Stop Trying to Make Your Brand Go Viral

There seems to be an ongoing belief that the ultimate achievement for any brand on social media is to go viral. Not simply to create good content, build an audience or become more recognisable, but to have one piece of content suddenly escape the confines of its usual audience and be seen by millions of people who, in many cases, have absolutely no idea who you are or what you do.

And I understand the appeal. Watching a post that normally gets a few thousand views suddenly climb into the hundreds of thousands is exciting. Then it hits a million and everyone starts refreshing the Insights tab as though the fate of the business depends on it. The follower count starts moving, the notifications keep coming and, sooner or later, someone says the inevitable:

‘We need to do more of this!’

I've had that conversation plenty of times. The problem is that ‘this’ is rarely as easy to identify as everyone would like it to be.

Was it the subject? The format? The timing? The sound? The first three seconds? Was it actually any of those things, or did the internet simply decide it liked you that day?

This is where I think brands can get themselves into trouble. Going viral is treated as though it is a strategy, when in reality it is usually an outcome. You can create the conditions for something to travel, but there is no reliable formula for making millions of strangers care about your Reel.

If there were, we'd all be doing it…

The Audience Matters More Than the Number

A million views is an impressive number. There is no point pretending otherwise. But numbers on their own don't tell you very much.

Imagine you run a premium skin clinic in Edinburgh and one of your Reels suddenly reaches two million people. Brilliant. Except your biggest new audience is 18–24-year-olds in Manchester, most of whom will never visit your clinic, aren't looking for the treatments you offer and have followed because they enjoyed a funny video.

You've technically succeeded at reaching a huge audience, but you've potentially moved further away from the audience your business actually needs.

I've seen versions of this happen over and over. A post performs far beyond expectations and everyone gets excited about the reach. Then you look at where that reach came from, who followed, what happened to engagement afterwards and whether it generated anything beyond a very satisfying screenshot. Sometimes, the answer is very little…

This is one of the strange things about social media. We've become so accustomed to measuring success through reach and views that we sometimes forget to ask whether the people seeing our content are actually relevant to us.

A local restaurant reaching 100,000 people in its own city is a very different proposition from reaching 1 million people scattered across the world. A skin clinic with 20,000 highly relevant followers has a very different audience from one with 200,000 people who followed because a single video happened to land on their Explore page.

The numbers look better in the second example. The business might not.

Reach is useful. Relevant reach is better.

Stop Trying to Make Your Brand Go Viral…

Then comes the pressure to do it again

Perhaps the most difficult thing about going viral is what happens afterwards.

One post performs exceptionally well and suddenly everything else is judged against it. A Reel that would previously have been considered successful now feels disappointing because it only reached 20,000 people instead of 2 million. Twenty thousand people, incidentally, is still a lot of people. It's just difficult to remember that after you've seen seven digits.

This is where brands can start chasing the result rather than understanding it. The content becomes more trend-led. More reactive. More desperate to recreate whatever happened the first time. A successful format gets repeated until it stops being successful, at which point everyone wonders why the audience has ‘lost interest’.

Usually, the audience hasn't changed. The content has just become predictable…

I've also seen brands start bending themselves around a viral post. A brand known for beautiful, considered content suddenly decides it needs to make memes. A serious business starts talking like a 22-year-old on TikTok. A luxury brand discovers a trending sound and, for reasons nobody can quite explain, decides it absolutely must be part of the conversation.

The original post worked. So now the brand has to become the original post. That isn't a strategy. That's an identity crisis with a content calendar.

Not Everything Needs to be Entertaining

I think we've also become slightly obsessed with the idea that brands need to entertain us constantly.

Everything needs a hook and needs to be relatable. Everything needs a personality and needs to stop the scroll… And yes, nobody wants to follow an account that feels overly corporate. But there is a point where trying too hard to be entertaining starts to become its own kind of brand problem.

I've worked across fashion, beauty, hospitality and retail, and one of the things that becomes obvious very quickly is that what works for one brand can look completely ridiculous on another. A playful approach can be perfect for a restaurant and completely wrong for a luxury clinic. A fashion brand might be able to jump on a trend within minutes; a professional services brand doing the same thing can look like it's having an existential crisis.

Some brands are funny. Others are aspirational, informative, beautiful, opinionated or deliberately understated. The answer isn't to make every brand behave like a content creator. It's to understand what makes that particular brand interesting and communicate it in a way that feels natural.

That might occasionally mean joining a trend or creating something designed to travel well beyond your existing audience. But it can also mean making something that reaches a few thousand of the right people and gives them a much better understanding of who you are.

Not every post needs to win the internet. Some just need to do their job.

So, Should Brands Stop Trying to go Viral?

Not exactly…

If something takes off, enjoy it. Look at who it reached and what happened afterwards. Was the attention reaching potential customers? Did it lead to enquiries or sales? Did those new followers stick around? Most importantly, has it made the brand more memorable?

Those are much more interesting questions than refreshing the view count every ten minutes…

There may well be something useful to learn from a viral post. The subject matter might have resonated. The format might have made the content easier to consume. The tone might have felt more natural. You might have accidentally found a part of the brand that people hadn't seen before.

But a viral post shouldn't automatically become the blueprint for everything that follows.

The better question isn't, ‘How do we make this go viral?’. It's ‘What do we want this content to achieve?’

If the objective is awareness, great. If you're trying to build a community, generate sales, drive bookings or simply become more memorable, that's equally valid. And if something happens to go viral along the way, enjoy the moment. Just don't mistake a lucky break for a business strategy.

Because social media isn't a competition to see who can collect the biggest number underneath a Reel. Nobody is handing out a trophy for views. The real value is in building a brand people recognise, remember and, ideally, choose when they're actually ready to spend some money.

I'd take a smaller audience who genuinely cares about what you're doing over millions of people who have already forgotten you by the time they've finished scrolling. Going viral is nice. Being relevant is better.