Creating viral Instagram posts is one of the cornerstones of being successful on Instagram. If you want to grow organically on Instagram, you need to make sure that your content is on point. Creating content with viral potential will increase your chances of ranking on hashtags and getting your post featured on the explore page.
Is there a proven system that you can follow to achieve this? Yes, there is! And I’ll break it down for you today…
What Is A “Viral Instagram Post”?
Viral Instagram posts usually get more engagement than normal posts get. In other words, their performance is above average and a lot of people enjoy the content and interact with it. Instagram takes note of a post’s performance and if it performs above average in terms of likes, comments, shares, and saves, it will likely be promoted by Instagram and reach a larger audience.
Where Are Viral Instagram Posts Promoted?
For a post to go viral, it needs to be featured in at least one of the following places on the platform:
- Hashtags with a lot of traffic. If your post lands in the top 9 featured posts for popular hashtags such as #travel you’re likely to get a lot of traction on your post and grow your audience further.
- The explore page. Instagram shows users content they may like on the explore page, and if your post gets featured there you’re in for a ton of exposure.
Both hashtags and the explore page are great tools for you to get your viral content out to the masses. Other than that viral Instagram posts can also be promoted by users who share the content with their followers or friends via stories or Direct Messages.
Finding Ideas For Viral Instagram Content
Creating viral Instagram posts isn’t the hard part of the process. The hard part is getting the idea for a viral post. That’s what most people struggle with. However, finding ideas for viral content doesn’t have to be a frustrating and daunting task. Let me show you how researching viral posts can become easy & almost effortless.
Inspiration Through Similar Accounts
When you’re trying to create a viral post it’s important to remember one thing: You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You don’t need to come up with a brand new idea for a viral post. Instead, you can take viral Instagram posts from accounts similar to yours and model what they did. That doesn’t mean that you should knock off their idea. Instead, use it as inspiration to create something similar. Let me walk you through the process.
- First, you need to find big accounts in your niche which post content regularly and grow their accounts organically. You can use platforms such as IGBlade or SocialBlade to see how many followers these accounts are gaining per day. Any large account in your niche that gains a minimum of 300 followers per day should be suitable. Ideally, you should pick 5-10 accounts that gain at least 500/day and have at least a couple hundred thousand followers.
- Once you found 5-10 suitable accounts you should go through each account’s posts and see which of their posts gained more likes and comments than their other posts gain on average. For example: If an account usually gets 10.000 likes per post and one of their posts has 16.000 likes, you just stumbled across a post with viral potential, because it outperformed the other posts.
- After doing this with a couple of accounts you should have a list of at least 50-100 viral Instagram posts. And this is where you can get creative. Recreate the posts, make a similar one, or even make the same post with your own touch to it.
Keep in mind, however, that if your post is very similar to the original, you should give the creator credit. If you run a theme page that reposts content, go ahead and repost the viral posts, but always give credit to the owner in your caption!
Creating Your Own Viral Instagram Posts
Once you have a set of posts that you want to recreate, you need to create high-quality posts. The way to do that will vary depending on the niche you’re in, but here are a couple of ideas:
- If you’re looking to create infographics or edit images, you should give Canva a shot. Canva is an app that allows you to create simple graphics and animations for your Instagram posts. You can add text to images, lay images on top of each other, and much more.
- If you have more money than time, you may want to consider outsourcing the job to someone else. Especially if you’re looking to create videos since they aren’t easy to make yourself with zero experience. Hiring someone to create these viral Instagram posts for you is a great way to get high-quality posts. Platforms such as Fiverr or Upwork make it easy to do so and have a lot of cheap offers!
Tracking Your Posts Performance
Once you upload your viral Instagram posts you need to keep track of their performance and see how well they are performing with hashtags and the explore page. You should also read our article on organic Instagram growth to learn more about ranking on hashtags and the explore page. The strategies detailed in that article will help you get your posts featured there.
Instagram Post Insights
If you don’t already have a creator or business Instagram account, you need to take care of that now. You can upgrade your current account within your profile settings very easily. Once you have a creator or business profile you will have access to audience and performance insights.
As you can see, the insights will show you how each post performed. You will see how many impressions your post got through hashtags, through the explore page, and how many people weren’t following you but still saw your post. Insights such as total reach, shares, saves, and followers generated are also included.
Final Thoughts On Creating Viral Instagram Posts
Refining your strategies for creating viral Instagram posts over time will be essential to your success. Keep on improving your content and always track your performance to see what performs well and what doesn’t. Analyze which types of posts perform well and which don’t. Then all that’s left to do is to double down on what’s working and keep on posting consistently. Good luck!
