Science of Social Media Marketing - Masterclass w/ Brendan Kane

we're not talking about tricking people we're not talking about clickbait here [Music] joining to me today is brendan kane he's the founder and managing director of hookpoint he researched an insights company about social and viral content the author of two best-selling books he's generated over a billion dollars in revenue if you're in the social media space if you want to build personal brands or be more effective at marketing and getting that very coveted earned media you're going to want to pay attention here for people who don't know who you are brandon can you just briefly

introduce yourself and tell us a little bit of your backstory yeah my backstory is interesting in that i got into social media very early so i started in like 2004-2005 so i'm going to date myself a bit but i started on like friendster in myspace and it was kind of by accident you know i was going to film school because i wanted to be a film producer but when i showed up at film school i realized they teach you nothing about business there and i'm like well i probably should know something about business if i

want to be on the business side of the film industry so the most cost efficient way at the time and it still holds true today is to start internet companies so i was just creating internet companies while i was going to college really just to learn and experiment so that i had kind of a leg up when i was going to la to pursue a career in film because my second book is all about this uh hook point is how do i go into a notoriously difficult industry to break into and have a leg up

so i showed up in la after i graduated film school in about around 2005 and like everybody else i was making coffee and copies and deliveries you have to start at the bottom and when people would ask me what do i want to do i would say that i wanted to be a film producer and i could see everybody's eyes glaze over you know because i was just one of a million kids with a pipe dream so i had to take a step back and really analyze the environment that i was in i was working

for a movie studio and i could sense this tremendous anxiety that would come over the office every time we finished the film because we invested tens of millions of dollars into a single piece of content and then we needed hundreds of millions of people around the world to know about this single piece of content in a matter of months it's not like we had years or decades so i just started going to the the president of the studio and i said listen i know how to tap into these online traffic sources for a fraction of

the cost that we were paying for television or print and in some cases no cost at all so that's how i really got my foot in the door and i went from making coffee and copies to building you know digital divisions and tapping into these social networks to promote our films so you saw the need early on the connection between social influence and building an audience to help launch properties projects and ideas right where did you get that confidence that you could do this that you're pitching this as a relatively new person in the industry

it's interesting that i learn something i get super excited about it and i want to share it it's just about like hey there's this cool thing that we can do like for example i did the first ever influencer campaign on youtube this is around like 2007 for a movie called crank with jason statham and i was just analyzing youtube and there was no such thing as an influencer but i was like there's these kids out there that are generating millions and millions of views on their videos why don't we reach out to them and i

just made a list of the top 100 youtubers at the time and i said do you want to interview a movie star and i got like 10 responses and we didn't have to pay anything for it but the confidence just came from there's this unique opportunity that will provide value to the movie the directors the studio executives because they want nothing more than their film to succeed and that's where just that confidence comes from i kind of lose myself in that process of finding solutions to people's problems it's a theme that we talk about a

lot or i try to in that from one's one point of view you see opportunity and someone else sees like an obstacle for you it must be like natural like breathing you see something you go for it but for people who are more stuck who still are late to the social game who are quick to dismiss it as being vapid and vacuous forms of entertainment killing the intelligence of people and they're looking at like this is dumb and i'm not gonna get on social media social media are for people who can not do things social

media is about looking good and falling into social trappings and it's emotionally very damaging for young people there's a lot of people who are still in that camp how do we shift the conversation around a little bit to have a different perspective and then maybe we'll get into some real marketing tactics with you well i think the first question because i do run into that quite a bit and i think the first question to ask yourself is what is really driving that belief and this could be on a subconscious level you know this may not

be conscious but really sit with yourself and ask yourself is it that you really just despise social media and what it stands for or does it overwhelm you because you don't know how it works and thus those beliefs are coming up because we work with some of the largest creative agencies in the world like traditional creative agencies and we get that a lot and what i find is it's really not that they despise social media or the negativity around it they just have a a sense of self-doubt or they don't know how to translate their

expertise to that medium and thus it's very easy for us when we don't understand something to kind of put it down what i find working with you know top creatives is they can't and i'm talking about creatives that have mastered creative for other forms so television print radio things of that nature they don't know how to translate their zone of genius to social media and thus because of that they put these negative thoughts or beliefs about social media but from my experiences once you show them how to translate that form of genius to it then

they're completely open and receptive to it so it sounds to me like some of this is i mean some people really don't want to do social media and i heard you in a different interview saying if if that's not you or maybe i read that in your book then don't do it it's not for everybody and it's it's just like not everybody needs to be an actor or musician it's a different form of self-expression but i think what you do a really good job in is creating systems and process through a lot of experimentation and

