Hot take: going viral once is one of the worst things that can happen to a small account

It depends on context. If you go viral for your normal posts, then it’s great. If you were throwing crap at a wall to see what stuck & something random blew up, it could suck for you.

I had 5k followers in May, went viral (had like 3 different vids hit 1M views in one week) when I decided to start posting consistently & got to 50k by June. The difference is I knew what I was doing & what content worked. Now I’m at 380k & still posting content I enjoy & that matches my brand.

I always recommend posting what you want to be known for, never try to hop on a wave or quick trend just to get attention because to your point, it’ll suck when you realize the new people either don’t engage, or they unfollow because they only liked you for that specific type of content.

I have a friend who’s a rapper who went viral (8M+ views, even Justin Bieber reposted his video) for a random vid playing guitar while singing… grew from like 7k to 85k in like 2 weeks, guess what his newfound audience only wants to see? Him playing guitar and singing lol. Whenever he posts rap vids the comments are “this is ok but post more singing with the guitar”. He’s not even a great guitarist, he knows like 3 chords but it works. Issue is that now, people view him as a guitarist / singer instead of a rapper & they only care when he posts guitar vids.

Post the content you want to be know for lol.

This happened to me and I actually just started a new account.
Thousands of followers from outside my ideal audience and it TANKED my engagement and distribution.
Never recovered from it

dude tell me about it 😭 i had a reel blow up to 5.6 million views now i can’t get anywhere close to that for my other ones

yeah this happened to me, hit 400k on a dumb clip and the next month was brutal. those followers wanted one thing and my normal stuff just died in the algorithm.

what helped was not chasing it, just went back to my regular cadence and let the dead weight sort itself out. took like 3 weeks but reach normalized.

viral is a spike not a strategy fr

Your audience is constantly changing. You get new ones and lose old ones every day. Just keep posting videos in your niche

I think the real problem isn't going viral, it's going viral for something completely different from what you normally create.

Getting a lot of views sounds great, but if those people aren't interested in your usual content, they probably won't stick around.

I'd rather have a smaller audience that genuinely enjoys what I make than thousands of followers who only showed up for one random video.

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This makes sense. A viral post is great for numbers, but if those followers aren’t interested in your usual content, the spike doesn’t mean much. Consistent audience > one random viral hit.

I had a post go viral on LinkedIn. At first, I thought it was great, but then I noticed in the comments that it was people trying to sell me something or who wanted something from me.

My LinkedIn messages went crazy with requests. Then my phone went off the hook with spam calls.

It made me realize the intent was not working the way I had wanted. Not all "going viral" is always a good thing.

the worst is when you go off brand a bit and what sticks is a controversial/political one and now you're just labeled as one of those