Transcript of Brendan Kane: Why Your Content Isn’t Going Viral (and How to Fix It)

Is social media a requirement to success? No. Does it give you a distinct advantage and a higher chance of likelihood of success if you master it? Absolutely. The things that you and I are sharing with the audience today, 99% of content creators are not doing.

Right.

It's still very winnable. The follower number doesn't necessarily matter as much anymore. Like we just launched with a, an Alzheimer's expert, a doctor. had no audience, zero followers, zero views. And in 2 months, he's at 150,000 followers and over 50 million views because the content was dialed in because we applied these principles, not because he was somebody that was famous, or had this huge audience.

I know there's a lot of women listening who want to do social media for business purposes. They want to grow a personal brand, they want to be able to build freedom-based businesses, But they cannot seem to break through. When you're looking at starting from scratch with somebody, how are you planning out their first 1, 3, 6 months?

There's a few different questions, and people can use this for themselves, but that I look to determine what is the strategy that's best fit for them.

Okay, I don't normally do intros, but I just have to read out a lot of these numbers because it's mind-blowing. 20 years in social media, 15,000 hours of research across 400 organic content formats, 60 billion views, 100 million followers for clients, built a million followers in 30 days twice, built platforms for Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Adriana Lima. I mean, it's mind-blowing. You are one of the leading voices in social media. So I have to ask, what do you think about the current landscape? I, I don't think it's changed as much as it has in the last 12 months.

It's a great question. And it, the fascinating thing that I look at is it's just storytelling. Like it's, it's crazy from the standpoint, cuz you and I were talking beforehand of how long we've been in this space. Like we, I think we've both been in it the same amount of time.

You a bit longer.

But so when I started, I started in 2005, there is less than 50 million people on social media today. There's 4, 5.4 billion uploading a billion pieces of content to these platforms every day. And I think so many people focus on like, what's the hack? What's the trick? What's the key to the algorithm? Like, you know, am I playing the lottery? Do I, is it about spending money? But in reality, my thesis is it's the great storytellers rise to the top. So it's almost like ignore the algorithms, ignore all those other things, and let's get down to kind of like how we can be great storytellers. And if you focus on that, that's ultimately where success comes from.

I could not agree more with you, but I will say I think it's the step most people skip. I think it's very tempting to jump onto social media and just wanna go viral, to do all the trends, to put out, especially now, sloppy content and just hope that it works. Then when it doesn't, feel bad about yourself as if, oh my God, I'm doing something wrong. But if it comes down to storytelling, are you saying, well, actually, if you wanna do this right, that's what you need to learn how to do?

100%. Yeah, I mean, it's, and I agree with you, everybody kind of thinks that social media is like this brand new thing. It's this mystery black box that you have to kind of find these tricks and tips to do it. But honestly, it's history repeating itself. So we've been telling stories for over 50,000 years. And the fascinating thing is some of the storytelling formats, and when I say format, and we'll dive deep into it today, it's basically a repeatable structure that has proven to have success time and time again. So let's take a prime one, for example, Man on the Street, which I'm sure everybody listening to this has seen that format. You approach a random stranger on a street and a story unfolds. Now, the beauty of formats like Man on the Street, you can use it for any industry or sector. So you have School of Hard Knocks that's using it for entrepreneurship. You have Alex Stemp that's using it for photography. You have Body by Mark that's using it for nutrition. Now, the fascinating thing is, do you know the first time that Man on the Street was ever used in video form?

No.

1956 for the first season of The Tonight Show.

What?

Yes.

Wow.

So we're talking over 70 years of using that format. You, you look at another example like Ryan Serhant is huge in real estate. He does like property tours. There's a lot of people doing that on social media. But if you think about Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or Robin Leach.

Cribs.

Yeah. MTV Cribs.

Oh my God.

He's just repeating himself. Or you think about MrBeast, he's doing the challenge format. Think about MTV, um, Road Rules back in the day doing the challenges. You think about Survivor starting in 1999, or there's another, um, format I'm sure you, you know, it's called Two Characters, One Lightbulb. It's where the same person plays two different characters and debunks a common myth or misconception about that. So like Erika Kohlberg uses it for the fine print of legal advice. Think about Austin Powers back in 19— I think it was '97.

Uh-huh.

He's playing, um, Dr. Evil and Austin Powers and going back and forth. So that's where, like, I agree with you 100%. It's like, learn the art of storytelling. And history shows us that if you become a masterful storyteller, it doesn't matter what platform lives, what platform dies, what comes next. you will ultimately always win.

I think that's such a great perspective. And I, I know there's a lot of women listening, I really know this, who want to do social media. They want to do it for business purposes. They want to grow a personal brand. They want to be able to build freedom-based businesses. They see why it's important. They do not need sold on why it's important, but they cannot seem to break through. And I think a lot of it comes back to this is We too quickly will jump into the execution without really pulling back to understand the formats, without understanding, okay, what connects to someone. And for you, I mean, you are one of the best probably in the world at starting and scaling accounts for multiple different types of people, different industries. When you are looking at starting from scratch with somebody, what is it you're sitting down and talking to them? How are you storyboarding this? How are you planning out their first 1, 3, 6 months?

So we do a very deep dive to understand who the person is. So there's a few different questions and people can use this for themselves, but that I look to determine what is the strat— strategy that's best fit for them. Um, number one, what is your personality type? Like, what is your personality structure? Are you extreme, um, high energy person? Are you kind of more low key? Are you comfortable on camera? Are you uncomfortable on camera? These elements contribute to what type of format, what type of strategy is best suited for you. Even for myself, like, I'm not gonna do what Gary Vee does because I don't have the personality of him, so I'm not gonna try and chase what he does. So we take clients through like a deep personality assessment to understand that. Number 2 is like, what resources do you have? Do you have a team? Do you not have a team? Do you just have an iPhone? Do you have a whole setup? Do you have a studio? Because the beauty is like we work with clients all the time that all they have is an iPhone and they are solo creators and they can still have massive success.

