Influenced: The Viral Effect

#Viral + #Trending = #Famous?

For Bella Lindsay, “overnight success” is not an exaggeration.

Bella Lindsay never started with a five-year content strategy or carefully curated personal brand. When she began posting on TikTok in 2023, it was simply something she enjoyed.

“At first, it was literally just a bit of fun,” she says. “I’d post random relatable posts and little thirst traps, and I’d get 200 or 300 likes and think, ‘Oh, that’s quite sick, my views are going up.’”

Then she started talking. Unbothered by the prospect of people from her hometown judging her, Bella began posting conversational videos and noticed something shift.

“From there, it just shot up.”

Bella documented her breast augmentation and one clip attracted around 40 million views.

“I would say I did kind of blow up overnight, and I know that’s quite rare,” she says. “I was gaining something like 100,000 followers a day.”

The numbers soon became more than validation on a screen. By around 100,000 followers, Bella says she was charging approximately £3,000 for some brand collaborations. Her audience continued to climb into the millions.

It was a future she could hardly have imagined a few years earlier. After struggling severely with her mental health as a teenager, Bella did not complete her A-levels and found herself working at McDonald’s without a clear idea of what would come next.

“I felt quite lost. Even at 17, I was thinking, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’ I didn’t have the A-levels to go to university and I felt like I had no direction.”

Today, social media is her full-time career.

“TikTok has literally changed my life. I make enough money to be able to treat my family to holidays and things that the majority of 21-year-olds probably aren’t able to do.”

#GoingViral changed Bella’s life...

...but it also changed her relationship with social media.

The Viral Effect did not simply change Bella’s career. It also changed the way she saw herself.

After experiencing severe insecurity as a teenager, putting herself in front of millions of strangers has helped her let go of some of it.

“Sometimes I’ll open TikTok to film a video and think, ‘I look like shit. I’ve got no makeup on. I look a mess,’” she says. “But being able to post it anyway and think, ‘No one actually cares,’ is so freeing.”

Being herself became part of the formula. The more curated thirst-trap content she had posted previously never connected in quite the same way.

“It wasn’t real. It wasn’t me.”

But authenticity becomes complicated when millions of people expect access to it. Bella says she sometimes feels pressure to remain the same person audiences initially followed, even as the success of her platform transforms the life she is sharing.

“There’s also the pressure to keep posting and posting,” she says.

Her visibility expanded further after appearing on JD Sports’ reality series Locked In. For two weeks, Bella swapped constant access to her phone for constant cameras, living with strangers while audiences watched from outside.

“You start second guessing everything because you don’t know how production is going to edit it,” she says. Despite the anxiety, she “absolutely loved” the experience and would do it again.

That contradiction runs through Bella’s relationship with online fame. She acknowledges the hate and pressure but refuses to portray a career she loves as something to complain about.

“My head is TikTok, TikTok, TikTok, 24/7,”

“I wouldn’t change what I do for the world — there’s nothing else I’d want to do — but I can’t really unwind.”

Go Viral, but #StayRelevant

Katie Brooks is also familiar with what it feels like to watch the numbers suddenly rise.

Her platform began during a difficult period in her relationship with food, when she started uploading food videos as part of her recovery.

“They started to blow up. I’d tried to grow on social media before and suddenly people were engaging with my content.”

At the time, Katie was still at college and mostly posting for fun. Years later, she continues to create fitness and lifestyle content, but the online world surrounding her has changed.

“At the start, I think a lot of people posted mainly for fun,”

“Now, more people want social media to become their career, so there’s much more effort and strategy behind it.”

Her follower count may look relatively similar to where it settled after her initial growth, but underneath it sits an audience constantly shifting as new followers arrive and others move on.

Katie does not obsessively chase the algorithm, but she cannot ignore it either. Trends move quickly, and disappearing for too long can come at the cost of views.

“If there’s a food trend, I’ll think, ‘I need to get that now and post it while people are still interested.’”

The endless stream of other creators can make comparison difficult too.

“I struggle with comparing my content to other creators when I see a certain style doing really well. Sometimes I think, ‘Maybe I should do that too.’”

Instead, Katie has settled on content she knows she can sustain, even when life gets busy: talking to camera, voiceovers and simpler editing styles.

“I’ve realised you have to make the kind of content you actually enjoy and can still produce on a bad day.”

Unlike Bella, Katie continues to work outside social media. The decision provides financial reliability, but it also gives her something perhaps equally valuable: distance.

“You can get completely stuck in social media and overthink everything. Even at my in-person job, it feels like time off from social media.”

“I don’t think I give myself enough credit,” Katie says. “If I told myself two years ago that I’d still be here doing this now, I’d have been really happy.”