Instagram’s competitive landscape makes it more challenging than ever to go viral with your reels, but one of the best and most trusted ways to go viral is to create relatable, high-quality content with strong hooks. This automatically improves your reach, follower count, story engagement, and more while attracting more users beyond your target audience.
Posting consistent high-quality reels will lead you to achieve your content marketing goals—whether to sell, build a community, or widen your customer base. It also opens you to more business opportunities and increases your brand credibility, leading to a higher follower count. In this article, we’ll highlight the key strategies to make Instagram reels go viral. Let’s get to it!
Table of Contents
- How Many Views Do Instagram Reels Need to Go Viral?
- 16 Effective Ways to Go Viral on Instagram
- Focus on Your Niche
- Create Captivating Content
- Use Creative Hooks
- Increase Your Reel Views
- Use Trending Music and Effects
- Shorten Your Reels
- Post at the Right Time
- Use Relevant Hashtags
- Add CTAs, Captions, and Text Overlays
- Create Custom Reel Covers
- Start Your Reel Series
- Use Eye-Catching Visuals
- Participate in Viral Challenges
- Collaborate with Others
- Share Reels Across Multiple Platforms
- Analyze Your Performance
- Conclusion
How Many Views Do Instagram Reels Need to Go Viral?
The number of views to go viral depends on your audience, your usual engagement metrics, and other key factors. However, getting at least 100,000 views on an Instagram reel will easily place you among viral creators, regardless of your niche.
16 Effective Ways to Go Viral on Instagram
Going viral requires taking strategic steps to get your content in front of many viewers, and here are some proven tips to guide you:
1. Focus on Your Niche
To create relevant content with your target audience in mind, pick a specific topic or theme in your niche to concentrate on. Staying current and relevant will help you capture attention and become popular in your niche.
Over time, the Instagram algorithm will automatically place your reels in front of users who are interested in that topic, helping you go viral. When choosing a niche, make sure that it’s one you are passionate and knowledgeable about. This will ensure you have a consistent flow of good ideas to inspire viral content.
2. Create Captivating Content
Start by creating a content strategy centered on your goal, whether it is educational, inspirational, or informative. Focus on videos that your audience will find relatable and shareable, increasing your reach to more users and potential to go viral, since it signals to the Instagram reels algorithm that people love it.
You also want to ensure that your content is original since many users prefer videos that tell unique stories. Unique stories will increase viewer retention and shares, especially if you infuse entertainment into them. Don’t be afraid to explore and share various types of reels, such as voiceover videos, lip-syncing reels, transitions, UGCs, etc.
3. Use Creative Hooks
The first 3 seconds of your reels are crucial to grabbing viewers’ attention, so you must ensure that every reel starts with a strong hook that is appealing and makes people curious to watch the entire reel. Some examples of attention-grabbing hooks that give a strong punch include: “5 Things I wish I knew before…”, “Stop Scrolling! How I went from This to That”, “No one will tell you this about…”, etc.
More importantly, ensure your hook relates to the main concept of the message you are conveying, to avoid misleading people or disappointing them after getting their attention.
4. Increase Your Reel Views
To achieve viral success, you need a substantial number of views on your Instagram Reels. High view counts signal to the algorithm that your content is valuable, leading to greater visibility and the potential to reach a wider audience. However, manually boosting your views can be daunting and time-consuming.
The easiest way to elevate your views is by buying authentic Instagram Reels views. This strategy can quickly amplify your view count, attract more organic interactions, and enhance your engagement rate. With increased visibility, your chances of going viral skyrocket! Don’t miss out on the chance to take your content to the next level—invest in your success and watch your reels soar!
5. Use Trending Music and Effects
Trending music and effects are popular sounds that people are currently using and listening to. With high-quality visuals, strong hooks, and trending music, you have the complete viral elements you need to become Instagram-famous. Popular music comes in handy when creating reels—to not only boost engagement but also to potentially land your reels on the Instagram Explore page.
To get started, find trending audio tracks that match the mood and message of your reel and add your personal touch to stand out amongst others using the same sounds. To get more impressions and eyes on your content, use the trending music tracks, so that the algorithm picks up your video on time to have a chance of going viral.
6. Shorten Your Reels
To make Instagram Reels go viral, short is better, no matter how appealing your visuals and how valuable your message is. So, your reel length needs to be optimized to match people’s declining attention span, as longer reels may cause viewers to lose interest.
Keeping your reel short also improves the chances of it getting replayed over again, increasing your view count and chance at going viral. The best length is between 15-25 seconds. You should also pay attention to your video size, as the optimal video size for reel layout on Instagram is 1080px x 1920px with a 9:16 aspect ratio.
7. Post at the Right Time
Maximize your visibility and give your reels the initial traction and engagement necessary to reach a larger audience by identifying the best time to post reels on Instagram, which is when your audience is most active on the app. To get started, check your Instagram analytics for when your audience is most active. You can also observe when your posts perform best on each day of the week.
