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Hosted by Antonia Semanske, founder of Crush Your Social, this podcast helps service-based business owners turn their online presence into a clear extension of their expertise.
If your business runs on referrals, reputation, and results—but your content isn’t reflecting that—this show is for you.
You’ll learn how to use platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn to build visibility, reinforce trust, and position yourself as the go-to in your space—without burning time or following trends that don’t serve your goals.
Practical insights. Strategic content. Credibility that converts.
(Soft Music)
As you're going about your business and you're thinking about making viral content, think about the kind of viral content you're making. Is this the kind of viral I want to be known for?
I've been having a lot of conversations with people in the real world about viral content. And these are business owners who aren't doing a lot on Instagram. They're trying to figure it out and they want to go viral because they think it will help their business. Let's just start with what does viral mean?
When a post goes viral, it usually means, and there's lots of ways to describe it, but what it means in general is that you're getting 10X or 10 times the views or 10 times the reach that your normal content would get. So that's how you can tell if a post has gone viral. And you can kind of check that on anybody's page. You go to their Reels page especially, because you can check their views. And if you see a post that has a lot more views than any other, you know that's a viral post. And people see these and they think, I want a viral post, I want that kind of reach. So I'm gonna start with talking about my most, two pieces of my most recent viral content and kind of why they were viral and what that meant to me as a business owner. The first post we're gonna talk about is a post called 40 Story Ideas That Build Trust. This is a list post, so it was a static post. It had a headline and it had 40 ideas for my ideal audience of how they can build trust in their stories. And that post got views of 22,000 people. It had 500 likes, had low comments, 59 comments. I don't think I answered them all. Reels, that can be a kind of a thing. It had 371 shares. And over 1,000 saves. The post was seen by people on the Explore page, on their homepage, in the hashtags pages and other places because it was shared. So I got a lot of reach to non-followers, which is really good. Here's another post that was viral, that went viral for me. And it was a meme post and it had trending music and I put a headline at the top that said something to the effect of this is how I feel when my brand gets recognized and remembered. So it was supposed to reach my ideal followers, but the post got 17,000 views, 238 likes, 78 comments, lots of comments on that one. 31 saves and five shares. Well, the two posts went viral, but the business results were different. The post that was a meme was really fun and people liked it, they were talking about it. Not many people shared it though, because it was just kind of a fun piece of content. With the other post, the static post that was actually turned into a video, it got 178 profile visits.
73 people followed me from that post and three people tapped my link. So as a business owner, that post was really valuable because 178 people that saw that static post, they went to my page and they wanted to find out more about my business and 178 people, that's a good number for me. Let's contrast it with the meme post that did really well. It got three followers and they were probably not my ideal followers. It got no profile visits and no external link taps. So as a business owner, I would say this is probably what I would classify as bad viral content. And the reason is, is because it reached such a wide audience of people that it didn't attract the right people to my business. The post wasn't structured to build my reputation. It was just fun content. And it's okay to have that kind of content on your page and that viral content is fun. But if you're gonna do it, you shouldn't strive for viral content on every post because what happens is if you only create fun content, that's viral content, your page will be kind of confusing because you might end up with a lot of random followers that just happened to tap that follow button because they liked that particular post, but they aren't your ideal clients or your ideal audience members. What's the difference between good viral and bad viral content? Well, in my opinion, good viral content gives you profile visits. It's shared, it brings on website taps and it gets saved. Those are business metrics that will tell you if you're hitting the right information. Bad viral content, if you wanna call it bad, gives you a lot of likes and comments, but nothing else is happening. No one comes to your page to find out who you are. It might be random people, so you really don't want them to follow you because they aren't going to be part of your community. The bottom line is that the good viral content is gonna bring you future clients and it's gonna help your business grow. And bad viral content is not going to do anything for you.
So you can do viral content and you can strive for it on occasion, but here's three tips for doing it right. If you're gonna do viral content, the first thing is your goal should be to nurture your current followers. And what I mean by that is that it's gonna be fun content most likely, but you want it to help your current followers who are already, they already know who you are, they already know that you know what you're doing. They can see a side of your personality that they wouldn't normally see. So you're going to reach a lot of people and some of them won't be ideal followers, but it's still okay because the goal wasn't to attract new followers. The goal was to nurture your current followers with fun content that happened to go viral.
Tip two would be use a topic that resonates with your specific audience. So if you know your audience likes football, you can do a football meme and talk about your business and they'll think it's fun, they'll resonate with it. And people who like football will also resonate with that. And the third tip is use your keywords. If you're going to do viral content, make sure that you have your industry and niche keywords, your audience identity keywords, and the right hashtags that will tie it together that will guarantee more reach.
Now let's go crush it.
(Upbeat Music)