 day trial, needing to hit certain milestones to stay for a longer term.
Katie describes how with only one format they managed to hit their first 50 millions views on socials, which is exactly the format I decided to copy.
Finding viral videos
Cluely’s UGC campaign was REALLY hard to miss. They were literally all over social media. I remember tweeting:
Since the campaign started I had followed as many of their creators as I could on Instagram and kept up with their progress. Looking at what type of videos they were posting, what hooks they were using, which videos were going viral but most importantly: which videos were going viral on multiple different accounts. Those videos were my gold. Not only did they go viral once, I had proof that they could go viral for other creators too.
Creating your own version
During the campaign I noticed Cluely’s target audience consisted primarily of students so their audience was quite different from mine (professionals). And besides that, I had slight doubts about the conversion rate of their videos which was later confirmed by Roy in a blog post*. He explained that some of their most viral videos did not end up converting people to download and use their tool. It was clear that some tweaks were needed to apply their viral format for our own tool Ultimate Web Scraper.
The first thing I did was identify some of the main elements in their video format, which consisted of:
- Brief face reaction, then demo of the tool
- Catchy gen z vibe hook with emojis
- Environmental sound & talking by the UGC’ers (no music or TikTok sounds)
Now that I had the building blocks, I got to work. What I kept most and foremost was the ‘vibe’ of their videos which was curiosity driven and casual without much editing. I liked the environmental sound, and chose to talk in the videos as the Cluely creators were doing. Plus I used the emojis they put in their hooks.
What I had to change were the hooks themselves. They did not suit our tool so copying them one-to-one would have made no sense. I came up with some of my own hooks that applied to what I was doing in my videos.
Finally, I used the ‘face reaction and then demo’ video flow. But instead of only showing a small feature very shortly, as the Cluely creators were doing, I did a more in depth demo of our tool, lingering longer on our main features to help with conversion.
All in all I kept the format very similar and primarily altered the elements needed to successfully showcase our product. It worked! With the inspiration from the Cluely format, and the tweaks to suit our tool I managed to create multiple viral videos both on TikTok and Instagram.
Infinite video ideas
The best thing about this strategy is that you can apply it over and over again! Old formats go out of style, and new ideas pop up. The important thing is that you keep your eyes open for when they do and don’t hesitate to try them out when you think a format has potential.
I apply this strategy constantly. It helped me get over 30 million views and is very scalable. You can even copy yourself plenty of times before your audience gets format fatigue 😉
So, now it’s your turn to do some doom scrolling and get inspired by a good format!!
Good luck 🙂
Floor
Leave a Reply