How to find viral posts in your niche (and what to do with them)

To find viral posts in your niche, stop sorting by likes and look for posts that did far better than their creator's own usual numbers. A post that got four times what that person normally gets tells you the topic or the hook really hit, and you'll find those fastest by watching a short list of people a step or two ahead of you on LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube.

Once you've found them, the goal is to learn why they worked and then make your own version with your own story. Here's how to spot them on each platform and what to do next.

Why raw likes mislead you

The posts with the most likes in your niche nearly always come from the biggest accounts, and that tells you almost nothing. Someone with a huge following gets a lot of likes on an average post, simply because a lot of people see everything they share. If you study their posts, you're learning what a big audience does out of habit, which won't show you what made one post special.

It works the other way too. A smaller creator can post something that did five times their normal, and it looks tiny next to the big names, so you scroll right past the most useful post in your feed. Likes also change with how long a post has been up, what day it went out and how many people follow the account, so comparing raw numbers across creators is comparing apples with watermelons.

The better measure: a post that beats its creator's own usual

The fix is simple. Compare each post to that same creator's normal, and nobody else's. If someone usually gets about forty reactions and one post gets two hundred, that post did five times their usual, and something in it grabbed their audience far harder than usual.

These are often called outliers, and they're the posts worth your time. They show you what the audience wanted, separate from how big the account is. We explain the idea in more detail in our glossary entry on the outlier score.

Don't bother with posts that only did a little better than usual, and study the ones that did several times their normal. Look for the same pattern showing up for two or three different people, because a single outlier can be luck, while a pattern across creators is a signal.

How to spot them on LinkedIn

LinkedIn doesn't show view counts on other people's posts, so you work with reactions and comments. Pick five to ten people in your lane, scroll back through a month or two of their posts, and note roughly what a normal post gets. Then look for the ones that jump well above that line.

Give comments extra weight, because a post that sparks a real conversation is doing something a post with quiet likes isn't. When you find one, write down the first line, the topic, the format and how long it runs. Our guide on how to research your competitors on LinkedIn walks through this step by step, and how to write a LinkedIn hook helps you make sense of the first lines you collect.

How to spot them on Instagram

Instagram shows view counts on reels in a creator's profile grid, which makes this easier. Open the reels tab, get a feel for what a normal reel does for that account, and look for the ones that sit far above the rest.

Look at what happens in the first couple of seconds, because that's what decided whether people kept watching. For carousels, look at the first slide and how many slides it runs. We go deeper in which Instagram reels are worth learning from, and if your own reels get seen but don't grow your following, read why your reels get views but no followers.

How to spot them on YouTube

On YouTube, open a channel's videos and look at the last few months, since the all-time most popular list is usually full of old videos from when the channel was different. Compare each video's views to the channel's typical recent video, and keep Shorts and long videos apart, because they get very different numbers.

When a video beats the channel's usual, the title and the thumbnail are usually why, so write those down along with the topic. Our guides on how to read a competitor's YouTube channel and how to pick YouTube video ideas show you what to do with them.

How to learn from a viral post without copying it

Copying a post word for word gets noticed, and it rarely works anyway, because the thing that made it land was partly the creator's own story. What you want is the shape underneath it.

Ask yourself a few questions about each outlier. What was the promise in the first line? What problem was it about? What format was it, a story, a list, a strong opinion or a how-to? Then write your own post that uses the same kind of hook and the same kind of topic, with a story or opinion that's really yours.

This is where your AI is a great help. Give Claude or ChatGPT three or four outliers from your space, ask what they have in common, and then ask it to write your version using a story from your week. Our guide on using AI to write content that sounds like you covers how to keep it in your voice, and how to use Claude for your personal brand has prompts you can copy.

Finding them every week without the scrolling

Doing all of this by hand works, but it takes hours and it's the first thing to go when your week gets busy. It's also hard to keep a record of what each creator normally gets, so you end up guessing.

Kadenza's Radar does the finding for you. It shows which posts from the people ahead of you on LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube beat their own usual, so a label like 4.2× means that post did four times what that person normally gets. You can copy a post straight from it and ask your AI for your take.

If you want to see how finding outliers fits into a full week of posting and getting leads, read how to grow a personal brand on LinkedIn with AI. If you're weighing it up against keeping a spreadsheet, our comparison of Kadenza and doing it by hand is honest about when doing it yourself makes more sense, and you can see the plans and pricing here.