So we want to understand kind of what their personality is, what resources they have, and also what business and goals and objectives do they have? What are they trying to achieve with their business? Because we want to always tie it to, to business goals and outcomes. So that's typically where I start with clients. And we have a 5-step process that, that we follow with this. So step number 1 is research. And I think that this is the biggest mistake that people make is oftentimes they just look at their own content and they try and find the clues of how they're going to scale with their own content. Now, for successful creators, for established creators, the clues are there, but people that haven't broken through on a consistent basis or are just starting out or are struggling, You can't find the clues within your own brand or your own channels. You need to go out and learn from others. So for example, I started my career in the film industry and I went to film school, and I'm sure most people have seen movies about people going to film school. Like, what do you do? Well, they make you sit down and watch classic movies and break down all of the elements of what made that movie good, what made that movie bad.

They make you write screenplays. Like, I wanted to be a producer. They made me take acting classes. They had to, they made me take writing classes and, um, And editing and, and cinematography, all these elements. Why? Because that's how you learn. All of these little different elements contribute to a successful story. So if you ever walk out of a movie theater and you were so excited to see a movie, but you left and you're like, I don't know what it was, but that movie just wasn't as good as I thought. It's because one of these small elements was off. Maybe the, the chemistry between the, the, the actors wasn't there, or the, the director just wasn't connecting to the material, or Maybe the studio executives messed up the editing, all those elements. So the first step really is to go out and study as much as humanly possible and look for content that's succeeding. So like one of the exercises I give people is most people are using social media from a passive perspec— perspective. You know, they're on, they're on the couch, they're in the bed, and they're just doom scrolling.

Yeah.

So a simple exercise that you can do going forward is Switch from a passive to an active consumer. So if you see a video that has 10 million views, well, click on that creator's profile. Have they used that same structure multiple times or have they not? Maybe it's just a trend. And the big difference between a trend and a format is trends are fleeting. Formats are structures that last forever. Like man on the street, we just said, has been used for over 70 different, uh, 70 years. So we want to go out there and do that research and understand it as much as possible. What stories are working, what stories are not, so that we can move to step 2 and select our format. So again, the best way to find formats is just consume content. But when, again, when you see a video that has a lot of engagement or views, you have to click on the creator's profile and see have they've had repeatable success at least 10 to 15 times. And that will be a great reference for you to learn from. So I'll just stop there because I know I threw, threw a lot at you.

That's great. I think that's exactly right. When I, anytime I'm looking to change up my strategy, anytime I'm looking to bring in a new format, the first thing that I do is go look at other people's content. And it's not, oh, let me go copy what people are doing, but let me go and actually study from people that I know take this really seriously. People who have teams, people who spend so much time in the research. And I think as founders, we often aren't the ones, we're not taking content as seriously as a creator. We are thinking it, thinking of it as something we do that helps us drive sales, but it's not what we do. It's not the first thing. Whereas there actually are a lot of creators where that is what they live and breathe. Go study it. There's so much we can learn from that. I'm curious for myself, one place that I often get stuck in my own content, and I've been creating content for a really long time, is every now and then I feel like, you know what, I'm in a rut. I am in a rut with my content.

feels like I'm saying the same thing over and over, my engagement's starting to plateau, I know I need to step back and breathe life into it. So for someone like me who's not starting from scratch, what kind of advice do you have there? Is it the same or does it differ?

It's the exact same process, but I think you make a great point because there's a difference between feeling like you're in a rut and just performance is dipping.

Yeah,

if you are in a rut, then Absolutely, it is time to choose a new format, but the process is always the same as you go out and you study and you find the format and you study the format. And I love what you said. It's not about copying people's content. There's a big difference between the content and the structure. And when we're studying, we're paying attention to the structure. So again, an example is I started in the, in the movie industry. I don't know how many people know this, but for the past 100 years, every movie, follows the same structure, the 3-act structure, yet you don't realize it when you go into the movie theater because they're using that structure to tell unique stories. So when we're doing that, that, that, that research and studying, it's, it's less about the, the content of what they're saying, cuz oftentimes people get too caught up in finding like an apples-to-apples comparison. Like, I'm a chiropractor, I'm a dentist, or I'm a meditation coach, so I have to find the exact person talking about the exact thing. Same thing in order for me to learn from that. Oftentimes you want to kind of avoid that.

One, because there's oftentimes you can't find great references that are high performing, but also you don't want to sound the same as them. So even for people like you is like, if you're in a rut and performance are declining, well, let's go out and study and find some formats. Find the one that feels authentic to me, matches my research, uh, my resources, matches my personality. But then we get into that third step is we have to actually analyze that format. We have to understand why it works, because most people will see, oh, this person's using man on the street. I know what they're— they're just going to walk up to random strangers. They're generating millions of views. I'm going to do that and I'm going to be successful. I guarantee 9 out of 10 people that do that will fail because even people that have success with that, they will have wins and they will have losses. So that's what we do in our process whereby we actually take a very specific format like School of Hard Knocks on a very specific channel like Instagram. And what we will do is we have a team of researchers that will spend about 15 to 20 hours cross-analyzing the high performers versus the low performers.

Ooh.

And what we're looking at is we're looking for what we call performance drivers. So these are things that drive performance up. Or drive performance down. So these are storytelling elements. Now, each format has its own unique DNA of makeup of these performance drivers, but it can be things like how effective is the hook? Is there a strong perspective shift? Is there tension throughout the video? Something we call work-to-wow ratio. How hard does the viewer have to work in order to get value out of it? Also, pacing and tonality and editing, all these things can contribute to the success or failure of it. So when we find a format we like, well, we obviously don't wanna stop there. We want to actually analyze, well, what's the difference between those high performers and those low performers?

