For Photographers : Why going "viral" shouldn't be your goal

First I want to preface that this is specific to Canadian photographers. I have no idea how things work in the States and other countries where you can actually monetize your views.

At the time of writing this, my most “viral” post on Instagram has 1.4 Million views. I have a second post just shy of 1 million and a few in the hundreds of thousands of views. I also have under 5,000 followers. After my first couple posts that went “viral” (for the sake of this blog, I’m considering that to be over 250k views), the novelty of it really wore off for me and I decided to stop trying to chase this idea of “going viral”. Now let me tell you why.

We all think that views on social media are a good thing. Eyes seeing our services couldn’t be bad, right? Well I’d actually like to challenge that idea. One of my most “viral” videos, with 800k+ views, was a short little clip of my horse running that had nothing to do with photography, or my specific geographic location. It was popular because it was a quick and relatable video, making it perfect for re-sharing. But it did nothing to further my business.

Another reel I posted recently garnered 50k views on instagram and 140k on Facebook. I also gained hundreds of followers on both platforms from this video. This one was photography focused, so that’s good right? Again, not really, because the algorithm was primarily showing it to accounts in the United States and Australia, neither of which I service. This is despite using very specific geographic hashtags. But the problem is that once a certain demographic of people start interacting with your account and content, the algorithm is more likely to push your content to other people who fall in that demographic.

So what have I learnt and how am I addressing this instead? By creating very specific and niche content. I’m no longer creating content that is intended for a broad audience and attractive to re-share, but rather getting hyper specific about the type of person my content is targeting, and the geographical location. Because I would rather my content be seen by one Alberta horse girl than by a thousand people in Australia. I’m not out here chasing views, I’m trying to speak directly to my potential customers and help the equestrians of Alberta, and Canada, have beautiful portraits with their horses.