Even puppy videos fail 🐶 unless…

Do you ever feel like virality is only preserved for “certain people” on social media?

It’s easy to assume that ALL pet reels, model-looking people, and paradise locations automatically go viral.

That they have an unfair advantage that’s just too difficult to compete with.

But in reality, those viral videos are just the tip of a highly biased iceberg.

The majority of cute puppy videos and other mainstream topics never go viral.

They remain hidden in the black hole of the algorithm.

Because, like in ANY niche on social, there’s a right and wrong way to design viral content.

We saw this recently with Erin Gorrie, who runs a puppy yoga studio in Ontario, Canada.

Despite her adorable business model, she couldn’t pinpoint what made certain videos succeed and others flop with very similar content.

So we ran it through our Viral Content Model to uncover the performance drivers that could shoot it up to the tip of that iceberg.

By the way, if you want to use the same process to generate virality for your brand, my team would be happy to help.

But back to puppies.

Turns out, it didn’t even matter how cute the dogs were in Erin’s footage.

It was the reaction of her yoga students that changed everything.

The dogs could wreak havoc all they wanted but that didn’t create tension in her storytelling.

It was how people interacted with them that made the crucial difference between blending into the sea of pet videos versus nailing a viral content format.

So, in her new reels, she made sure she captured the facial expressions of students and how they reacted to the little troublemakers.

Emotions are truly contagious (thanks to our mirror neurons), which is why reaction videos are so powerful.

But they only work if the context of what people are reacting to is clearly set up from the beginning (in this case, a yoga class raided by tiny dogs).

Once Erin made this simple change to her videos, the results spoke for themselves.

Within days, her content went viral on Instagram.

She gained a 70,000 following and her video above reached 34 million views.

With several million-view content pieces, she keeps getting inquiries on her landing pages and selling out her classes.

So being cute isn’t enough to go viral.

Ultimately, it’s those minutiae details that drive performance, no matter your niche.

I’ll show you next week how an extremely simple (but overlooked) editing feature can make or break a viral video.