Watch The Next 10 Minutes If You Want to Go Viral in 2025

This isn't about just grabbing the attention. It's about holding that attention and making sure that we're retaining that audience that we're getting unless you're passionate about it. I have people come to me sometimes and say, well, I hate social media, but I know I have to do it. I was like, then don't do it. Like, if you have no kind of like redeeming factor in it that you want to leverage it for something, if you don't love it, do not do it, because you will not be successful in it. And people think going viral is lucky, but there is a science and a model to it. We spent the past six years building one, and we'll break down that model today. If your content is good enough with your follower base and it's holding attention long enough, it will definitely cede it to people outside of your network. 95% of the people producing content are not good enough in terms of their storytelling because you got to remember the people that are following you are probably following a thousand other people. So you're fighting for the attention of those against the thousand other accounts that they're following. The algorithms have an abundance of content to choose from, and what they are really favoring is content that can hold attention for as long as possible with the widest audience. As an individual, just starting out is really try and understand that your success, or lack thereof, is your ability to tell compelling stories. You need to find a very specific format that meets what you want to do and understand those qualitative nuances of what makes a successful use of that format versus an unsuccessful use. A big challenge that people run into is they think that their industry or subject matter is not sexy enough. They're like, oh, I'm a tax accountant. It can't go viral. Any subject matter can go viral. It's proven. Tax, accountants, insurance, real estate, finance, anything can go viral, but it comes down to the context of it. And this is also going against like a traditional kind of known thing about marketing is like you have to niche down with the message and the content. And that was designed before when it was just all based on targeted ads. But when we think about organic social media, we have to use what we call and this is a performance driver called the generalist approach. How can you make your subject matter interesting to anybody? One of the biggest principles that we talk about in terms of that contextual element to drive success around your content is called the generalist principle. So how do we make your content interesting to the average person while not losing the subtext of our core audience. So I'll give you an example. I'm sure you know the YouTuber Graham Stephan, who teaches finance to millennials. He's built a massive audience on YouTube. His most viewed video is how I bought a Tesla for $78 a month. So right there, that hook anybody would be interested of seeing, well, how did he actually get a Tesla for $78 per month? But if you watch the video, he's actually breaking down finance principles of, like, understanding what it means to finance a car versus, if you were to say, I'm going to teach you the top five principles I've learned in leasing a Tesla, it would have gotten 10,000 views instead of 9 million views. If you look at the numbers, there's literally 60 billion messages sent on digital platforms each day. Between emails, text messages, notifications, feeds, there's just so much content that's being pushed out into the world. You have to find some way to stand out and grab their attention in those first three seconds to earn the next 15 seconds. So the way that we look at it is we don't want people to go and do trends because you're not mastering a skill set. We, we tell people to look at a format. So when we think about movies the past 50 years, every movie follows the three act structure in terms of how stories are told. So when Steven Spielberg makes a movie, he's not reinventing that structure, he's using that structure every time to become one of the best storytellers on the planet. So we look at social media in terms of what we call a format. And there's. Our team has done about 10,000 hours of research, and we've crossed 220 different formats. So there's many to choose from. I'm not by any means saying it has to be like these three formats are the only ones that work. So you have to do them if you don't love them. So what's an example? We broke down Tanner Leatherstein's Is it worth it? Format, where he deconstructs a $500 Chanel handbag tells you whether it's worth it. It's not about trying to beat the algorithm or hack the algorithm, because this isn't like Netflix, where Netflix invests billions of dollars in original content to keep people on their platform. They rely on us as content creators to be the fuel that runs them. They're not going to risk the holy grail of their platform, which is their main feed of pushing content to you. That's not going to hold your Attention, because if they keep seeding you content that's not holding your attention, what's going to happen? You're going to leave the platform. There's a lot of people that are still stuck on time of day hashtags, things like that, where again, at a certain point in time when there's less competition on the platform, it could yield results. But what I always say to people is focus on the content. Don't focus on these, all these other variables, because it's just having the right hashtag posting, the right time of day, posting every day is not going to make a crappy piece of content amazing. You have to be a student of the game. You have to learn how to really contextualize your message for what audiences are looking for and what the algorithms are looking for.

One video in particular, because I couldn't understand the hook point on this one. Sort of you walking with an umbrella. I think it's raining outside, and then money falls from the sky and you kind of look at it and I think you just kind of walk away. I was like, I didn't understand that video, but it has a lot of views. What is going on there?

One of the things that we've realized in terms of what we talked about with retention, is setting an expectation that something's going to happen, but you're not sure what's going to happen. So that's kind of why that video worked, is you're like some guy's walking on the screen with umbrella. You think something's going to happen, otherwise they wouldn't be posting it. You're not sure what's going to happen. But one of the kind of performance drivers or things that really hold people back, especially, you know, when we're talking about organic social media, is they're operating off of the old paradigm of create a niche piece of content for a niche audience. The social media algorithms are not really looking for that. They're not going to do the heavy lifting for you. They're just looking at the retention metrics. Are you able to stop the scroll and how long can you hold their attention for? The biggest mistake that I see people make, and I'm brought into these situations all the time in big brands and corporations and celebrities, is they waste so much money, hundreds of thousands, some cases millions of dollars, on either growth strategies or content strategies that just don't perform. And I'm of the mindset that how do we quickly test and learn and iterate to figure out what works? And when I see especially people that are just starting out or just trying to scale. They just keep doing the same thing over and over again and they're not really learning, they're posting and they feel like, oh, I need to post five days a week and I need to post at these times, I need to use these hashtags. But they're not actually seeing what happens and they're not learning from the process of putting content out there. There's another amazing woman on TikTok, Dr. Julie Smith, and she is a clinical psychologist and she breaks down very difficult subjects like ptsd, anxiety, panic attacks, things of that nature. And she uses a format called a visual metaphor. One of her most videos, it's got 12 most viewed videos, it's got 12 million views is she has a waste paper basket overflowing with papers, talking about what it means to be overwhelmed with emotion. And then she takes those papers out one at a time, folds them neatly and then puts them back in there to show kind of what trauma processing and going through therapy looks like now. Like therapy, especially on TikTok. Most people think TikTok is like silly kids dancing and stuff. But like clinical psychology is not really a sexy or viral subject matter on the surface. But the contextual nature of how she's representing that information allows her to scale her message and brand without losing the subtext of what she's actually trying to get across as a business and a personal brand. If you're going to use social media and consume social media content, at least have the lens to try and understand what is this content creator doing that's causing them to get 10 million views versus what I'm doing. Just talk about Facebook and Instagram. Both Facebook and Instagram are short form content. You're lucky if you can get somebody to watch something for 30 or 45 seconds. Now they're trying to change that and compete with YouTube, with IGTV and Facebook Watch, but it's going to be a struggle. YouTube, long form consumption behavior. So if you really want to dive in deep with people, then that's a great platform, Facebook. The benefit is you can drive so much traffic out to then build that longer term relationship with them. What content formats, what content structures, what content creators are going viral and then we break down why we don't just look at the numbers because that's a big mistake that people will make is they'll look at a content creator and they'll see that they've generated 10 million views on a video and they're like, oh, I see what that person's doing. They've gone viral. But the challenge is, is they may. That person, that content creator, may have only done it once. First simplest place that you can start is just use this knowledge to consciously consume content on social media. Because most people are just unconsciously consuming content. They're not kind of looking for the patterns. But now when you're consuming YouTube or Instagram or whatever platform you're focused on, just look for those formats or look for a video that has 10 million views, then dig further into that creator's profile. Are they consistently doing it? Oh, well, what's the format they're using?