What's having some people completely break through and some people just flop?

I think, again, each format has its own unique DNA. I think that the biggest thing that causes people to flop is they don't actually go and study. And one of the best things that you can do that makes this a lot easier, uh, is once you've done that research of the high performers versus the low performers, And you have your hypothesis. Your hypothesis may be right, it may be wrong. You don't know until you start creating content. But the one thing that you can do is once you start creating content in that format, you put the reference on one side of the screen and you put your video on the other side of the screen. And if you start playing them side by side, you can really start to spot the differences of where it's different. Again, we're not talking about the content of what they're saying. We're talking about how they say it. So it may be like, you know what, that person has a really steady pacing, but I feel like I'm talking way too fast.

Mm-hmm.

Or maybe their hook is just way cleaner and stronger than mine, or maybe I don't even have a hook. And that's where it becomes effective, a lot more effective. But I would say 99% of people that are struggling is they don't spend the time to understand the difference between those high performers and the low performers. Mm-hmm.

And what do you think? So we're talking right now about doing all this analysis. We have more content now than we've ever had to learn from, to research, to, to see how to grow. I also think it's never been easier than it is right now to grow. I mean, back in the day we had kind of had a bit of a heyday, but it's back, which feels amazing. But what do you think to the idea, well, if everyone's creating content, is there any point?

100%. There's a point. I mean, it, it, I think it's the one thing that I say is, is social media a requirement to success? No.

Yeah.

We know plenty of business people and businesses that are successful without social media. Does it give you a distinct advantage and a higher chance of likelihood of success if you master it? Absolutely. Now, to your question is like, it feels like it's an impossible task. 5.4 billion people on these platforms uploading a billion pieces of content every day.

A billion a day?

Yeah. Across all the platforms combined.

Wow.

Yeah. So it seems daunting.

Yeah.

And impossible. However, the things that you and I are sharing with the audience today, 99% of content creators are not doing.

Right.

So if you start applying these things and, and really dig down to learn these things, You will ultimately have success. Now, does that mean you're going to have success in the next 7 days? Maybe, maybe not. You— mindset comes along with this too, is like, how bad do you want it? How much are you willing to learn? Because like, this is a muscle, a new muscle you're learning. It's a new skill set. If people think about whatever field of expertise they're in, they didn't learn it in a week. So is it, um, competitive? Yes, but it's still very winnable. And as you mentioned, you know, with these platforms, you know, the follower number doesn't necessarily matter as much anymore. Like you could literally start out, like we, we were just, uh, we just launched with a, uh, an Alzheimer's expert, a doctor, had no audience, zero followers, zero views. And in 2 months, he's at 150,000 followers and over 50 million views. He's on track to do 100 million views. Because the content was dialed in, because we applied these principles, not because he was somebody that was famous or had this huge audience. So it is a very winnable game if you kind of follow this practice.

And I'll give some more resources to the audience if they want to click a link below, um, where they just go to hookpoint.com/bossbay, where we walk through these, these steps where they can start applying these things, uh, starting today.

And when you say client, how are you currently working with clients? What does that look like?

We're at a very interesting inflection point right now. So we, our historical business is we match people with their ideal format. So we collect all this information about them. We've done all of this research, you know, 15,000 hours across 400 formats, and we match them to our, their ideal format. But then we supply the deep research cuz we're spending 15, 20 hours researching it. So we give them a very clear blueprint and roadmap on how to actually execute it for them. But now, as we were talking beforehand, is we're starting to apply that dataset to full AI video production because we've always had clients asking us, well, can you just create the content for us? I would love to create content for everybody that's asked me that, but it's just not feasible. It's not scalable until AI came into the picture.

So on that though, can you just create the content for me? In that way, I think my perspective on it is why bother? If you don't want to create content, why bother? If you don't want to be the one actually in front of the camera, you don't want to be the one learning how to do it, whatever your format is. Some don't require your face. You know, I built a massive page off of quotes. You don't have to put your face in, but I had to be the one doing the content because otherwise I wouldn't know what connects with my ideal buyer. I wouldn't have been able to build a business off the back of it. I might've had followers. but I wouldn't have had a business. And so I think I'm a, a bit of a harsh critic there. I'm like, if you really don't wanna do it, why bother doing it? Go find a different career.

I wish every person that came to us had that level of mindset. It would make our life a lot easier, and I think people would be more successful. Unfortunately, there are so many people out there that are disconnected from that, either because like they said, they don't wanna have their face on camera, they're a little bit shy or, or hesitant. Or they're like a doctor or a dentist or a lawyer, and they just can't find that, that time. Or we've seen also with some clients that have a lot of success, they start to burn themselves out from it because it does take a lot of time if you wanna be in that top 1%.

Huh.

So everything that you say, I agree with you 110%. The reality of what I see in the battlefield of people coming to us all the time, I wish they had that mindset, but some people just, they just don't. They're looking for the opportunity of social media without having to do all of the, the grunt work behind it.

And do you see people like that be successful though? Because I, I think it's, it's great to look for the opportunity of something, but if you're not willing to do the work behind it, are you gonna ever see the success you want from it?

If you're not willing to do the work behind it, no, you will not have success. You need to hire somebody then that is willing to do the work and understand things. And that's the, I think the big disconnect in what you're saying, the big disconnect with, well, I'm just going to have AI do it. I'm just going to hire this social media agency to do it. Well, do they actually understand what it means to have success with these platforms? Do they understand, you know, what causes content to work versus fall flat. And you and I have been in this game for so long. The challenge is that anybody can open up a social media account and post content. So there are so many so-called social media experts and social media agencies. They'll be happy to take your money, happy to create content for you, happy to post that content. But is that content ultimately going to perform? Is it going to match and understand your brand and understand your, you know, brain of like what you're thinking about, what you represent. Most of the time it's not. I'm not saying that they don't exist, but I would say it's less than like 2% of the people out there advertising that type of, uh, service.

