Why going viral isn't the goal

What I learned from going viral

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Thanks to a strike of creativity and a little bit of luck I churned out not one, but two viral videos last week. This week I am going to focus on this one. Between Instagram and Tiktok, the video has close to 4.5M views. Beyond the dopamine hit, I really thought this was going to be the key to my accounts taking off in a big way.

Spoiler alert, not much has changed.

4.5M views translated into about 1,000 new followers on Instagram and about 150 new followers on TikTok. I don’t know if this is an accurate comparison but if I compared new followers to views, .0002% of the people that saw the video decided to follow me. What’s up with that?

Coincidentally, I recently read this Eater article that was recommend by another creator. The article talks about all of the negative things that can happen when you go viral, mostly in reference to online trolls. Luckily, comments were relatively tame on my video but it did make me think about how people engage with viral content. The reality is that 99% of the people that saw the video had zero idea who I was. Though they might have gotten a good laugh and sent the video to a friend (almost 160K shares to be exact) they weren’t compelled to follow me. Here are some theories I have as to why:

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