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Social Media & Content Creation vocabulary · Engagement and Reach

Go viral

Meaning in social media & content creation, with examples

/ɡoʊ ˈvaɪrəl/idiomCore term

In social media & content creation, go viral means: To spread very quickly across the internet because huge numbers of people watch, share and talk about something in a short time.

In Turkish: viral olmak, hızla yayılmak

How it is used

Very common in conversation, news and creator talk. A video, post or tweet goes viral; in informal speech people also say it 'blew up'. The adjective is 'viral', as in a viral video or a viral trend.

Example sentences

  1. Her video about first-day nerves at a new job went viral overnight.

  2. You can't plan for a post to go viral, but you can make it easy to share.

Common collocations

  • go viral overnight
  • viral video
  • viral post
  • viral trend
  • shareTo pass your own or someone else's content on to other people, for example by sending it in a message or posting it to your story.
  • trendA sound, format, challenge or topic that many people copy or talk about on social media for a short period.
  • reachThe number of different people or accounts that saw your content at least once in a certain period.
  • For You pageTikTok's main feed of recommended videos, chosen for each user by the algorithm and including many from accounts they don't follow.

This word in other fields

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

More terms: Engagement and Reach

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