I think it's really rare. I mean, if you look at a lot of people that have broke through in the content space, I mean, the Hormozis are great examples. They did put Caleb Ralston behind them as the, as the producer, their content guy, and he went all in. And you cannot discount the fact that they were willing to do the work. They learned how to speak in soundbites. They had all the knowledge. They had something they were bringing to the table. They didn't just go into this blindly saying, all right, I'm hiring you, go make me famous. And I, I hesitate when people have that perspective because I just think, I don't see you taking off. I do not see this working, and you'd be better off putting your energy into a non-social media career.

I agree. And I think that there's also like a distinction of somebody trying to build a personal brand versus somebody trying to build a business and leveraging social media.

Yeah, good call.

So I think like personal brands, I agree 100%. Like if you are gonna be the face of your brand and you wanna leverage social media, you've really gotta learn, lean in and learn these things. Like you act, you know, Alex Hormozi, he hired this person, but he didn't just hire this person to just do everything and outsource his brain. He learned from this person to get good at these things. So I think that also people listening to this need to under— or make a distinction and answer a question for themselves. Do I want to build a personal brand or do I want to leverage social media to build a company, my company, or a brand that is not like solely reliant on me? That doesn't mean you can't be a part of the content. But I think there are 2 distinct, uh, layers. And I think that you've brought up some great points. Like, you know, maybe the personal brand route is not the right approach for you if you're not gonna put in that time to really learn and like perfect these things. There's other ways to grow businesses and maybe it's, uh, a different way to do it.

Or you can just say, I have a business, I'm not willing to put in the time and the energy to build a personal brand, so I'm gonna create a, a, a system. Um, or engage somebody that really understands this stuff to create content on behalf of the, the, the company, not the personal brand.

Yeah, I think that's a really great distinction. And I say all of this as someone that encourages my community to create personal brands. I always say, I think it is such an amazing asset to have a personal brand. It is such a great way of growing a business. It's something that you can bring with you into multiple different businesses. But I will mostly say, hey, I'm not gonna work with you if you're not gonna do the work. Because like you say, you have to do the research, you have to figure it out, you have to be willing to try and fail. That's the only way you're gonna get data. And coming back to your process, I find it really, really interesting. So you've got a 9-part process, which is so detailed. And I, I wanna go into it because I think we can often see, let's just say the Yap video, cuz we, we know that format's been taken off, or a carousel that's completely popped off. We can see the end result. And if it's done really well, it seems so effortless. It's like I just sat down on the couch, or I'm just about to do my makeup, and all of a sudden this perfect hook comes out my mouth and I'm so succinct and I land the plane.

It's published. It's, you know, well, it's edited to a, a way that looks very polished but looks very raw. It's published and it does really well. And we can be scrolling, and when that's done really well, we can think, wow. They just slapped up their camera, sat down, and popped off. And we all know that's not the case. I can tell you, I, that, that's happened to me a couple times when I've had a hot take. Uh, it happened recently when I was sitting in the car, absolutely exhausted because my baby doesn't sleep. And I was like, you know what? I'm gonna rant about moms that have kids that don't sleep. And it, yes, it might pop off. It's very rare. It's very, very rare. Most of the time it's this whole process. So can we go into this process for the person that's listening? I want them to pull out their notebook. I wanna really get into what are those 9 parts?

Yeah, so let's start kind of like at the, at the macro level of, of what we've kind of covered thus far. So the biggest thing is we wanna study and learn. We wanna identify what's working out in the ecosystem. And then moving to, to, to the next step is we want to find our format is the one that connects with us. And a part of that process and the steps is understanding what resources do we have, what personality do we have. Then we wanna analyze the format. So we call that process gold, silver, bronze. Mm-hmm. So when we find that format, we open up a spreadsheet, our, our research team, and we take an account that has at least 10 or 15, um, 10 or 15 high performers in that format.

And high performer, you mean an outlier? Yeah. If it's 1,000 likes, 1,000 likes, this one's 10,000 likes.

Yeah. So. Each, and it's a great distinction, each platform in format will have kind of like its baseline. Like obviously like short form on Instagram Reels or TikTok is gonna be different than long form on YouTube.

Right.

If we're talking about short form, we wanna see at least, you know, like a million views plus, like on at least 10 or 15 views.

I love how casual you are about that. We just want a million views.

But again, we're, we're looking at people outside of us. Yeah. You know, we're, we're looking to learn from others, even if your goal Is not a million views.

No, it is.

You should be learning from people that are doing that.

Yeah, I agree.

So what we do is we, we open up the spreadsheet, we look at their account, and what we'll do is we'll take like, we'll look for like 10 or 15 of those high performers, million views plus. Those are the, our gold standard. Those are the ones that are high performing. But then we look at the, the, the silver, which are the median, which gives us that baseline. So these are the ones that are not like fully breaking through, but they're not completely bombing. And then we have the bronze, which are the underperformers. So in a, in a page that's doing, you know, the, the gold standard millions of views, the bronze may be a few hundred thousand views or 50,000 views. Now some people are like, oh my God, I would love to have a few hundred thousand views. That's not the point of what we're looking at. Mm-hmm. We're trying to study and what makes this format tick. So then what we do is, and you don't have to do it to this extent, like, again, our team takes like 15 to 20 hours to analyze a single format.

