Inside an Instagram meme empire's strategy to get in your DMs

• Instagram is in its sharing era.
• Doing Things, a meme-focused media firm, is crafting videos to drive sharing in group chats and DMs.
• Making videos shareable is all about focusing on "universal truths," creative lead Sam Graviet said.

Instagram creators don't just want your likes. They need you to DM their posts to your friends.

Doing Things, the company that runs accounts like Overheard and Recess Therapy, is trying to tailor its videos so that Instagram users share them.

"Likes are awesome. Saves are great. Comments are amazing for reaching your followers," Sam Graviet, Doing Things' creative director of brand partnerships, told Business Insider. "But if you really want that algorithm boost … you need to be able to master what a share is."

The strategy shift stems from the top. Meta executives like head of Instagram Adam Mosseri have made it clear that "shares" — when a user sends a post elsewhere, such as to DMs or stories — is one of the top signals Instagram uses to rank content in the app.

"When you're creating content, think about creating something that people would want to send to a friend," Mosseri said in a 2024 Instagram post.

Why do DMs suddenly matter more? It's partly because that's how users actually interact with each other on Meta's apps.

"It used to be that you interacted with the people that you were connecting with in feed," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told Stratechery's Ben Thompson. But today, "the real social interaction comes from you finding something interesting and putting it in a group chat with friends or a one-on-one chat," Zuckerberg added.

Mosseri said at the beginning of the year that Instagram would be "doubling down" on messaging, adding more than 20 new updates to DMs between March 2024 and 2025.

Meta even positioned Instagram as "more of a messaging app than a broadcast-sharing app," in a statement attributed to Mosseri in Meta's opening presentation during the ongoing Federal Trade Commission antitrust trial against the company.

For Instagram creators, the direction is clear: make videos that people can't help but pass around.

Making shareable content

So, how do content creators make their videos more shareable and gain access to private spaces like the family group chat?

It's all about making content that's widely relatable, Graviet said.

Sometimes Doing Things uses a prompt like "What's your biggest pet peeve?" or "What's the thing about your family that annoys you the most?" as a tool to try to make videos that could resonate with a large population and spark an emotional reaction that drives sharing.

"It's finding those shared universal truths that we all have and then developing the content around that," he said.

One example could be a video poking fun at a trope that dads are obsessed with lawn care (the company has an account dedicated to dad humor). Workplace jokes are also popular on Doing Things' meme accounts like Middle Class Fancy.

The company puts the most shareable moment of a video in its first few seconds.

"It is like a hook to get you to watch the whole video," Graviet said. "That's just the part that spurs that connection with somebody else that you have, that lands the video in their inbox."

Doing Things may be uniquely positioned to pull off relatable content. Much of its portfolio is meme accounts that lean into observational humor, such as its city-specific accounts like Overheard New York or its animal feeds like Doggos Doing Things. The company, which raised a $21.5 million Series A round in 2022, has tens of millions of followers across platforms on its over 40 different accounts.

Graviet said Instagram is its top focus. Being an Instagram-first media company in 2025 means focusing on sharing.

"Sharing is such a huge part of the platform now, it's kind of always on your mind," Graviet said.