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Digital Marketing & SEO vocabulary · Social Media Marketing

Go viral

Meaning in digital marketing & SEO, with examples

/ɡoʊ ˈvaɪrəl/idiomCommon term

In digital marketing & SEO, go viral means: To spread very quickly and widely online as huge numbers of people share, comment on or watch something in a short time.

In Turkish: viral olmak, hızla yayılmak

How it is used

Used in everyday team talk about posts and videos: the video went viral overnight. Clients often ask for content that will go viral, but this is very hard to plan. 'Viral' is also an adjective: a viral post.

Example sentences

  1. The behind-the-scenes video went viral and brought 20,000 new followers in two days.

  2. We can't promise it will go viral, but we can make it easy to share.

Common collocations

  • go viral overnight
  • viral video
  • viral post
  • viral campaign
  • engagementThe ways people actively interact with content, such as liking, commenting, sharing, saving or clicking, rather than just seeing it.
  • reachThe number of different people who saw a piece of content or an ad at least once during a period.
  • short-form videoShort videos, usually vertical and often under a minute, made for platforms such as TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.
  • trendingCurrently very popular and being talked about by many people online, especially on social media.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Social Media Marketing

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