documenting very clear-cut actionable things that a person can do to help reduce the overwhelm and just demystify some of the stuff that's happening online the interesting thing is i have to do that for myself it's like i didn't go to mit i'm not a math wizard i have to distill these things into its simplest forms so that i can understand it and then once i understand it then i can figure out how to scale it and do it better so that's where i think i'm able to articulate what social media is in a more simplified

way in terms of what you need to do because i've had to do it for myself your first book one million followers which i'm holding here in front of me i think what what's really interesting for me is you actually implement the things that you recommend people to do and so it's hard to walk by a book like this and one million followers how i built a massive social following in 30 days it seems outrageous it seems incredible like too good to be true so can you tell us a little bit about why you wrote

this book and what you're hoping that people get from it because it does seem like a clickbait title but you've actually been able to do this multiple times i didn't want to just provide my perspective i wanted to interview partners and friends and other ways of doing it so that i made sure that i was providing well-rounded strategies and information and not just from myself i had wanted to do a book for some time because i love teaching i love sharing information i love providing value but i just didn't feel like i had a strong

enough hook something that was going to grab people's attention and i had spent about three and a half years working with some athletes journalists and celebrities to help them grow their audience and i had probably at the time tested 70 to 100 000 variations of content so i had a very good understanding of what it took to build a following and then i thought to myself because i would have these conversations with people like oh it's great you worked with a taylor swift or an mtv or paramount pictures but i'm not that and i could

just see in the data that i was getting it didn't really matter as long as you had the right message the right content it would work it wasn't a matter of if i could do it it was a matter of why i could do it and i'm a huge believer in testing hooks testing stories to see if they have validity before you actually go and do it so i called the literary agent that represented five billion dollars with the book sales like he brought the four dummies books to life and i said hey i'm thinking

about doing this experiment and turning it into a book if i do it would you sign me as a client and get me a publishing deal and he said yes and then i didn't stop there i wanted to ask like other marketing experts hey i'm thinking about doing this if i did it would that be a book that you want to read and the answer was a resounding yes so that's where the experiment came from and that's where the inspiration of the book came from i wrote some notes from the book itself and i'd like

to do a little deeper dive on some of these concepts i think when we take away the word social media and we just talk about influence it maybe sounds a little bit different like if you have an idea if you have a concept a process a framework if you write a book you want to get people to read it that's the whole point the the best most shareable ideas win after all and these can be things around marketing sales or could just be around ideas about how we should live sustainability in dealing with issues that

are potentially life-threatening to our planet and to ourselves so you talk about shareable content and there's a couple things you write about serving others finding i think in the other book and you references a lot like a hook point a headline that's going to grab people's attention because if you don't have that you don't have anything you talk about keeping your intros short having twists and something that i would like to ask you more about is this pcm model the process communication model and you point out a couple of really interesting things the content that's

shareable has some element of logic humor and really tugs at our emotional kind of heartstrings can you expand on that yeah absolutely i think the first place to start is really explaining what drives success on social media today it comes down to one thing and that's the algorithms the algorithms control reach and distribution of content and there's a lot of myths about the algorithms one of them is they suppress your reach to get you to pay for reach so to boost your post run paid ads but if that were the case nobody would ever go

viral so what do the algorithms really care about they care about user retention the longer people spend on a platform the more ads they can serve thus the more revenue they generate and now we live in a world i remember when i first started social media i remember the press release of myspace hitting its first million users you fast forward today there's four billion people on social media and they're pushing 200 billion messages into the world every day so the algorithms have an abundance of content to choose from and what they are really favoring is

content that can hold attention for as long as possible with the widest audience when we talk about social media and gaining influence growing audience getting views engagement clicks whatever that may be you have two things you need to do you need to grab attention you need to stop people in those first few seconds for tick-tock facebook instagram it's stopping the scroll youtube it's really getting people to click on the suggested video thumbnail because that's where most of that traffic comes from so that's the first part because if you can't stop people's attention you're never going

to be able to hold their attention which is the second part and click bait isn't really relevant anymore because again if you're clicking people into viewing something or stopping and the substance isn't there if you're not meeting the expectation that you set in those first three seconds then that retention graph is gonna completely fall off a cliff so our job as content creators of mastering social media is how do we grab that attention but then how do we tell an effective story that holds that attention long enough longer than the billions of other pieces of

