How to find viral Reels in your niche

Why Explore and hashtags mislead you

Explore, the Reels feed and hashtag pages are dominated by big accounts, and a big account's big numbers are just its normal. A Reel with three million views from a creator who always gets three million tells you nothing about what to make. The Reel that matters is the one that got thirty times its creator's usual views, and on a big feed it is invisible.

Step 1: list 10 to 20 accounts in your niche

Mix sizes, but lean small: a few large accounts and mostly creators between a few thousand and a hundred thousand followers. Their breakouts come from the content, not the audience they already had. To find them, search your topic on Instagram or TikTok, open the "suggested" accounts on a creator you already know, and look at who the bigger accounts collaborate with.

Step 2: rank each account's posts by outlier score

The outlier score is a post's views divided by the median views of the same creator's recent posts. 1× is a normal day, 3× is worth a look, 10× is the one to study.

• By hand: write down the views of an account's last 15 to 20 posts, find the median, and divide each post by it. The outlier score calculator does the arithmetic.
• In one click: with Sortflare, open the profile, press Alt+S, click Sort and choose Outlier score. Every post gets its score, and the breakouts rise to the top.

Step 3: read the top three of each account

For each breakout, note five things: the hook (the first line said or written on screen), what happens in the first three seconds, the format (talking head, voiceover, list, before and after), the length, and the topic. Transcribing the Reels puts the hooks side by side as text, which makes the pattern much easier to see than rewatching.

Step 4: put everything in one sheet

Export each account's ranked list into the same spreadsheet and sort the whole sheet by outlier score. When the same topic or format breaks out for three different creators in the same month, that is the signal. One creator's hit can be luck; three is a trend. See exporting posts to a spreadsheet.

On TikTok and Facebook

The method is the same. On TikTok, open each creator's profile; TikTok's own Popular tab shows the biggest videos, not the biggest surprises, so sort by outlier score instead (more on sorting TikTok). On Facebook, open each page's Reels tab and sort there (Facebook Reels).

Copy the structure, not the video

A breakout tells you what the audience responded to: a question in the hook, a format, a topic. Take that and make it yours. Reposting someone else's Reel gets you nowhere and gets reported.

Questions

What counts as a viral Reel?

There is no fixed number. A Reel is a breakout when it gets several times its creator's usual views; for a small account that can be 50,000 views, for a large one several million.

How many accounts should I track?

Ten to twenty is enough to see patterns and small enough to review every week or two.

Is there a free way to do this?

Yes. The free plan sorts each account's latest 25 posts by outlier score, which covers the last few weeks for most creators and is what this method needs.

Does it work on YouTube Shorts?

Yes for ranking: open a channel's Shorts tab and sort by outlier score. Downloading and transcribing are not available on YouTube.