How to Use AI to Go VIRAL on Social Media (full guide) — Silicon Valley Girl Podcast

Marina Mogilko: It feels like every new week in 2025 is a new life, like we're starting from scratch. There is this new AI tool that we're integrating. There is this new strategy and we're hiring more people to help us with all of that. So, I've been creating content for 10 years, but I've never experienced anything like this, like 2025. I try to switch off for Saturday and Sunday to be with my family. And then Sunday night, I open my feed. I start preparing for the next week and it just blows my mind.

So today we're going to talk about content creation and one thing that I took away from Google IO is that content becomes infinite. Which means that five years ago if I wanted to be on multiple platforms at the same time I needed to create multiple pieces of content. Now it's all about reorganizing your content and reproducing it in a way that fits every single platform. And this is what we're going to talk about today. It's the only way to create content in 2025.

There's one thing you should remember. Product becomes commoditized. It is already very easy to build a website in seconds, to build an app in the matter of several minutes. It has become very easy to build something. The real challenge is now how do you market it? How do you distribute it? How do you get in front of the eyeballs? And this is where content comes in, which again is very commoditized because it's easy to create it.

The topic of today's video is creating a content machine for you. In order to get your product in front of different people, I am building it right now for myself because as a creator, I have to be visible on every single platform. We're creating it for Lingu with AI characters with AI channels. So, let's dive deeper.

Remember when followers actually saw your content? I do. Ten years ago, when I posted something, I knew my audience would see it. Today, it's like I'm posting every single video hoping that it's going to get picked out by the algorithm and it's going to be shown to my followers. The rules have changed completely.

So what's actually happening—and Jack Conte, the founder of Patreon, pointed it out—we might be witnessing the death of the follower itself. So these days we're fed content by the algorithm. And anytime I open my Instagram feed, I will see some people I follow, but I feel like 60 or 70% of the content that I see will come from accounts I do not follow. And that happens because they created a video that is going viral. And this is what you need to master in 2025 to get the eyeballs.

So, in the next few minutes, I'll share the seven critical shifts you need to make in your content strategy or if you're starting from scratch, you need to adopt these things in order to start creating content in 2025. Doesn't matter if you're a solo creator or running your business. What worked yesterday is not effective today and it's actively hurting your reach.

Basically, the death of followers—something that I've already mentioned—subscribers do not really matter anymore. For me, subscribers is this legacy metric. Yes, I have 17 million followers across all my social media platforms. I've been creating content for 10 years and that's the thing. I have a million followers on this channel. I am not getting a million views on every single video because it's just not the way it works. People subscribe but then the algorithm feeds them different videos.

This started with TikTok back in the day. They made a revolutionary bet. They started showing us content based on our behavior instead of our subscriptions. And their AI basically predicted what content you'd enjoy regardless of who created it. And that bet paid off spectacularly. Now every platform—Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn—follows the same rule. So once you realize that, you realize that you don't need to focus on the subscriber count. You need to focus on how you package your content because especially on YouTube, the brutal truth is if your packaging sucks, nobody clicks on your video.

As I discovered in my analysis of top performing channels, the difference between two million views and 28 million views often comes down to how you package your idea. Your thumbnail and your title are no longer just labels. They're the most critical marketing assets you have on your YouTube channel. They basically need to create what psychologists call a curiosity gap, revealing just enough to spark interest without giving away the entire story.

And the same rule applies to any type of content. If it's a short video, then yes, we don't make a decision based on the title or thumbnail because we're fed the short video, but we make a decision when we watch, when we consume the first second of it. I just was getting ready for this video, I opened my Instagram feed and there was this girl sitting on the floor and the video started as if she's apologizing for something. Of course it's getting a lot of traction, but then it's actually an ad for her chips or something. But anyways, like you only have a second if it's a short video to captivate people's attention. Same with LinkedIn. You have these first two lines to spark people's curiosity.

And this is where I would say with our team, this is where 80% of thinking goes. We're not thinking about the actual content first. We're thinking about packaging first. How are we going to market it? And then once we find the right idea, we start filming, we search for a guest for this podcast or we start digging deeper into different AI tools. But it's all about the packaging these days because you have to be seen in all this noise. So basically, generic packaging is a death sentence in 2025.

What's happening in 2025 is that people are putting out more and more content. There is more AI generated content and I listened to this interview with a marketer who worked with Alex Hormozi and Gary Vaynerchuk. He mentioned that these guys put out hundreds of pieces of content every week. And that doesn't mean Gary Vee sits down and creates 300 pieces of content. What he actually does is he creates a couple of videos and then his team redistributes this content across social media platforms.

I remember listening to him back in 2019. I was like, I'd love to create something like that, but it costs a ton of money. I need to be able to generate enough revenue on every single outlet in order to be able to pay people who are going to cut those short videos, make those posts, etc. These days, I don't have to do that because there are plenty of AI tools that can make it for me. Basically, I'm adopting the strategy—we started a couple months ago already. We are trying to produce at least, I would say, 50 different types of content every single week, including stories. And the way we're making it is I generate ideas and my team adopts them using different AI tools. And this way we're able to be present on LinkedIn, on TikTok, on Instagram, on YouTube in different formats—short videos, long videos, written posts, threads, etc.