content longer than our competition and if you do that the algorithms will become your best friends because we have to remember these social media platforms don't exist without our content it's not that they want to suppress it on purpose they want content that holds attention that provides value that entertains so that they can really keep people on these platforms longer and as you mentioned one of the tools that we use pcm and we've kind of evolved it to what we call communication algorithm is one of those storytelling mechanisms and this is backed by 1.5 million

communication assessments worldwide so it's validated and it's updated every year pixar doesn't talk about it but all of their screenwriting are trained in this model bill clinton used it to become president nasa uses it to train all of their training program and what it does is it breaks down the six different ways that people perceive content they perceive the world and we break it down into a mathematical formula so the largest subset of the population 30 percent is feeling based so they're going to connect with your content they're going to buy for your products or

services based on how it makes them feel so they want to feel really connected they want that emotional response to the the messages you're putting out there the second largest 25 is fact-based so it needs to make sense for them it's not about feeling it's about time frames data information who what when where why the third largest 20 is fun base these people react they want excitement they want fun they want to just know that if i watch this piece of content it's going to be entertaining or if i buy this product or service it's

just going to make my life more exciting more fun 10 is values and opinions so can i trust this brand do i feel like this creator is committed and dedicated to me another 10 is imagination based so these people are very reflective they don't say a lot if you hear the stories about albert einstein and how he came up with his best ideas he would sit by the window and just stare out the window for hours on end reflecting on all the things that he was working on and the smallest subset uh is action based

it's five percent so they don't think they don't feel they don't believe they don't have fun they just run so if you've ever seen tom cruise in mission impossible what is he doing he's running the entire movie he's hanging off the side of lanes so when we work with clients or we look at content we want to make sure that we are contextualizing our message to incorporate those as many as possible for example my base is thoughts and logic if i just talk data information time frames things like that i'm disconnecting and potentially alienating 75

of the population us as individuals we have communication strengths and we have communication weaknesses so we have access to all six different ways but we tend to communicate from our strengths so when we're creating content oftentimes from a subconscious level we don't have that awareness so we're gonna speak through the way that we perceive the world we perceive the content but that really kills retention off of content because it's not really looking at the larger population so again look at pixar like you know a great homework assignment is watch inside out not for the content

but for the different characters in the little girl's head that represents these different ways that people perceive content and that's where we see a lot of brands struggling with marketing or creative content as their creative directors are designing content based on how they perceive the world instead of looking at the holistic view i want to ask you just one question about you because you just revealed something you're a very analytical person data fact logical kind of this is how you operate in the world that's your normal mode right yeah and and i think a lot

of us operate in our headspace and so we forget to connect from the heart and get people to feel something knowing this i've looked at your content i've been kind of looking at what what's popping on your instagram feed i've recognized some patterns but i want to just throw the question to you how does someone who's like you either a personal brand or a company who's very fact data-driven maybe a little cold in how they present stuff how do they bring in some of these other concepts to reach a broader audience and increase their retention

the first place to start is just awareness is having awareness of how you communicate and how you need to diversify that communication and then it comes down to practice i've been integrating this process for over eight years i'm not perfect at it but i've gotten a lot better over the years and the thing to understand is you don't have to go over the top with it so i'll give you an example i was brought in by a guy named gary keller that founded keller williams one of the largest residential real estate companies in the world

and he asked us to really help him revamp the social media strategy and our process is deeply rooted in research so we did a lot of research on the content that they were producing and their competitors were producing and it's a very formulaic model in real estate they say hey this house has five bedrooms four bathrooms and an acre of land do you want to schedule a tour that's fact based you know that's 25 of the population so how would i sell this house using this model i would start by with facts by saying this

house has five bedrooms four bathrooms and an acre of land and imagine your family sitting around this fireplace on christmas eve how is that gonna feel when your family's all together all cozy excited to open up presents and as you check out that pool in the backyard you are gonna have the craziest and funnest parties and all of your neighbors are gonna be super jealous and i really believe that this is the best house on the market because of the school district that it's in would you like to schedule a tour so the big thing

is the content of the house never changed it was the way that i represented the context and i did it in about 30 seconds so i didn't go over the top with each one i started with the facts about what the house was i tuned into the imagination by just saying imagine then it went quickly into feelings by saying how is this gonna feel when your family's sitting around this fireplace on christmas eve then i went into fun saying check out this pool you're gonna have the craziest and funnest parties and i went quickly into

