The brutal truth about viral videos

We’ve all seen someone in our industry blow up online and thought, I could do that - and better.

In professional services especially, it’s frustrating watching someone post a video giving wrong advice, get 10,000 likes, and suddenly be seen as the expert.

But here’s what you’re not seeing: attention doesn’t always equal trust, and it rarely equals conversions.

Views, likes and comments are great, but if it’s the wrong message, it’s purely a vanity metric.

Take an accountant hopping on a trending sound. Funny? Sure.
Does it bring in a high-value client? Probably not. It might even undermine their professionalism.

We recently had a client that owns a cosmetic business in Melbourne post two pieces of content:

• One reached 154,000 views: great for surface-level awareness, but no brand impact and $0 in sales.
• Another reached just over 9,000 views: but it spoke directly to a pain point their audience cared about and generated over $1,000 in 30 minutes.

Both posts served a purpose, but neither happened by accident.

And this is where most businesses go wrong: they judge all content by the same outcome.

When you expect one single post to attract, inform and sell, you fail.

You could go viral three or four times this year and still not convert a single client. But you can also post strategic, low-ego, problem-solving content that reaches only a few hundred people, and win consistently.

So the real question isn’t “How do I go viral?”
It’s: “What purpose do I want this content to serve.”

PS: in a world where seeing a video with 1 million views is normal, picture a room of 300 engaged people - there’s still a whole lot of sales that can be made to a smaller, more receptive audience.