You Don’t Want To Go Viral

Here’s why.

As a digital communications consultant, I belong to, and follow, lots of online groups related to content creation, social media management, and various forms of internet marketing strategy. It’s part of my professional networking — contributing to the conversations happening in my field, keeping an eye out for what I might be able to learn from other folks. Thanks to the interests indicated by my likes, shares, and profile, I also get “targeted” fairly often by ads for the same kinds of services — even though in many cases that means that the company paying for the post is marketing to their own competition, and “tipping their hand” with respect to their own ad strategy in the process.

The combination of these factors means that whenever an idea is “making the rounds,” there’s a good chance I’ll be seeing it on repeat — and because truly brand-new ideas are pretty rare, variations on a few familiar themes cross my radar fairly often.

One of the most common of these themes is the concept of “going viral” — people asking how they can go viral, people explaining how to go viral, people offering to make you “go viral” … for a fee.

I am here to tell you that you don’t want to go viral (probably).

There are exceptions to every rule, and we’ll deal with a few of those, but basically: If you are trying to figure out a sensible, sustainable online marketing strategy for a business, then “going viral” is probably not an effective, much less an efficient, path toward your goal.

Let’s break it down.

What does “going viral” even mean?

Rapidly circulating social media posts and certain types of malware are called “viral” and “viruses” because they work very much like the ordinary, physical viruses that make us sick all the time (sorry, but it’s true!).

In case you needed a refresher …

The familiar category of “germs” can be divided into two main groups: Viruses and bacteria. Bacteria are microscopic single-celled organisms that can (and often do) invade and colonize a host organism (an animal or plant). They can even establish mutually beneficial (called “symbiotic”) relationships with their hosts in some cases (if you’ve seen some buzz lately about “good bacteria,” this is what that’s all about). But they can reproduce independently of their hosts — bacteria love being in a living organism, but they can also grow, thrive, and produce many more little baby bacteria in a plate of food left out too long at the family picnic.

All germs are NOT created equal.

Viruses do not have cells (not even one each!). Like bacteria, they can sometimes make us sick, but they really don’t have the ability to set up any kind of symbiotic relationship. That’s in part because viruses are not, in the strictest sense, “alive” in the first place. They can’t reproduce on their own — they can only replicate, and the only way they can do that is by hijacking a host organism’s cells to make lots and lots of copies of themselves using a host’s cellular materials (tough to form a “mutually beneficial” relationship when one side’s existence depends on eating the other side alive).

Viruses also tend not to survive very well outside their hosts — if a virion (a particle of virus) gets stranded outside a host’s body, it quickly begins to deteriorate. Just how quickly depends on the type of virus and the external conditions (things like temperature and humidity matter a lot), but a virus is not going to be happily replicating in the potato salad at the picnic — unless your potato salad is actually alive, in which case you’ve got a whole other set of problems!

Viral transmission needs a host.

Because viruses don’t survive very well, or very long, outside the body (where “the body” is any organism with cells the virus can hijack), the main way they spread is from host to host. If you live with somebody who has a cold, then you’re likely to inhale some minty-fresh viral particles from one of their sneezes, or pick a few up off the doorknob and rub your eyes before you remember to wash your hands — and then you give the cold virus a chance to start populating in your cells. But generally speaking, in most cases you aren’t likely to “catch” a virus from somebody three streets over you never see face-to-face. Viruses don’t travel much except in the bodies of their hosts. This is why the standard public health advice is to stay home if you’re feeling sick (because as long as you are staying home, you are limiting the virus’s chances to use you for a free ride to its next host). It’s also why content that “goes viral” disappears once it’s made the rounds and everybody has seen it — once people have seen the same post a few times, they stop giving it piggyback rides.

When do you want to go viral?

The only rule that has no exception is that there is an exception to every rule (sit with that for a minute), so: There actually are a few scenarios in which, okay, sure, you actually do want to go viral.

Let’s go ahead and get those out of the way up front:

When you are a “content creator” …

… by which I do not mean that you create content. Just about everybody here is doing that to some extent. If digital “content” of some kind (blog posts, YouTube videos, whatever) is your only product, and your business model is “monetizing” that content somehow, by selling subscriptions to your content or ad placements based on your average number of clicks (or both), then “going viral” probably is not the only strategy you need for growing your audience (and therefore scaling your operation), but it can fit very comfortably within your overall business toolkit. You’ll likely also want to incorporate some kind of plan for convincing readers/viewers to stick around and keep checking out your (future) content, but a single post that goes viral can be a great vehicle for getting “on the radar” for a whole bunch of people in a relatively short span of time.