Having a schedule that tells you what to post per time is also crucial to being organized and aids consistency. It might help to create a content calendar to determine the specific content to post and how often so you stay consistent.
8. Use Relevant Hashtags
Using the appropriate type and number of relevant hashtags can help your reels perform well since it allows you to be discovered by a new audience interested in that hashtag. Here are the types of hashtags to use: niche-based hashtags, trending hashtags, location-based hashtags, branded hashtags, etc.
To get the best results, use between 4-6 hashtags of various types. Your hashtags should also match your reels’ themes to make them more relatable. Avoid overly broad hashtags that make it more difficult for your audience to find your content.
9. Add CTAs, Captions, and Text Overlays
Depending on the reels’ goal, add a Call To Action (CTA), telling people what you want them to do after watching. This should be done in a way that signals benefits to your audience; for example, instead of just saying, “Follow me,” you should say, “Follow me to get more valuable tips like these.”
Another helpful reminder is to write engaging and valuable captions. This can prompt viewers to save or share your reels if the caption resonates. Your text overlay is also crucial and can add to your view time when people read it to the end. So, it should be attractive and pique their curiosity enough to watch the reel.
10. Create Custom Reel Covers
By using strong hooks on your reel covers, people will know what the reel contains and are more likely to click on it. Beyond that, it is a great way to grab attention and highlight the benefits of your reel before it starts playing. It also gives your Instagram feed a customized look and consistent layout that can make people stop scrolling to watch your reels—increasing your engagement.
There are several editing tools available to help you create simple and eye-catching reel covers. All you have to do is choose a theme color and font to keep the cover consistent and uniquely on brand. This can be used over and over again and will make your page stand out among your competitors.
11. Start Your Reel Series
Your reel series could be a teaching series, telling a featured story in parts, etc. This strategy organizes a constant flow of reel ideas that keep your audience engaged since they want to see the next video in the series. This can increase your follower count, with people following you to keep up with the series or even turning on post notifications to be alerted whenever you post.
When deciding on a series to start, make sure that your audience will find it very entertaining or useful, and infuse storytelling to keep them glued to your page. You can also check what your competitors have done in the past to give you ideas for your reels.
12. Use Eye-Catching Visuals
High-quality videos are important if you want to grab attention and go viral, especially on such a visual platform like Instagram, where every reel can be edited to perfection. To start, get a high-quality camera and ensure you clean your lens before shooting any videos, which is best done in natural sunlight or artificial light.
When editing, apply basic techniques like overlays and voiceovers where needed and use the appropriate filters and color grading that match the video’s mood and tone. There are various free editing apps to get you started without having to spend much or even a dime. Quality editing will help get your video into the limelight and gain more popularity.
13. Participate in Viral Challenges
Fun fact: some people who go viral on Instagram achieve it simply by participating in viral challenges. Since most viral reels can be tweaked to suit any niche, you should take advantage of the trends to get your content in front of a large audience. Whatever challenge you decide to join must be suitable to your message, or you risk turning people off.
To get good results from trending challenges, ensure you participate early enough and add a unique touch to your reel to stand out. Even better, you can start your viral challenge that others will participate in.
14. Collaborate with Others
With Instagram’s latest collaboration feature, you can get your content in front of another creator’s followers, which can be converted into yours now when choosing influencers, brands, or creators to collaborate with (don’t focus only on influencers). Mid-level creators work great and maybe more approachable, especially if you are a growing creator.
Cross-promoting with other creators is a great way to advertise your products and make money on Instagram. You can share more personalized content on your story, ask questions, or even share on the grid for more engagement.
15. Share Reels Across Multiple Platforms
Your reels shouldn’t start and end on Instagram, and this is what makes creating content more beneficial and rewarding. Beyond Instagram, you can share your reels on other social media platforms like TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc.
This will ensure you get the most out of all of the traffic on those other platforms, increasing your views and growing your audience. You can also repurpose your reels into microblogs for text-based platforms like X (Twitter) or blog posts to maximize exposure and virality.
16. Analyze Your Performance
Whatever you don’t measure, you can’t grow. So, beyond creating great reels, you also need to monitor your growth and understand what your analytics is saying to create better content. Identify the content that resonates more with your audience and has the most engagement, leading you to create similar ones to get more engagement.
Regularly reviewing key metrics like views, shares, saves, comments, and likes can help you discern which reels get the highest number. You can also know why a reel is not receiving views as you wanted, helping you review your strategies.
Conclusion
People go viral on Instagram every day—regardless of their present engagement rate—and that can be you, too. By creating high-quality and clear visuals, using strong hooks to grab attention, and following other strategies, as discussed above, you can get people’s attention on Instagram and get that viral streak.
Being creative, engaging other creators’ content, and optimizing your page for visibility is also crucial to reaching a larger audience. So, get to work and start creating those scroll-stopping reels that will gather thousands of views and boost your popularity.