Red Bull, YouTube, and a 120,000 ft Free-fall
By: Chloe Rolph
October 12, 2012 | Reading Time: 2 mins
In case you’ve been hiding under a rock and haven’t heard about the Red Bull Stratos Jump here’s the Red Bull Stratos Jump in a Nutshell (courtesy of Pandemic Labs, because we could have explained it too, but they nailed it)…
- Put dude in fancy new space suit.
- Put dude in a little box.
- Hook box to a super-cool weather balloon and let go.
- Watch as balloon floats towards space.
- Once the balloon is 23 miles (120,000 feet) above the earth, dude opens box and JUMPS OUT!
- Dude falls back towards earth and (hopefully) becomes the first person to break the sound barrier with his body.
- (This is the important one) Dude survives.
Why do we care?
Since we know videos are shared 12 times more often than links and text updates combined, we think it’s awesome that Red Bull has leveraged this to make a wicked YouTube channel. They’ve used their strong subscriber base to help spread the Stratos jump videos, and they have spread like wildfire.
Fun fact #1: When we started researching the Stratos jump on Monday, Red Bull had about 604,000 subscribers. Four days later, they surpassed 645,000!
Fun fact #2: They got the attention of their followers who then got to talking about it… 200,000+ live viewers later, the Stratos jump hashtag #livejump trended on Twitter without Red Bull forking over a dime.
Why should you care?
Red Bull does it right. Now we’re not saying you have to have a huge marketing budget to find success for your business or brand on YouTube, but you can certainly take a few of these scaled-down tips:
- Post videos that people will care about. It is cool? Helpful? Entertaining? Educational? Solve a problem, fill a need, or entertain someone for a few minutes and they’ll come back for more.
- Post videos that people enjoy watching. Reelseo.com says, “You don’t have to be the next Spielberg, but your videos should be professional and easy to watch. Shaky hand-held camera work, poor audio quality, bad lighting or lack of coherence in the story all lead to viewers changing the virtual channel”
- Post videos often… For two reasons, 1) To keep current followers engaged and happy, always with fresh content to browse and, 2) To give new followers a reason to subscribe, because people who click that “Subscribe” button want to know they can expect to see the latest and greatest from you.
Other companies can learn from Red Bull without sending a man 120,000 feet into space and hoping that he freefalls right back safe and sound. You just have to post great stuff, post often, and find a great way to use the hard-earned attention you have just grabbed to get people talking.