I would, I would do that 100%. Yeah. I, if you're not getting the results that you want, in some ways it's better to just stop producing content and focus on learning. Or if you're just getting into producing content, before you produce a single piece of content, Spend a few weeks just studying and learning. It will save you so much time and headache because I, I tell you what's going to happen, and it's probably happening for a lot of people out there, is if they don't do that process, they're banging their head against the wall saying, I'm spending 5, 10, 15, 20 hours a week creating content and I'm not seeing the results and I have no idea why. Or what happens is they have one that breaks through. And it gets millions of views, but they have no idea why. So the next 50 pieces of content they produce are underperforming. So what we kind of do in this gold, silver, bronze is we will just sit there one by one. We'll take one gold performer and one bronze performer and we'll play them side by side, and then we'll jot down the notes of like, what's the difference?

And we'll try and again, create what we have performance drivers, which is another part of the element. So again, these can be things like How strong is the perspective shift? Meaning, is there like an aha moment in this video where you shift a person's perspective viewing it?

Mm-hmm.

Um, like work-to-wow ratio. How hard does the viewer have to work to get that, that, um, insight that you're trying to deliver? And this is a big mistake most people make is they're too technical and people can't understand or follow that.

Okay.

The hook. The hook is another, you know, critical part because if you're not stopping the, them in the first 3 seconds, Then, you know, they're gonna just move on to the next one. And that's the first signal to the algorithm that you're not holding, uh, attention. Your tonality and pacing are another big one. Are you moving too fast? Are you moving too slow? Tension is another big one. Most people kind of, when they're telling stories, they're just flat like this. And great stories are never like this. Great stories have the ups and downs, and the ups and downs can come from your tonality or pacing. Or it can come from, you have 3 or 4 different hooks in a video. You have hook 1, you provide an insight, and then you go into hook 2, provide an insight. So you wanna have those dynamics of the storytelling in there.

So, so good. Yeah, I think too, that just really is gonna land with people to pull back and do the research before just jumping straight in. And I'm curious, have you been able to use AI to help you do this research, or do you feel like it's just not knowing what to look for?

Yes, we can, because we've been doing this for so long.

Right.

But you cannot outsource the thinking to AI without first understanding these principles, because ChatGPT will give you 100 scripts if you ask it for 100 scripts. But if you don't understand how and why content goes viral, the likelihood that you're gonna have any success with any of those scripts are very low. On top of it, maybe you get 1 or 2 scripts to work, but you don't know why. So then you're creating another 100 scripts and to create like 100 videos to get 1 or 2 to, to, to work. I mean, you're just going to completely burn yourself out. So we actually built a technology on top of our dataset because we have this massive dataset that we wanted to attach that to the actual physical production process. So we built an actual intelligent content system that can go from A to Z. It can come up with ideas, it can write scripts, and it can produce the video with an AI character. However, we didn't build this as a SaaS tool. We built it as an internal tool. Mm-hmm. For our trained strategists to help our client— clients create content. Because again, we're not leveraging AI to solve our problems.

AI is a tool. You still apply your knowledge to that tool because you could have 2 people using the exact same model, whether it's Claude or ChatGPT. One person has very little to no knowledge of social media. The other person has extensive knowledge in social media, and they could be in the creating content for the same exact niche. Let's just say it's a dentist. They both create scripts for dentists. The output will be drastically different from the expert. Versus the novice.

I couldn't agree more. I recently, I'm really good at writing quotes. That's been my content format for over a decade, and I recently put together a course on how to write viral quotes. And I went to Claude and I plugged in Apify and I said, go look at tens of thousands of my quotes and tell me what makes the viral ones work. And it did this whole research. It put together a paper, it presented it back to me. And as the person writing it and knowing what works, I knew none of it was correct. I was reading it and it sounded so good and so fancy, and I'm reading it and I'm like, you are missing the point completely. None of this is why my quotes worked. But when I went back to it and I said, and I fully just spoke to it, I said, here's what I think about when I'm writing a viral quote. Here's what I know will really work. Here's what I did. And I gave it all of that context, and then I said, Go back and see if you can come up with 10 different categories to see.

And when I plugged in all of the knowledge and give it a very defined task, I got something amazing. And it meant I could teach from an easier perspective cuz I could say, you know what, we've been able to go through all of these posts and I've realized these top 10, uh, formats within a format work and I can explain the why. But just asking AI to tell me why it worked, it just didn't work. And so I think that's the whole thing. It's, you can approach this as an expert, you can do it yourself, or you can actually go learn from someone that's done it. Or if you just rely on the model to do the thinking for you, it's gonna think like a computer and not like a person. And so how is it gonna know what actually resonates with people?

Yeah, AI is a thinking partner. It's a tool. It's not the end solution. It's like thinking about hiring somebody to come into your business, like No matter what the role is, you don't just hire them on day one and then just, oh, you're off and running, just do whatever you wanna do. You have to train them.

Mm-hmm.

On how you want the business run. Like, how do you, how do you treat customers? How do you handle customer service? Whatever element it is. And it's the same case here, like in building this platform. We, the hardest part is when we take a format is not actually creating like an AI video with it, that's actually the easiest part. It's actually training the model and instance of how to come up with great ideas and great hooks. Even when we have the context of the 15 to 20 hours that we're putting into it, like our strategists are going in there and constantly tweaking, like, nah, that doesn't make— that hook's not good because of X, Y, and Z. This hook is good because of this. It's almost like we're adding a new team member. We're training that team member, but we're also overseeing and managing that team member. And again, with leveraging AI for content, if you don't have that base level of understanding, you're ultimately just not gonna achieve that level of success that you're looking for.

Yeah, I agree. Okay, so coming back to this, so we've got the research phase, then we move into ideation. What do you suggest moving into ideation? How— we obviously aren't gonna go to ChatGPT and say, gimme 20 ideas. 'Cause it's not gonna work. What are we doing when it comes to ideation?

