Reasons Viral Content Does Not Drive Conversions

A school hired me after spending $$$$ on social media management. 10,000 followers. Beautiful content. Zero enrollment conversions. Here's what they were doing wrong... Their Instagram looked like a magazine. Stunning photos. Perfect captions. Daily posts. But when I asked to see their enrollment data from social media, the room went silent. "Well, we don't really track that." $$$$. Zero accountability. After 28 years in education and now helping schools with their marketing, I see this pattern everywhere: Schools confuse popularity with purpose. Here's what their "successful" social media actually looked like: → 10,000 followers (90% weren't even local) → Beautiful sunset campus shots (zero parent value) → Generic inspiration quotes (every school posts these) → Student achievements (great for current families, invisible to prospects) Meanwhile, prospective parents were asking: • "What's your approach to bullying?" • "How do you support anxious kids?" • "Can my child get into good colleges from here?" • "What makes you different from Public School X?" And finding nothing. The agency they hired? They were social media experts. Just not school marketing experts. Big difference. Here's what we changed: Killed the sunset photos. Started showing real classroom moments. Stopped chasing followers. Started answering parent questions. Ditched the inspiration quotes. Shared specific student transformations. Forgot about going viral. Focused on going local. Result after 90 days: → Followers dropped (good - they're actually local parents now) → DMs from prospective families increased → Tour requests from social up → First social media enrollment conversions The uncomfortable truth: Your social media manager creating "beautiful content" might be your biggest enrollment obstacle. Pretty posts don't pay tuition. Parent connections do. That school down the street with ugly social media but full classrooms? They're answering questions, not winning photography awards. The math is simple: 10,000 followers × 0 conversions = Expensive mistake 1,000 engaged parents × 1% conversion = 10 new families Your board doesn't need to see your follower count. They need to see your enrollment impact. Stop paying for vanity. Start investing in value. What metrics does your school actually track for social media ROI? #SchoolMarketing #SocialMediaROI #DigitalMarketing #EnrollmentMarketing #MarketingMetrics

At Chubbies we went “viral” many times. In fact in one year, Chubbies was one of the top 10 most-watched brands on the Internet. We identified a recipe for maximizing our view count from a content perspective, and we pursued that relentlessly and single-mindedly. And by hacking in that direction (and failing quite a bit, I might add) we started to see a higher and higher hit rate of “viral” content. You’ll notice, though, that’s not what Chubbies is doing today. We aren’t pursuing “virality”. We are no longer aggressively maximizing our views for the sake of maximizing views. Because what we learned as we went down that path, and as we got more and more specific about how we measured the impact of our content and our marketing, was that we actually wanted to do something quite different. We didn’t want a fleeting interaction with a piece of content that could’ve come from anywhere. We wanted our viewers, and our potential customers to really understand who Chubbies is, what we care about, and to leave with an emotional connection to our brand. And in the content world, often times even mentioning that you are, in fact, a brand is enough to fully stop virality in its tracks. “Advertising“ - and customers are extremely intelligent about smoking out advertising masquerading as content - is simply extremely difficult to get to any sort of virality. And the reality is that Branded content - where you must leave the customer with a deep emotional connection to your brand - looks like, walks like, and talks like advertising much more than it does social, or meme-y content. And that’s OK. What we realized Chubbies was that it wasn’t virality that grew our brand. It was something else. We formulated different KPI‘s for our content performance, and, as we architected our content and our marketing towards those KPI‘s our virality actually went down. And while our ability to create content that would organically shoot up to millions of views declined, our ability to build Brand in a monetizable way went up. So for any brand builders out there working to build an emotional connection with an audience, no matter the size, don’t get distracted by the shiny KPIs other folks are using or that the social platforms are endorsing. Instead, keep a fully open mind and an analytical framework to find out what it takes to truly grow your Brand with a capital B. What you find might surprise you.

Everyone's obsessed with going viral. But after analyzing 1,000s of creator campaigns, I've noticed something counterintuitive: Virality rarely translates to sustainable business growth. Brands are chasing the wrong metric entirely. They're measuring: • View counts • Trending status • Brief engagement spikes Meanwhile, the brands consistently growing on our platform focus on: • Conversion consistency • Community development • Creator relationship quality The math doesn't lie: A single viral post might reach 1M people with 0.1% conversion. But 20 targeted pieces of creator content reaching the right 50K buyers? That's how you build a business that lasts. The creator economy isn't about moments. It's about momentum. — Leo Limin

Your C-suite is asking you to make content that goes viral. So...now what? You ask them why they want to go viral. They'll say to get more followers. You'll ask them why they want more followers. They'll say to see a better ROI on social. You'll ask them to define a better ROI. They'll say they want to see more sales conversions directly tied to the social media and content team. They don't necessarily want more followers, they want more conversions, but in their minds more followers = $$$. Here is what you can tell them: Going viral is great. However, it doesn't always translate to new followers or even sales conversions. What we want to do is focus on high-quality content that resonates directly with our target market. There might be fewer eyeballs on our content, but our content has a better chance of getting in front of the people who are most likely to convert into paying customers. Story time: A friend of mine is a pretty popular photographer in Phoenix. She had a reel go viral on IG that garnered almost a million views. From that reel, she received only four new followers and zero sales conversions. She had been testing content formats to see what resonated best with her target audience. The reel was a video of one of her brides walking with her bridesmaids and didn't even feature her main offering, photography. By all accounts, she went viral, but it did nothing to grow her account or her bank account. More eyes on your content doesn't always equal a better ROI. Half your job as a creative is to ensure the C-suite understands what you do, why you do it, and the outcomes. Make sure you understand how to communicate strategy effectively and be able to back up your strategy with data. P.S. - I'm Emily, your go-to source for a mix of insights and humor drawn from 15 years of experience in corporate marketing. Hit that connect button, and let's embark on this professional journey together as friends!

The Truth About “Viral” LinkedIn Content... After 2+ years helping B2B executives grow through LinkedIn, I've discovered something that may surprise you: Most "high-performing" posts do nothing for your bottom line—or any meaningful KPI for that matter (revenue, brand authority, etc) The pattern is beyond clear across dozens of business leaders I've worked with: Those who chase virality (generally) fail to generate actual business results. What most get wrong? They pursue broad appeal instead of targeted impact. Large accounts with impressive follower counts often generate fewer qualified leads than focused experts with smaller, highly targeted audiences. I've seen this firsthand across thousands of posts… The business leaders who see real results follow a different playbook—they understand that remarkability comes from substance, not virality. They create content that helps people solve real professional problems, asking: "How can I provide maximum value to my target market in the most interesting way possible?" In this carousel, I'm sharing my framework refined through years of working with high-performing B2B companies to transform LinkedIn strategies from engagement-chasing to revenue-generating. Swipe through to discover how to create LinkedIn content that doesn't JUST boost engagement … but actually grows your business: