Going Viral Is My Worst Nightmare (And Why It Should Maybe Be Yours Too)
I have a confession that’s going to sound strange coming from someone who does content and social media for a living: The thought of one of my posts going viral is my actual nightmare. Like, literally — that fear has kept me up at night at times.
But isn’t going viral the dream on social media? Isn’t that what we’re all chasing?
Not I, said the fly. (It’s me, the fly).
The very idea of a post taking off and racking up hundreds of thousands of views makes my stomach a little queasy. It’s the last thing I want. So I want to talk about why it scares me so much, and the much better questions I think you should be asking instead of “how do I get my posts to blow up?”
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The story we never got taught but somehow all believe
We see people go viral constantly — celebrities and influencers, yes, but also people we actually know, whose posts blew up overnight and brought in thousands of followers. When you watch it happen to someone in your own orbit, it starts feeling achievable, like something you should be able to make happen.
I’ll tell you right off the bat: it is possible. That’s exactly why it scares me.
Anyone who posts regularly has a real chance that one of their posts takes off and lands a flood of views and engagement. And because we see so many examples of it, we’ve gotten it into our heads that going viral is the goal. We treat virality as the finish line, like the moment you cross it, the eyeballs turn into clients flooding through the door and your business is suddenly booming. We treat reach as the domino that knocks over everything else.
It makes sense that we think this, because the platforms put these numbers front and center constantly. Likes, views, impressions, shares, follower counts, all in big bold letters, not just on our own accounts but on everyone else’s. You go to someone’s profile and make a snap judgment about how legitimate they are based on a follower number, even if you’d swear you don’t.
The number the platforms bury
Here’s what those platforms don’t show you, because it’s buried under the big sexy numbers: Are you reaching the right people?
The right people are the ones who would actually buy from you, the ones you actually want to work with. That’s a much harder thing to put a number on. The algorithms can’t yet tell the difference between a right-fit person seeing your content and a random pair of eyeballs scrolling past it. So they show you the easy metric and hide the one that matters.
When a post goes viral — and we’ll use that word loosely, because viral means something different for everyone; for me, a 10,000-view post is huge — by definition, it lands in front of a very broad range of people who are mostly not your people.
Reach is a vanity metric. A post that gets 100,000 views is genuinely exciting, but does it translate into a single sale? Not necessarily. If those 100,000 people are the wrong fit, it won’t move your business in any measurable way. So I would trade that 100,000-view post a thousand times over for a post that gets 200 views from the right 200 people.
The time I actually went viral (and got zero clients)
Lest you think I have no idea what I’m talking about, I have actually experienced some level of virality on LinkedIn and Threads (even if not on Instagram at the time of this writing). A few weeks ago I posted something dumb on those other two platforms, and it went bonkers. Not millions of views, but somewhere around 50 or 60 thousand on each, with a flood of comments and shares. Mega viral, for me.
The post was a screenshot of a cold outreach email I’d gotten. If you’re a business owner, you get these constantly — the agencies pitching to book you sales calls or run Facebook ads that will “instantly” bring you more clients than you can shake a stick at.
This one was special. Their AI automation had clearly scraped a LinkedIn post of mine where I’d written about grief and how it shows up in my business, and the email I received was the AI tool’s own refusal: it was telling whoever ran the prompt that it couldn’t write the pitch because tying a sales email to something as sensitive as grief was inappropriate. Clearly, no human eyes had looked at it before it went out. I screenshotted it, added something like “show me a better cold outreach email,” and it took off.
For about a week, my phone would not stop buzzing. And I won’t lie, it felt good. It’s an intense dopamine hit, and I completely understand why people chase it. Your brain lights right up. That’s what the whole thing is engineered to do.
But, guess how many clients those two viral posts brought me? Zero. Not one.
Partly, that’s because the post wasn’t really about the work I do. There’s a thin thread — don’t use AI without infusing it with your own human empathy — but the post itself was a silly, funny thing unrelated to brand voice and messaging.