So the biggest mistake that people make when coming up with ideas for social media is they produce the first idea that comes to their mind. We want to come up with as many ideas as possible, so we'll open up a spreadsheet and we'll come up with 10, 15, 20, 30 ideas, as many as we can, and then we'll rank them. So we have a ranking system of 1 to 5.

Okay.

1 being, I wanna make this video, 5 being, I don't wanna make this video. And we'll actually go idea by idea by idea. You can use AI as a thinking partner for this, but you need to go through that process of actually sitting there looking at each idea and either working with your team or doing it yourself of like, on a confidence level of like 95%, I think this is a great idea and it'll work. I'm going to give this a 1. You know, it's like 30%. I think this is going to work. Okay. This is a 5. And you just go through that process because again, you have to really put a lot of thought into what's going to work before you start creating content, at least in the beginning. It's kind of like crawl before you run is you want to have strong hypotheses as you're going into creating content. To decide what content I'm gonna create. And it's completely fine if we follow this process we're talking about today. It is completely fine if the content bombs. Why? Because we set a hypothesis, and even if we're wrong, we can go back and understand where were we wrong?

What, what was it? The hook? Was it the idea? We can put the side-by-side comparison of that gold high-performing standard versus our content. And that's the biggest element here. But with ideation and coming up with ideas, do not start with the first idea that comes to mind. Really try and, and spend some time brainstorming and ranking those ideas to find what is the best use of my time and what is gonna gimme the best outcome in terms of learning and progressing and getting better.

So good. So, so good. And then hooks, moving on to hooks. How are we structuring really good hooks?

So there's many different ways of, uh, structuring hooks. I'll, let's start with where most people go wrong.

Okay.

With hooks. Um, number one, hooks don't always have to be verbal. They can be visual. So one massive mistake I see people make is they'll have a title card on the top. They'll have somebody talking and captions going on the bottom, and then they're moving around. You need to have a clear visual hierarchy of what you want the person to focus on.

Mm-hmm.

Because typically our subconscious mind, not our conscious mind, is deciding within a second or less, am I scrolling or am I staying and watching this? And if our subconscious brain cannot determine where I need to focus, they feel like they're being left behind. And if they feel like they're being left behind, they're just gonna move on to the next thing. So the first thing is have a very clear visual hierarchy of what you want people to focus on. If you want to have multiple things on the screen, then you have to prioritize 1, 2, 3. Um, another big mistake that people make is that they are saying something in the same way somebody's already heard it. If somebody sees a hook, even if you have a unique perspective, if, if they think, oh, I know what this person's going to say, they're just going to move on to the next video because it's so easy to scroll moving on to the next one. So you want to. Think about what topic you wanna cover and how do you present that hook in a unique way that demonstrates to the viewer, I have this unique perspective on this subject matter, so it's worth sticking around for.

So that can be a contrarian point of view. It can be subverting an expectation, or maybe just a different wording about it.

Hmm.

The other big thing with hooks is you wanna be, be, make sure that you're setting up Um, a clear payoff with the video because this is very different than it was 5, 10 years ago where you could just do clickbait and trick people. Audiences have become too smart for that. So if you kind of leverage a hook and the audience starts feeling like this isn't going to pay off for me, they're going to scroll past because the hook is critically important, but holding their attention past hook is just as important. Another thing to, to kind of think about that I think a lot of, um, content creators, uh, ignore or, or don't even know is a lot of videos need more than one hook. You need to be hooking them throughout the video, uh, in order to kind of build that, that retention in order for the content to, uh, to, to succe— ultimately succeed.

I mean, it's not as popular anymore, but it still works as like the top-down cooking videos.

Oh,

you know those videos? Like how you slide the food onto the table works. Or there's, uh, there's a great format that we've done research on called How Much Sugar, where They basically demonstrate how much sugar like ketchup has. So they'll have like the ketchup on one side and like a jar full of sugar on the other side with just the title card, how much sugar. So you're automatically cluing into the person, this product has a lot more sugar than you would ever imagine. So you better watch this video because I'm going to break down how much sugar it actually has. So that's where you can use those visual cues. Or you think about, um, I'm sure you know her, Dr. Julie Smith. She uses visual metaphors. Like she has these elements on screen. Like there was a video, um, where she talks about, I think it's either anxiety or PTSD, and she uses the analogy of a wastepaper basket. And the wastepaper basket is on the table filled to the brim with paper. So that visual cue just on screen is like, there's something here. It's adding tension to the screen of like, Why is this trash can on top of this desk filled with paper?

I need to, I need to understand what is ultimately going to happen. Um, another one is man on the street. One of the reasons man on the street can work really well is there's an, this inherent tension of walking up to a stranger and what is going to happen? Is this person ultimately going to, um, reject this person? Are they going to yell? Are they going to hit them? Like some creators we've worked with on Man on the Street, we've, we've seen if you edit in rejections in the beginning, it often causes the content to perform better because it's increasing that tension of what's going to happen next.

Yeah. The best ones, they always seem to look angry in the beginning and then you watch it all the way through and you're like, this was totally set up.

Yeah. You can see that like Simon Squibb, he uses that. Um, and he's a master at the format, but you can see, you can totally see just by How he approaches the person. If it's like a celebrity or somebody pop— that, that was set up, you can tell by the body language, the approach. And I think that a big thing for the audience to think about, a lot of the decisions our customers are making and what con— content we consume is happening on a subconscious level. It's not necessarily happening on a conscious. So sometimes you have to separate yourself from your conscious bias of why something is working and not working. And kind of dig into a little bit of human behavior and psychology of why people, certain people are making decisions.

So good. Okay. Scripting. Now you must have a lot of thoughts on this coming from film school.