There are different ways to do that. My main frustration with ChatGPT is that if I produce a video on YouTube and put it into ChatGPT to extract audio or help me with frames, it doesn't do it. Basically, if you want to extract audio or text from your YouTube video or somebody else's YouTube video, you need to use multiple different platforms. But I recently discovered Poppy AI, which basically changed the whole process in our team a couple weeks ago. Because when I discovered it, I'm like, "Oh, finally."

I was using Replet. I actually wanted to code something like that because I just needed to be able to send a video to my team and say like, "Hey, now redistribute it across different platforms." But it was such a slow, painful process because then you extract the text and then you go to another tool to create a LinkedIn post and then you go to another tool to create images and then you go to another tool to create an expose because it's all different. Now we started using Poppy AI and I'm going to show you how we use it.

It's basically your mind map where you drop real content. You can actually drop an Instagram reel. Prior to Poppy we would download an Instagram video, split video from audio, upload audio somewhere. It's so hard when you are trying to make a script based on one video and you also want the frames and you also want something like frame by frame script. With Poppy, you add a YouTube video that you like or maybe a TikTok that you liked or your own reels and Poppy helps you unpack what's actually working, find the hooks that hit and turn all of this into scripts, carousels, emails in minutes.

So, here are two examples of how we use it. For example, a podcast goes out and this is the board that you see for the podcast with Samir. It went live. I drop a video and I say to Poppy like, "Hey, take information from here from this video." And then I find somebody else's content that I really like. For example, it's a LinkedIn post that performed really well, got tens of thousands of views. And I take that post and I tell Poppy, use this LinkedIn post as an example of how to write a post. Then I connect all of this to the AI chat.

I remember that during this conversation with Samir, he told something about hiring that really blew my mind. Like they went from 140 employees to 60 employees or 40 and they tripled their revenue or something like that. And I asked AI to create a LinkedIn post about Samir's hiring strategy. And they used two models. They used ChatGPT and Claude. And you know, Claude is a little bit more powerful when it comes to writing text. And oh my god, voila, it created a LinkedIn script. And you can also continue chatting with it like make it shorter, make it longer.

Another example that I really like and it's also how we use Poppy—we are making a lot of reels these days on Instagram, but with reels you have to surprise people all the time. You can't just mimic trends anymore. You have to be creative. We started making something that I called cinematic mini vlogs and I see them on the rise on Instagram as well right now. I'm using my DSLR camera. I'm using Sony Alpha 7C to film those. I am changing outfits. I invited my videographer to come over and we created a little beautiful B-roll. But basically, we're doing those mini vlogs right now and they're performing really well and our brands love them and our subscribers love them. Like everybody loves them. They're very interesting to create and there are a couple of creators on Instagram who I really like when it comes to those mini vlogs. One of them is Khloe Shin. She's amazing. I feel like she nailed this format.

So, for example, if I want to create something like she's creating, I would take two or three of her reels and tell Poppy that these are the perfect reels. The way she talks, the way she presents, the way she uses the framing. And I would also add some of the other reels that I really liked in terms of frames and in terms of scripts. And then I would add a couple of my own reels and say like hey, these are the reels that I'm creating. This is the language that I prefer to speak. And then within the chat I would say like, hey, I want to create a video, something I'm working on. I'm doing small business advice. And then I asked Poppy to create a video about financial mistakes that small business owners make based on my own storytelling and based on the formats on Instagram that I really like. And it creates the script. It creates a frame by frame script that I can use with my team and it makes the process so much easier.

And then we still save this board because we're going to use the script for other formats. Then my LinkedIn manager Sophia comes in and she says, "Hey," she just continues the chat, "Create a LinkedIn post from this script." And then if we want a written version of it, we just ask for a written version. We ask for a community post, we ask for a newsletter. And this is how you scale content, right? It's not about making so many videos that people are tired of seeing your face. It's about coming up with genuine ideas, something that you really want people to know, finding the right formats for every single platform and replicating your content.

And I feel like Poppy is the best tool out there right now. There are several tools that are specific for different platforms like for LinkedIn or for image generation, but they basically took all of those and created this thing. And I remember a couple months ago, I was talking to my husband. I was like, I am ready to pay hundreds of dollars for something like this because I wouldn't need to hire an extra person for X, an extra person for a newsletter. I would just use my own team. And here it is. Here's the tool.

A lot of people might be asking, "But Marina, come on. Just be on YouTube. Just focus on YouTube. Why would you need to be everywhere?" The thing is, again, in today's age, it takes about six times for people to see you before someone even remembers you. Consistency in format, style, and storytelling builds familiarity on each single platform. And it also builds trust because honestly, there are so many creators that I don't even remember. But you have to stand out on every single platform so that they see you not as this person who's just on TikTok. They see you as a real person.