And this is something I’ve heard from many people who’ve gone truly viral: the post that blows up is usually not the one about your actual work, because the silly, broadly relatable thing is what pulls in the crowd. The eyeballs a viral post brings are not the eyeballs that buy from you. I didn’t even gain many new followers from it, and the few I did now follow me for something that has nothing to do with what I sell.
The trolls come with the crowd
There’s another thing that happens when a lot of people suddenly see your post: it draws the trolls out of the woodwork. I got lucky on that viral post and barely got any nasty comments. But a couple of weeks earlier I’d posted something silly about AI on Threads, a post that didn’t even get many views, and within 30 minutes, I had five insanely nasty comments. So I took it down. It wasn’t a post I’d poured myself into, and I just didn’t want that energy in my space.
Now, I want you to sit with the following scenario:
You pour your heart into a post on a topic that really matters to you. It took time, energy, and bravery to create and put out into the world. And it gets TONS of views — great! Except now, a wave of strangers starts leaving really cruel comments. They call you names no one would ever call you to your face and pick on parts of your post you never even considered would draw attention.
How does that sit with you? Maybe my skin isn’t thick enough, but that genuinely scares me. I want my corner of social media to be a positive, supportive, fun place, and I don’t have the bandwidth to police a flood of negativity. A bigger crowd makes that scenario far more likely.
The slow flattening of your voice
Here’s the deeper danger of all those wrong-fit eyeballs entering your orbit. If you start getting nasty comments (or even just the wrong kinds of comments from people who just don’t get it), it makes you feel terrible. You start to doubt yourself, and over time, you start modifying what you put out. Usually without even noticing.
You decide you won’t show up as your full self, because clearly that’s not landing with the people commenting. You smooth out the edges and play it safer. You start showing up as the person you think the room wants.
You water your message down so a broader audience gets it, except the ones who get it are the ones most likely to hire you.
What we’re actually chasing when we chase reach
Let me go a layer deeper, because I think the hunger for virality makes complete sense. We’re looking for validation. For permission. For someone to tell us we’re on the right track. And our culture has trained us to read reach as the proof of legitimacy — how many people saw it, how many engaged, how many followers you have. It feels like the thing that tells us we’re valid and we deserve to be in the room.
It isn’t. Going viral won’t actually hand you that feeling. The people I’ve talked to who’ve gone viral, sometimes more than once, tell me it often made them feel like more of an imposter, because suddenly there’s a spotlight on them and a flood of strangers judging their page.
The validation and the sense of belonging you’re actually after come from doing the reps, speaking to the right people, and having the right 200 see your work and want to go deeper with you.
Chase fit, not reach
If I could leave you with one lesson, it would be this: chase fit instead of reach. Don’t ask how many eyeballs are on this or how many people follow you. That’s not the thing that changes your business. You could have 50 followers, and if one becomes a client, that’s worth more than 50,000 followers and zero clients.
Other signals give you a much better read than view counts: people responding to your stories, sliding into your DMs, leaving comments that are actually thoughtful and show you struck a nerve in a good way. That’s how you know you’re reaching the right people.
When you’re focused on the right people instead of the most people, you get to make braver choices. You can show up as your weirdest self and say the things you’ve been afraid to say, because you’re no longer trying to manufacture virality and grading every post against a 10,000-view benchmark that just makes you feel like a failure. You only care that the right people find you.
Your action steps this week
First, pull up your best-performing post from the last few months — most views, most likes, most engagement. Ask yourself honestly: did it bring a single new client into you orbit? Is it even saying the thing you want to say? Does it show all those eyeballs the value of the work you actually do? Or did it just feel good for a day or two while the notifications rolled in? There’s no right or wrong answer. Just be honest with yourself.
Second, go find a post that really does capture the value of what you do, even if its numbers are way smaller. Put the two side by side and look at the gap between what performed and what connected. Which one was actually more likely to bring the right person in? That gap is one of the most important things you can pay attention to as you plan your content going forward.
Third, notice the comparison when it shows up. When you catch yourself wishing a post had gone viral, or asking why it didn’t do better, just notice that you’re holding yourself to the virality benchmark, and remind yourself you don’t actually want the 20,000 wrong eyeballs. You want the right 200. That’s the whole game.
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