Yeah. So when we talk about scripting, there's 2 different ways we can think about it. We can talk about fully producing a script that you're gonna read off a teleprompter. Some people memorize, I, I could never memorize an entire script, or you're using like a script Like blueprint, like where you're, you're mapping out the beats to it. There's also a third way where sometimes it's the editor that has the actual blueprint. So you think about like Man on the Street. Most of the time, like when Simon Squibb goes out, they'll go out for hours and hours and hours. And even an interaction that they condense into 60 seconds could be like a 20-minute conversation. So sometimes it can be the editor that has it. But I think the scripting process, no matter which version that you're doing, is incredibly important and incredibly helpful because you want to make sure that you are sticking to what you have learned and you're following that process so that you again can learn with each piece of content that you've created. So when we analyze a format and do all this research, we actually build script blueprints. So it's like this script has 5 steps, step 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

And then what we do is we actually write the script out within each step so we can actually see it written out in each one of those steps that we can do it. Now, it sounds like a lot of work and it is a lot of work in the beginning, but the more that you do it, the better that you get at it, the faster it's gonna move. And some people, the, just the more intuitive becomes so they don't have to ultimately do those steps going forward.

And then production, are you recommending that people batch produce? And do it all together? How, what is the most effective in that way?

I recommend producing one video at a time in the beginning.

Oh, interesting. Okay.

So that you can learn, because when we are first start— starting to learn this, if we go out there and batch produce 10 pieces of content and we make the same mistake in all 10 pieces of content, then what have we learned?

Yeah.

Now I recommend You know, cuz you wanna produce enough quality that as you learn, you can increase the velocity of the content that you're producing each time that you produce. But again, we wanna crawl before we run. We want to learn. And the last thing I want somebody to do is to sit there and, and, and spend 2 hours creating 10 pieces of content and they made the same mistake in every piece of content and they didn't realize it until they were done.

Yep. That makes a lot of sense. That's actually probably a big flip for people listening. Um, editing. This one I think has gotten so much easier with AI. There's so much AI can be taken off your plate now. You do not need to have an entire team.

100%. Even like the, the recent releases with GPT Astro where it can edit on your software for you. However, as we were talking about earlier, it's critically important that you are prompting AI with the knowledge and understanding of how it needs to be edited.

Mm-hmm. Okay. And then with editing, I'm curious, do you recommend people have a signature style? Do you recommend they stick with a tried and tested style? What, uh, the look of something, how important is that?

Let the research dictate the decision.

Okay.

So study.

Okay.

What, what works? The biggest thing is, is it enhancing the story? You know, is it enhancing or detracting from the story? Because I'm sure you see this. A mistake I see all the time is people are trying to make it too fancy.

Yeah.

They're playing around. They wanna make the most beautiful typography. Their captions are like all this, or they, they go out and buy the, the, the best camera and have these fancy lighting things. Oftentimes that can work against you.

Yeah.

Because you're trying too hard to engineer something that's not playing to the actual point that you're getting. Yeah. Like, You see this all, even like Man on the Street is the perfect example. Like that's, that's not like a polished production, you know, oftentimes it's shot on, on an iPhone. Like we have a doctor that just sits here on her iPhone and talks to it with no like big production and things of that nature. So again, just do the research and study what elements are they using and just try and kind of learn from that of why do they make certain editorial Or design choices.

And how much of the content doing well is in the editing versus the production or pre-production?

I would say it's 90% pre-production.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's really interesting.

Editing, editing. I would say that a way to look at, I think editing, if it's done wrong, is gonna work against you.

Okay.

If it's done right, I don't know that it's necessarily going to, like, it's not gonna take a crappy story and make it great.

Yeah.

I'll just say that.

Yeah.

Oftentimes I would say editing can work against you just if you're not doing it properly, but I wouldn't overly focus on, I mean, cuz a lot of formats you can do one shot, you don't even need to edit it.

Yep. Analysis and iteration. What specifically should you be looking for? Yes, the metrics are really important. What are we going in and looking for someone that is new to this? and doesn't really know what is making content good, what is a good baseline, what are they looking for?

I think that the best metric, like the simplest metric to pay attention to, is just purely views.

Okay.

Um, because it gives you an indication of if the algorithm is pushing it or not. Now, the algorithm is— there's so much demonization and myths about the algorithm. Number one, people are saying they're shadowbanned. I can tell you definitively, 99% of the time, you're not shadowbanned.

Agree.

Or they're saying, well, they're suppressing my reach because they want me to boost my content. If that were the case, then why is MrBeast the most subscribed person on YouTube? It would be somebody like Coca-Cola or Apple or one of these companies that spend, you know, billions of dollars a year on advertising. So if that's not the case, then what is the algorithm naturally looking for? They're just looking for retention, meaning they want to keep people on these platforms as long as possible, because the longer they spend on these platforms, the more ads they serve, the more profit they generate. So what they're looking for is content that stops the scroll with the hook, which we talked about, but then holds attention as long as possible with the story that you're telling. And this is why storytelling is so important. We've been telling stories for 50,000 years. It's ingrained into us that if we hear the premise of a good story, we wanna stick around to hear the end of that story. So that view count gives us a good indication of how well we are doing. At grabbing that attention and holding that attention.

Now, some of these platforms can have that retention graph, which you can dig into the analytics and it'll tell you exactly where it's dropping off, which is really useful if you want to take that next step. But I think at the, the macro level, the simplest place to start is just how many views is the content generating? And then you can move to deeper layers of engagement and things of that nature. By no means am I saying engagement's not important, but if I were to just focus on one metric to start out, Is just what is my baseline for the number of views that I'm generating in my content and how effective am I at pushing that baseline up as I start to learn and apply this process?

For someone that is listening, and from the beginning we've talked a lot about storytelling, where would you push people to learn a bit more about storytelling and becoming better storytellers?

