If this title sounds awfully familiar, you’re not imagining things. Yes, we did just create a Twitter SEO post 2 weeks ago. No, we haven’t run out of ideas – we’re doing an experiment. As luck would have it, a comment on the older post raised a great question; I’ll include it here.

“Most videos go viral on accident (often at the complete surprise of the maker of the video). The idea that one is going to “create a viral video” is unrealistic. That being said, thanks for offering these ideas on how better promote videos on hope that they *may* go viral.” – Dan from BlueClover.com.

Question: is it possible to engineer a viral video, and can Twitter be used to facilitate the spread of the epidemic?

Partial answer: it appears that if you throw enough money at video production and market research, you can develop something that will predictably spread on its own. I put together a Hub about viral video for business this past Sunday consisting of videos produced by big brands like Honda and Coca-Cola. It’s debatable as to whether these videos can be truly considered “viral,” since their sponsors no doubt invested in a “push” to get them going. It hardly matters; a small business owner can’t cut a big enough check to duplicate this strategy anyway.

There are two sides to this equation. Take the recent case of self-published author Amanda Hocking, whose books have skyrocketed in sales these past 2 months. “Everybody seems really excited about what I’m doing and how I’ve been so successful, and from what I’ve been able to understand, it’s because a lot of people think that they can replicate my success and what I’ve done,” she says in her 3/3 blog post. Later in the same post, she notes that people seem to think she “spent a weekend smashing out some words, threw it up online, and woke up the next day with a million dollars in [her] bank account.” In case you’re wondering how Hocking pulled off an overnight success, she didn’t. “This is literally years of work you’re seeing. And hours and hours of work each day,” she comments.

Hocking’s case seems to indicate two things:

1. If you persist long enough to fail at viral marketing enough times, you’ll eventually succeed (just like anything else).
2. Once you succeed, everyone will try to figure out how to instantly reproduce your results.

What does Twitter bring to the table for SEO?

And how does this affect viral marketing?

If you tweet and re-tweet enough times, can you make something go viral? As far as I can tell, points #1 and #2 above still apply, and Twitter doesn’t change either of them. Twitter does carry a heavy weight with the search engines, and the SEO boost from a high number of re-tweets can boost a video that’s already gone viral. However, neither of these things will make a video viral if it isn’t already.

SEOMoz ties it all together perfectly with two case studies that they did. They did the first Twitter SEO case study in 2010. They asked their users to either tweet one page, or post a link to another page, and they measured which one ranked higher. They found that the “tweeted” page ranked higher for the tested terms, but admitted that the results were not conclusive due to the high number of variables involved.

More recently, SEOMoz also wrote about an “unexpected case study” about the SEO effect of Twitter. The story is similar to Hocking’s, albeit on a tiny scale by comparison. They were surprised to find a high number of re-tweets about their SEO guide one morning when it had been covered by an online magazine. The guide climbed in the rankings for the search term “beginner’s guide” throughout the week, which yielded a sustained increase in keyword traffic. This isn’t the sort of thing they could have predicted or forced.

If you’re a business owner and you want to make viral videos, how do you do it? The bad news is that your first few (or first few hundred) videos probably won’t go viral. When you finally do succeed, you probably won’t understand why. The good news: there are a few Twitter SEO practices that will help you raise your odds of success if you start implementing them consistently.

If you’re excited about something and have a burning desire to make videos about it, the world will share your enthusiasm. If you’re trying to make a quick buck on viral marketing, do yourself a favor and go find something else to do.