When one of the “symptoms” is FOMO.

This one is hard to pull off and pretty much only applies to product-based businesses, but every now and then it pans out and when it does it’s absolute gold. A year or so ago a Maybelline post featuring a pink-hued “brightening” concealer went viral … and then, I owuld argue, it went bacterial, because other people started buying the same product to try it out for themselves, and making their own videos featuring the same concealer (note: no, actual viruses cannot morph into bacteria, thank God). I have no idea what that process did for Maybelline’s long-term sales — but for a couple of months, it definitely generated a ton of interest and sold a boatload of product (the concealer, and other products that people picked up to go with the concealer; kind of a nice “snowball” effect in the cosmetics aisle).

Maybe they’re born with it. Maybe it’s the marketing team.

Why would I NOT want to go viral?

In almost every instance other than the two I mentioned above, you don’t want to go viral because you do not want to be a short-term annoying experience that people quickly forget.

You do not want to be a fever folks “get over.”

You also do not want to go viral because:

Viral posts rarely associate your brand with your content.

There are, again, exceptions to the rule — but stop and think for a minute about the “viral” posts you’ve seen in the past, say, 2–4 months. Now try to name the OP (if your digital lexicon is lagging, that’s “Original Poster”) for each of them.

Depending on how attentive you are when scrolling social media and how many times you saw each individual post, you might remember the account responsible for a couple of them … but for most viral posts, way most of the time, you are not going to remember the person or the company who made the post that crossed your feed on repeat for a couple of weeks, half a year ago.

In other words:

Viral content is lousy for brand recognition.

Viral posts rarely generate “conversions.”

If you have been plumbing the depths of the internet looking for small business marketing tips, you have probably come across the concept of “conversions” several times. Depending on context, conversions can refer to the conversion of viewers into site visitors, to the conversion of audiences to customers, or occasionally (I’m looking at you, HubSpot users!) the conversion of customers to “evangelists” (basically, people who voluntarily tout your excellence to others).

The Maybelline brightening concealer trend was unusual in that it triggered a series of conversions — people didn’t just share the posts, they saw the posts and then went out and bought the concealer so they could make their own versions of the viral videos they’d seen (this would be the reproduction, as opposed to replication, that caused me to say the Maybelline campaign “went bacterial” … I’m stretching my microbiology metaphors here, but hopefully you get the idea!). JUST going viral doesn’t mean anything except that a lot of people will be seeing, and sharing, your post … which, as anybody who has been beating their head against the digital wall can tell you, is a long way from making a single sale.

The views-to-sales conversion rate on viral content is reliably terrible. And because people don’t even remember who posted the content (see above), views in most cases aren’t even going to convert into followers who might stay aware of your existence and buy something later.

Viral content generates backlash.

A viral post will pretty much always fill your mentions with random spam. That’s just how the internet works; there’s always somebody out there, looking to hop a ride on your post in kinda the same way a viral post is hopping a ride on everybody who shares it. But if you, again, think back to the last several “viral” posts that have cracked your radar lately … a sizable proportion of them were probably not “happy” shares, irrespective of the tone of the content itself.

To put it another way: People do, sometimes, share and respond to posts they think are cool. People respond, at volume and often aggressively, to content that pisses them off. One of the more reliable strategies for “going viral” is to “push buttons” and generate outrage … but if you are trying to manage social media for a business, that is almost never what you actually want to see.

Okay, so I don’t want to make my small business go viral. What should I try instead?

I hate to tell you this, but the best answers for small business online content are all “boring” stuff. Best practices for small business social media management basically consist of posting regularly, using keywords/phrases that people would be likely to enter as search terms if they were looking for exactly what you have to sell, on platforms where the people most likely to be looking for that “stuff” are also likely to be hanging out.

You show up in places where “your people” are, and you do your thing.

And then you keep doing it, over and over again. Rinse’n’repeat.

If you are already doing all of that — or you think you are doing that, and so far it isn’t working — it may be time to call a professional. Get an SEO review, get an audience analysis, get somebody to look at the stuff you’re putting out into the digisphere and help you troubleshoot how to fine-tune your approach or tighten up your target audience.

Book a free virtual session online, or call The Consulting Academic at 256–602–1038 today to find a time that works for you.