5 Reasons Why Going Viral is Bad for Your Business
‘Slow and Steady Wins the Race,’ Even Online in the Metaverse Era
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Everyone wants to go viral. But virality isn’t always a blessing; in fact, it can be a curse, misleadingly delightful at first and potentially catastrophic in the end. Huh? How!?
If we went viral, everyone would know about us, so of course we’d sell more widgets and improve our ROI.
As many brands, CEOs and CMOs have discovered in the last half decade, this is not the right mindset, or digital marketing strategy. It ignores all the best practices we’ve tested and proved.
What Does ‘Going Viral’ Mean?
Going viral does not refer to the type of content posted, or even the number of views or shares the content receives, but instead defines how a post is shared and popularized; specifically, that the content spreads far and wide, amplified exponentially, via social sharing by users.
As senior culture reporter Christiana Silva wrote January 2022 in Mashable:
The likes aren't necessarily the point. When we post publicly, we're often aware of the chance that our post might go viral, whatever that means to each of us. For one user, it might be getting a dozen comments on a photo; for another, a screenshot of their tweet shared on Facebook. But we know it when we feel it. Social media has created a space in which the number of eyeballs on any piece of content can escalate quickly, finding its way to a meme account, a popular subreddit, a trending hashtag.
And, they point out, Instagram’s own study found that removing the social graph from public sight “doesn’t reduce our misery-making need to feel popular.”
The Psychology of Going Viral, and Its Impact
I’ve gone viral numerous times. Going viral is fun, usually, and overwhelming, almost always. It boosts your ego, but it doesn’t last. Sometimes virality amounts to hundreds of new followers (or leads); other times, there’s no lasting impact at all. Or, worse still (and quite commonly), it brings out the ‘keyboard warriors’ — and going viral suddenly means receiving hundreds of attacks. For individuals or brands, if there’s no substance to support the viral boost, that newfound ‘fame’ typically flames out — with long-lasting deleterious results.
While the neurological effect of going viral hasn’t been adequately studied, what we do know, according to Dr. Courtney Tracy (The Truth Doctor), is that dopamine levels rise when others interact with our social posts. What we also know, says Stanford psychiatry professor Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, “is that likes are experienced as a proxy for popularity and relevance.”
Plus, if our intention is to go viral, and we don’t, we’re disappointed. “Aim that high enough times,” and you’re altering your brain chemistry. "Wanting to go viral and getting let down often encourages a maladaptive relationship with social media," Tracy says.
When we’re attempting to go viral, it’s usually because we’re motivated by the memory of our past validation. We gain dopamine just thinking about how we may get more [validation]. This is general excitement and motivation in the brain. However, when we don’t go viral, that dopamine disappears.
Most importantly for brands (and their social media managers), “the desire for that ego boost can change your behavior, making you want to post what your audience is most likely to like or share.”
As Aboujaoude notes, "This has played a role in the radicalizing of the internet and society, as well as the emergence of post-truth culture." But more importantly for business leaders, the battle for ‘social approval’ has blinded digital marketers to the purpose of their work: to create opportunities for consistent and increasing revenue, just like sales or CX.
An increase in likes on a social media post rarely translates to new customers, whereas implementing a digital marketing strategy focused on developing long-term relationships through meaningful interactions can deliver ROI for years to come.
Why Going Viral is Bad (and a Waste of Time)
In its article “Why Going Viral is a Waste of Time,” the storytelling platform Prezly points out two examples of brands that regularly reach viral status, and why it works for them.
- Wendy’s uses “sass” to “make their tweets circulate,” but it’s the fast-food company’s “dedication to consistency, engagement, and heart” that has “kept them an internet favorite for years” — and boosted profits by more than $60 million in one year
- Ben & Jerry’s “often goes viral” for its “unflinching use [of its] brand and global reach to champion causes” — and earned a record $450 million in revenue last year because, unlike other businesses that take political stances to appeal to their target audience, the (mostly) independent ice cream brand has proven that its primary priority is social justice and not productivity or profits (as the UK’s president of the board of trade Olukemi Olufunto Badenoch pointed out in mid-2022)
Most brands, however, are not built to strategically leverage the potentially positive impacts of going viral. Here are five reasons vying for virality is a bad digital marketing strategy:
- The internet is unpredictable. When you’re campaigning to reach ‘as many eyes as possible,’ you have to have a pristine pulse on what’s currently trending and what’s most likely to trend in the near future, which isn’t easy even for the most prolific prognosticators.
- Targeting everyone means targeting no one. By trying to appeal to everybody, you risk sanitizing your message so much that nobody sees themselves in your content, whereas decades of data demonstrate that developing user personas and targeting only your audience(s) is most effective.
- Personalization without empathy, authenticity and consistency is useless. Even if you’re able to personalize all the experiences and communications you deliver, you won’t impress or appeal to anyone if you aren’t speaking to their pain points, needs and goals — or if what you’re saying contradicts what you said last week or what you supposedly stand for.
- Trying to go viral distracts from smart digital marketing and customer experience strategies. When you’re focused on virality, you’re concerned with quantity over quality. And you’re looking at the most simplistic, least meaningful KPIs, such as impressions or likes, instead of the ones that truly matter. When you prioritize your audience, you can better identify what truly works (and what doesn’t) in building and expanding high-value customer relationships.
- Going viral creates unnecessary urgency and pressure. If you’ve ever experienced unexpected social success, you know how difficult it is to keep up with all the public and private responses. If your viral campaign makes promises, like early access to a new product, for instance, you’re also putting immense strain on your sales and CX teams, as well as your product people and the whole supply chain.
Don’t believe me? Just look at what happened to Airbnb, a company big enough to survive a corporate meltdown, and ask yourself: are you ‘too big to fail?’
If not, stick to what matters — giving your customers what they want — and give up on going viral. (Who knows, you might go viral organically, without trying, and reap only the benefits.)
When Airbnb Went Viral
Around the same time that Bloomberg exposed Airbnb for paying $50 million each year to settle legal claims and silence critics, the online marketplace announced an offer to host 20,000 Afghani refugees. Cool, right? Wrong! Consumers quickly took to Twitter and Reddit to denounce the company for the stunt, pointing out that donors — and not the company — would cover the costs, and Airbnb hosts — and not the company — would provide the housing. In other words, Airbnb went viral for all the wrong reasons (“virtue signaling”) and, as a result, hurt its brand reputation.
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Image Credits (in order of appearance)
- Photo by Melissa Keizer on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/X-0FisCRIaA
- Photo by Unsplash+ in collaboration with Getty Images on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/N0xn-BFl1ec
- Photo by Unsplash+ in collaboration with Getty Images on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/UeQ3u8d7-0A
- Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/sStahKEhT9w