The easiest place, the most effective place is just when you consume content on social media.

Okay.

I mean, I have 3 books on storytelling. They can check that out. I'll, I'll put a resource below that breaks down these steps. But the easiest place that you can start is just become a passive consumer of content when you're on social media. Like, that's the easiest place to start. And then there's just levels. You can look, listen to experts like me, listen to experts like you. There's other experts on social media out there that you can start honing your craft. But as we were talking about earlier, the most important thing is Are you actually going to be willing to take the time to actually learn these things? Because you're not going to learn them in an hour. You know, you're going to learn them by taking this information that we're talking about or download one of my books or one of your programs and then putting them into practice. Because putting it into practice is where we learn. Like, that's how I learned this stuff. When I started social media, there's, there's none of this. There was no experts or any of this. It's just purely trial and error. What works? What doesn't work?

Pulling this all together on that storytelling piece, the great thing is whatever you consume, you'll get served more of. So you can turn your algorithm into a great research area. You can always tell when I'm going to break into a new content format because that's my entire feed, my For You page, everything starts to shift.

It changes like within 30 seconds. It's so fast.

It's amazing. And so if you start consuming in that way, you will be shown more and more and more of that. If you start saving that content, you'll get shown more of it. And again, go and look at creators like MrBeast. They do it in such a masterful way. You could be pausing that video every 5 seconds and learn something and make a note. And it might not— you might not want to be a MrBeast, but I guarantee there's stuff you can then apply to your own Instagram or any platform that you're on. Like, success is leaving clues.

100%. And there's— if you don't— if you're not attracted to MrBeast and you don't want to watch his content, it's so easy to find other masterful storytellers on social media because there's so many of them out there. It's just go and find them and do the research. That's what like our team does is we have a private Slack channel where we're always passing back and forth new formats, new creators, and things of that nature and determining, well, which one do we think could be beneficial for our clients? Which one's worth our time to actually spend the 15 to 20 hours to actually research? But it's always constantly going out there and, and seeing what Is being done with content.

Yeah. I mean, even look at Alex Earle, you know, she just launched a Netflix show. She has become a complete celebrity. She started on TikTok with one format, get ready with me, and she perfected the format. She talks about in the show, from day one, I wanted to blow up. I wanted to be famous. And so I studied. It wasn't, let me put my camera and just, you know, get ready. It was meticulously planned. But it's easy to look at creators like that because they make it look so effortless and think that it's effortless. I, I don't know about you, but I'm not seeing that many people blow up and get really, really famous or really successful effortlessly.

I agree 100%. And I think the other major mistake that I see people make is they think the way to success is chasing trends.

Yes.

And constantly changing up their content. And they think that, oh, I need to constantly be changing and be different, or The, I think I hear a lot, uh, is like, well, I don't wanna use the same structure over and over again. It's just boring.

Yeah.

Like, I wanna always change it up. But the reality is, if you think about any medium like movies, why does Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg, you know, the, the, the top directors, why do they use the same format and structure? Because it works. And they spend decades mastering that format. It's the same thing with writing books. There's a clear format to books. There's a clear format to podcasts. So that example of Alex Earle is, is a perfect one. And you even see it with MrBeast or Mark Rober, the top content creators. Like we talked about Erica Kohlberg, who used the two, two characters, one light bulb. They will dive super deep into one format and master every element of that and scale it. And people will be like, well, won't audiences get tired of that? Not if the content within the structure is good.

Yeah. I'm still doing quotes and no one seems tired yet. Yeah.

If the quotes are good, people will engage with it.

Yeah.

It's not about the structure, it's the expression of the structure. structure.

Yeah, yeah, I say it all the time. I started with quotes and it started working, so I did it 4 times a day, every day, no matter what. And it worked and it still works. And of course I infuse more face-to-camera, of course I infuse more personality, more brand, but it built a brand and it works. You learn it, you master it, you stick with it, and it works. It's not about, you know, the amount of times people have said to me, quotes are dead though. I'm like, well, tell that to my algorithm.

But quotes, I don't know, and this would be a good thing to ask like ChatGPT or Claude, is I assume quotes have been used for at least a few hundred years, if not a few thousand years.

Yeah. Oh yeah.

So you're telling me all of a sudden after hundreds or thousands of years, quotes have just died.

Instagram killed quotes.

Yeah. It's just, it's, that's the thing. That's to me, that's the most exciting thing I think about social media is that it's just, it's just great storytelling.

Mm-hmm.

And if we can focus on that, I don't really care what algorithm change, like I can't tell you how many doomerism articles and things like, oh my God, TikTok just changed the algorithm, or Instagram changed the algorithm. You know, F them. They screwed up my life and my, my business and all. No, they didn't. They're just looking for more effective storytellers to keep people on the platform longer. And if you just ignore all that other nonsense out there and you focus on How do I become an effective storyteller? Whether you are doing the content yourself, whether you're leveraging AI, or even if you're using an internal team or an agency, how do you kind of leverage these tools to your advantage to tell great stories?

I could not agree more. Okay, you've got a PDF that breaks down— what is it going to break down?

So it's going to break down the steps of the process and especially how we apply it with AI, because I know a lot of people are trying to use AI. My recommendation is do not start with AI. Start with the process and understand this, and then apply, apply it to AI.

Okay, amazing. So what's the link again?

Uh, hookpoint.com/bossbabe.

Cool. And I'll put the link below as well. This was so helpful. Thank you for going into so much detail on it. I think my biggest takeaway from this is when I'm in a rut, pulling back, going and doing that research. But not just looking at what's working, look at what's not. That's— I've— I just haven't done that before. That was such a big aha. So thank you.

My pleasure. No, thanks for having me. It was great to connect with you and everybody that's tuning into this.