13. My first viral reel (260k views)

Have you ever posted something online, not expecting much, and then watched it explode with attention? That was me with a reel on the Surfside condo collapse. It started as a simple commentary but quickly turned into a viral sensation.

Reflecting on this journey, I realized the power of timely, relevant content. Newsjacking has become an essential part of my strategy—noticing what’s top of mind for my audience and turning it into engaging reels. It’s not about fancy production; it’s about striking a chord with real issues people care about.

In today’s episode of The Work From Anywhere Agent, I delve into how that one reel brought in over 260K views, thousands of new followers, and some incredibly valuable conversations. We’ll break down what made it resonate and practical steps you can take to replicate this success in your niche.

Dive in with me, and let's explore how an impactful piece of content can shift your engagement game. And hey, I’d love to hear your thoughts in our Facebook group, or join our 7-Day Funnel Challenge to put these insights into action. See you there!

Business Systems for Realtors Facebook group: https://facebook.com/groups/bizsystems.
7-Day Funnel Challenge: https://orbit.realestate/cnfin7days
Explore how you can team up with us at eXp: https://alexarosario.com/exp.

Transcript

Speaker 0: 0:00

In today's episode we're talking about the first time that I had a reel go viral, and I have to tell you, I kind of had an idea that this particular reel was going to do well, just because of the nature of the topic, but I had no idea that it was going to do that well. So this was a reel that I did about the Surfside building collapse here in South Florida a couple years ago and how it was going to be affecting condo assessments, and so I knew that this was something that was affecting a lot of people. I had no idea how well it was actually going to do. So for context, we ended up getting like 260,000 views, almost 200 comments, 6,000 new followers and there were about 20 really good leads that came out of that in tons of conversations just 20 like actually qualified leads. Now, in terms of how I came up with this is I'm really big on newsjacking, which is essentially I subscribe to the South Florida Business Journal and a couple of other news platforms like Housing Wire and BAM and the Real Deal, and about once a week I'll go through and I'll kind of scroll through to see what topics that people are going to be interested in talking about, and I basically just take a screenshot of the article, and so I end up using that as the background for my green screen reels on Instagram, and then they get repurposed to the other platforms, and so this particular reel took me all of probably three or five minutes to record. I sent it over to my VA to edit, and so we talk about how to edit these types of reels inside of the content funnels challenge, and we got it published and almost immediately started getting tons of comments, and so I've said this before and I'll continue to say it again, which is, if you really want to know if a piece of your content is going to do really well, it comes down to how quickly you end up getting comments.

Speaker 0: 1:54

Because this particular topic was so controversial it was like wildfire. It was my best performing reel on both TikTok and Instagram, and it really showed me the power of how quickly a reel can go viral. There was nothing special about this reel. The lighting wasn't that great, my audio wasn't that great. I literally just talked about a topic that I knew a lot of people were going to be interested in and, so as to sort of capitalize on that, what I had my VA do was every person that commented, I made sure that we responded to, made sure that we DMed personally, and then, as people were following us, I made sure that we were reaching out to them as well. And so you know, one piece of content itself is not going to change your whole life or anything like that, but it is interesting to see that one piece of content can have such a big impact. I've since had several reels go what I call baby viral right. They have had 15, 20, 30,000 views and tons of comments.

Speaker 0: 2:58

But one of the fastest ways to continue building your community and really establishing your thought leadership is, when you find a topic that your audience responds to, don't stop creating content around that topic until they stop engaging and you can use their comments as sort of the prompts for the rest of your content. And so, instead of just answering their comment in a text form, record a new reel using their comment as like the little header above your head, and then use that as a reel and then answer their comment with your new reel. And so that's a great way to continue growing your traffic, because over time, when people come across that content later and they want to know the same thing. That's how people start binging your content Just one of the simple ways to make your content go viral really, really quickly.

Speaker 0: 3:48

And, by the way, every single person that engaged from that was actually someone local. It wasn't just other real estate agents there were a handful, but for the most part, it was local people that were following me because of the nature of the conversation, and so don't be afraid to borrow the news and use that as your own content. That has been the fastest way that our content and our audience have grown, and so if you want to know more about how to do things like this, make sure you join our content funnels challenge. It's running right now. It's free to join, so I'm going to drop the link in the description here and you can go ahead and join us. I will see you in the content funnels challenge and I'm looking forward to seeing you again in the next episode.