Lessons learned from going viral on Instagram
Jul 13, 2025
My Instagram reel went viral. Here's what I learned. 📈
If you create content, chances are good every time you hit publish, you have dreams of the post going viral.
To specify, going viral means your content spreads throughout a social network and racks up a ton of views, comments, likes, saves, etc.
But is that really a good goal for your content?
And does going viral actually help your business?
Well, I had a post a couple weeks ago go viral and reach drastically more people than I normally do.
Here's what I learned...
The Reel: By the numbers. 📊
For reference, here's the reel that took off that we're discussing:
The viral reel was a video meme poking fun at the discrepancy between the two major jobs reports we got that month.
I used a clip of Dave Portnoy simply saying he has no words several times.
My caption was pretty neutral and primarily called out the confusion that comes from conflicting information like these reports.
And here are the major stats related to the reel (at the time of writing):
- Views: 308,077
- Accounts Reached: 223,841 (99.1% non-followers)
- Likes: 3,882
- Comments: 1,671
- Shares: 1,663
- Saves: 584
- New follows: 275
These stats are 100x my normal post.
Lessons For All of Us 🚀
Let's go over a few takeaways from this experience:
- 🤷♂️ The content that goes viral matters. Going viral on the wrong content doesn't really help your business.
Honestly, this reel got a lot of traction, but did very little to connect me with may target market: Realtors on Instagram. It was almost entirely random people who will never connect with my content or potentially be clients. Sure, I have 275 more followers, but odds are good they won't engage with my content beyond this reel. - 🎭 The internet feeds off extreme. Strong opinions or statements that create sides are more likely to go viral.
Even though I didn't put an extreme take in my caption, Instagram's algorithm figured out people would argue about the topic and pushed the content to people who likely have a track record of political arguments online. Also, many people were commenting directly to Dave Portnoy as if he made this post, which was an interesting phenomenon. The post was a topically timely, caused a lot of people to speak up with their opinions, and used a popular/polarizing person for the video. - 🎯 It's far better to create content for your target market than to create content for the masses in an attempt to go viral.
Given the option, I'd rather have a post really connect with 100 real estate agents in Northeast Florida that would interested in being part of my coaching group than hundreds of thousands of random people. Do you know who you want your content to reach? Going forward, be sure you're making content for the exact person you want to work with rather than trying to engineer something viral.
Obviously, going viral is better than the opposite, but most people probably put too much emphasis on trying to reach that outcome.
And it can be very easy if you get some traction like this to try to replicate the results by creating more divisive content to get views.
This is exactly what happens when people make a post that's negative about the real estate market or economy.
It gets fed into an echo chamber of negativity and the author loses all ability to think accurately because they're blinded by the views. Instead, they cherry-pick stats to make more content that creates fear, doubt, and conflict.
Then, the views pour in and they double down on the extreme takes until everything they put out says it's worse than 2008.
Unfortunately for them, that's far from actual reality.
And unfortunately for the public, they can't easily tell that it's not true.
So listen: going viral isn't all it's advertised to be.
If you can do it without losing your credibility, great!
But if you really want to use social media to grow your business, you'll be far better off defining your ideal client and making content that speaks directly to them.
Now, go out and connect with your people! 🚀
Dr. Alex Stewart
Founder
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