Things change fast in the digital world. On the other hand, business tactics can be slow to adapt. Crafting content with the intent of “going viral” has been part of the communication playbook for more than a decade. There was never a guaranteed approach to catching this lightning in a bottle, but that didn’t stop marketers and PR practitioners from trying.

That effort is increasingly futile, as the social media companies that host the content have altered their algorithms, and people are paying attention to different things these days. This has led several marketing influencers to suggest that it’s time to move on from the attempt to produce content specifically in the hopes that it will go viral. Neville and Shel share some data points and debate whether going viral should remain a communication goal in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

• Is Going Viral Dead?


• Evaluating the effect of viral posts on social media engagement


• We Don’t Care About Viral Marketing Anymore


• The Viral Effect: Unpacking the Influence of Viral Marketing Campaigns on Generation Z’s Purchase Intentions

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 27.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on [Neville’s blog](https://www.nevillehobson.io/) and [Shel’s blog](https://holtz.com/blog/).

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Neville Hobson: Hi everyone, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 485. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz, and it is time to stop making going viral the point of our work. I’m not arguing that reach is irrelevant. I’m arguing that virality as an objective is a strategic dead end. High variance, low repeatability, and increasingly disconnected from outcomes that matter. I’ll explain right after this.

For years, viral success stories seduced communicators, and I’m among them. There’s a thrill in watching that graph spike, but we’ve learned a few hard truths. First, virality is unpredictable by design. Platforms tune feeds to maximize their goals, not yours. Second, even when you catch lightning in a bottle, the spike rarely results in any kind of durable advantage. A new peer-reviewed analysis of more than a thousand European news publishers on Facebook and YouTube, published in the journal Nature, found that most viral events do not significantly increase engagement and rarely lead to sustained growth. In other words, the sugar high fades, and it fades fast. Meanwhile, veterans of content-led link earning have publicly stepped away from virality as a North Star. Fractal, an agency that once made viral part of its brand, now says flatly, and I’m quoting, “We don’t care about viral marketing anymore, and neither should you.” Their pivot is toward durable metrics like authority, affinity, and relevance. You might think that’s a vibe shift, but it’s not. It’s a strategic correction. Even the classic research on viral ads, the eye tracking work that taught us how emotional arcs and brand cameos drive sharing, was never proof that you can plan a viral outcome, only that certain creative choices improve your odds at the margin. Helpful craft guidance? Yeah, sure. A basis for corporate OKR? That’s objectives and key results? Nope. Layer on platform dynamics and the case gets stronger. Meta’s shift away from news culminating in the shutdown of CrowdTangle, the very tool journalists used to see what was going viral, has reduced transparency and made spikes harder to both trigger and to verify. When the scoreboard moves behind a curtain, playing for highlight reel moments becomes folly. In some markets, we can literally watch viral news get deprioritized. In Australia, publishers report Facebook engagement at all time lows as memes and creator posts fill the feed. If the feed favors entertainment over information, it also favors retention over reach. Your viral playbook ages out fast in that environment. The New York Times captured the cultural angle. The internet that rewarded sudden mass attention is giving way to one that rewards depth: revisit rates, creator loyalty, community momentum. A share count trophy doesn’t impress the algorithm anymore. Sustained, meaningful engagement does. So what should replace viral as the goal? Let’s cover a few things. First, it’s designed for compounding attention, not explosive attention. Planned content is a series, not a stunt. Build episodic formats: office hours, ask me anythings, recurring data notes, anything that trains the audience to keep coming back. The scientific finding I studied earlier is the tell. Durable growth comes from consistency, not from lucky breaks. Second, shift your KPI set. Trade shares and views as headline metrics for return rate, session depth, qualified traffic, assisted pipeline, issue literacy, whatever truly maps to your business or reputation outcomes.

Neville Hobson: .

Shel Holtz: Fractal’s rationale for de-emphasizing virality in form of authority and affinities is a good model. Third, optimize for platform fit, not platform luck. Where audiences actually engage, optimize to the native behaviors that correlate with retention. A quick example outside our usual stomping grounds, science communities now see richer discussion on BlueSky than on X because the culture and mechanics favor constructive back and forth over dunking. Smaller network, higher quality signal. Build earned elasticity into distribution is the fourth tactic. Yeah, keep a line item for opportunistic amplification. Creator partnerships, timely collaborations, paid boosts that extend life for posts that deserve it. But treat amplification as gasoline for a fire you’re already tending, not a match you light and hope it sets the world on fire. Fifth, prepare for attention risk, not attention gain. The wider your message travels, the less control you have over how it’s interpreted. Your plan needs counter message, clarification assets, and issues response baked in. Meta’s data opacity only raises the bar for preparedness. So when does a viral goal still make sense? Well, there are edge cases, awareness blitzes for entertainment launches, urgent public interest alerts, or short run stunts designed to trigger specific behaviors.

Neville Hobson: Hmm

Shel Holtz: like getting signups during a defined window of time. Even then, the viral moment has to be tethered to a post-moment system, a next step path, a nurture stream, community onboarding, so the spike has somewhere to go. If you’re still writing, “go viral” on a brief, cross it out, replace it with create repeat engagement among the right people, increase qualified discovery, or raise message salience with priority stakeholders. Those are hard, unsexy verbs, but they’re the ones that move the work forward. And if you’re thinking, “we’ve always chased reach, why change now?” consider the evidence. The platforms don’t reward virality the way they used to. The data windows are narrowing and the best research we have shows spikes don’t stick. Plan for compounding attention. Let virality, if it arrives, be a bonus, not the business model.

Neville Hobson: Good assessment, Shel. I had to admit, I was thinking about the two words, viral marketing. And what came to my mind, as it’s not a topic I’m kind of thinking about every day, was what we saw a decade ago, which was spontaneous stuff that largely wasn’t planned, although much of it was planned, but didn’t really work. Things like, for instance, I reminded myself today and I looked at the video, the Chewbacca mom back in 2016, I think it was, that was a surprise hit. I mean, really, it was natural. It was spontaneous. It wasn’t planned. It was brilliant. It was wonderful, actually. But it perhaps illustrated the point you’ve just made, which because that wasn’t part of any kind of plan at all, it was spontaneous. So it didn’t have any kind of road to go down. It just corrupted and grabbed lots of attention. And that was it. The guy whose name I can’t recall nor his company, but who was interviewed on the BBC, sitting in his home office, business suit and tie and all that, and his two little children burst in. One was a little toddler and one was even younger, who came in on like a baby stroller. And then the maid came in behind to drag them out. And all the time the interviewer was asking the questi