Oh my god, this is what we're talking about. I remember like 10 years ago, things were so easy. I would just create content and my subscribers would never miss a video. I wouldn't have to be on every single platform. But then it just started and here we are.

So basically the first things that I mentioned in this video, you have to be everywhere. Changing your mindset about the format. You can use the same idea many, many times but it has to be in the right format and we nailed how you can do it. After you mastered that, you need to start paying attention to other metrics like watch time and what content actually makes your followers return to you.

You know, again, like a year ago, if you would ask me, even if you ask my social media manager, we just changed her KPI. Her KPI even a month ago on Instagram was 30 million views a month. So, she would put out a lot of different pieces of content and they would get traction, but then we started to realize that they're just getting to the wrong audience. And we're just trying to compete in this virality game that is burning me out because I'm not talking about things I love, but I'm just recreating trends. And we changed her metric. Her metric is now 100,000 views a video. And we're also working with the right type of people who want to see this. And we measure it by geography, by reach. And we also measure it by how meaningful the DMs are. So if you guys are on Instagram, please make sure you're DMing me because that means a lot for me. That means I'm reaching you.

And also what we pay a lot of attention to here on YouTube are comments, how long you guys are watching, and whether you're returning to this channel after you watched another video. Because in 2025, it's not about—because the goal is not to become the next MrBeast. The goal is to build meaningful connections because they are the main currency in 2025. In 2020, yes, views were the big currency. You have to get millions of views. You get exposure, you win.

My fund, Slow Venture, not my fund—they invested in me. I was the first creator they invested in. They raised $65 million to invest in creators. Their thesis, they're not looking for another MrBeast. They are looking for creators who are niche, who have this great relationship with their audience, and they're building products for their audience. Like maybe they're in fitness and they're building a fitness app. Maybe they're in education, they're building an educational app. They're in AI and they're educating their audience about the tools. They're not looking for the next viral creator. And this is something you need to pay attention to in your social media strategy. The goal is not to go viral. The goal is to reach the right audience and really connect deeper with them.

Hence, you're tracking retention graphs. You're tracking who's returning. You're tracking videos that are getting you more subscribers who actually return to watch your videos, but at the same time, you want to still be appealing to the new audience that's joining. So, something that you need to remember every time you're creating a video is this surprise factor. You basically have to surprise your audience every single time.

For me, this surprise factor—yes, I change formats all the time, but also outfits has become a really big part of my creator budget just because people start commenting about the outfits. If you're working with a stylist and they're really well put together, that appeals to my audience. It's the production quality. It's the storytelling. It's the events that I'm attending. Basically, the lifestyle. And I've been saying it for a long time. As a creator, you have to live your life first and it has to be exciting. You have to be excited and then your content follows. It doesn't work the other way around.

So, make your life kind of unpredictable. Make sure something is happening all the time. You're launching something, you're working on something, you're reinventing yourself. Today you're a producer, tomorrow you're going to a conference, and maybe in two weeks you're going to a fashion week because you're building an AI tool for fashion. And it doesn't mean abandoning your niche or expertise. It means finding fresh angles, unexpected twists, and moments that change assumptions within your content area.

When I started dressing up, people were like, "Well, you were teaching English." I no longer get those comments. Funny enough, everyone is used to it now. And of course, as a creator, you're responsible for diversifying your income. It can't be just brand deals. You have to think of a product. And the best performing creators are actually launching their products—Matcha, fitness mats, healthy snacks, whatever you can think of, creators are launching it. We just saw Hailey Bieber sell Rhode for a billion dollars. Of course, you can say Hailey Bieber comes from this background of actors and she married Justin Bieber, but when I saw these numbers and don't quote me on them, but something like that sounds right.

In 2022, I think Hailey herself generated 70% of sales of her Rhode products. By 2024, they had 8,000 creators promoting their product. And in 2023, I think each creator mentioned Rhode like once on average a year. In 2024, it was five times a year per creator. So something like that. So a billion dollar valuation doesn't come from Hailey Bieber. It comes from hiring an army of creators. And I see every creator being this stepping stone for a product to go into the market. You use your audience to test it. You use your audience as the key consumer because you have this close relationship, but then you take the next step. Take it to the market. And the goal is for your brand to become known, not because of you, but because of the marketing strategy you've built and because it's a great product overall.

And I feel like this final shift will separate thriving creators from struggling ones because you have to have multiple sources of income. You can't just rely on brand deals, ad revenue, because it changes all the time. So think about what you can build—like a physical product or an app—that can become 10x larger than you.

As you see, the rules have changed and they keep changing constantly. But for creators who understand the shifts, this is the most exciting time to be online. And Sergey Brin said it's the most exciting time to be alive because of this AI revolution. You're not fighting for followers. So adopt this mindset of like, hey, these new AI tools are helping me become a superhuman, a content machine. They are empowering me to build a corporation just by myself.

I am looking forward to reading your comments. How do you see your content? Are you going to start creating content in 2025? And I hope this video inspired you to use AI tools to become a better version of yourself and build something that's 100x bigger than you.