action because they want the best they want the bottom line he said all your neighbors are gonna be jealous and then i said i believe tapping into the values and opinions sharing my beliefs that this is the best house in the market because of the school district that was in it's not that you go over the top in any direction you just hit on it so that you make sure that people are getting their psychological needs met so they they can resonate with the entire message that you're putting out there is there one that you

want to lead more with and then tap into others or does it not matter as much well we typically say focus on the big three feelings facts and fun and if you want to play it from a math perspective you would go feelings facts and fun because it's you know that's 75 percent of the population but that goes 30 25 20 however what you can do is fun doesn't need to be words it could be a background like i don't know if you ever saw that dollar shave club video that went super viral that they

created but you know he does an amazing job of doing facts in the first like five to ten seconds but in the background there's like all these crazy like posters and colors and things like that so just even the environment can do that and then he starts layering in feelings and just goes back and forth between all of them it doesn't necessarily have to be words it can be environments it can be facial expressions body cues how you use your arms and things of that nature to layer it in i really like those two examples

because one was linear and it progressed in a sequence and you could totally understand that it was kind of very logical for my mind to understand the other one that was happening simultaneously because there's the background the juxtaposition between what's happening behind him i think there's a i don't know if it was a dwarf or someone who's in the background and just crazy things happening and then him being in a suit he's very dry in his delivery but what he's saying is not in alignment with the way he looks so there's a lot of stuff

that's going on so you can sandwich and develop layers i really like that is there a third example that you can share with us it's kind of and i'm not political at all but let's talk about how bill clinton uses to become president because i think it's very interesting so he was in a debate i believe it was against george bush and and a woman got up and and said our family's really struggling how would you support us because we just we just don't know what it's gonna feel like if we choose you or you

win or we're just really concerned so george bush gets up and he just talks about data and facts these are the things that i'm gonna do to change things to make your life better bill clinton realized that this woman perceived the world through feelings and emotions and thirty percent of the population is that so the first thing he did is he stepped around the podium and he said i feel your pain and with that he won the female vote so it just absolutely you know killed it with that also you can look at the harmon

brothers who produce videos for like squatty potty poo pourri and things like that they layer in a lot of the feelings facts and fun with their characters you know they're very satirical but they provide facts and information about the product they emotionally connect the audience with the main character so i worked with a company called chat books and they they worked with herman brothers and they have this amazing story about a mother and how stressful it is to be a mother and it's very funny the kids are like shooting off crossbows in the background the

mother is just like have you ever experienced this like if that's you i really connect i really hear you and then it dives into the facts about the product you've been able to do something that very few people do you are able to grow your facebook account really fast and your instagram account really fast i'm curious if the observations that you've had in devising different ways of understanding how algorithms work and how humans perceive the world if you've been able to translate this across every social platform that you touch are you able to have the

same amount of success everywhere we've been able to translate this across every platform and every basically every industry and the reason is we have a viral content engineering creative process that's backed by uh 60 billion views 100 million followers and a billion in revenue for the projects we worked on the reason that we are successful across platform and no matter what change or new feature comes to social media is that our first step of our creative process is research so what does that actually mean some people think research is let me just look at my

competition and i'll try and emulate that now typically your competition is going to tell you what not to do because they're probably not succeeding at the highest levels which is important but what we do is when we work on projects we extend that research to other content creators other brands other people that are really excelling at social media even if they're talking about something that's nothing relevant to the piece of content that we're going to work on and the reason is that we're not looking at the content we're looking at the context of how they're

delivering their message there's over like 50 nuances that we pay attention to so it's down to like pacing tonality the personality types that we just talked about how many edits what are their first three seconds look at thumbnail images captions meme cards if there is one and what we'll do is we'll take a viral content creator or a viral content format and we have a research process that's called gold silver bronze so gold is the highest performers silver is like the middle performers and bronze is the lowest performers because if you just look at the

highest performers you'll never really understand what are those performance drivers that are pushing that so we'll look at these high performers the gold standard and we'll start creating hypotheses of oh we think it's the way that they're editing it this way or we think it's the way that they're delivering their message but then we have to go to the silver and bronze to make sure that same performance driver is not showing up because if that performance driver is showing up then we need to knock it out and go back to the gold and find a

new one so because we're deeply rooted in research and we do research every single day it doesn't matter what platform it doesn't matter when things get to the metaverse because we're always going to use research to inform our creative decisions about how we need to contextualize it for success based on your research and your clients and what you do is it possible for any person in any industry any vertical to have consistently high performing viral content yes and i can give you some examples like there is a youtube account called clear tax value it's all

about taxes has over a million subscribers they average like three to four hundred thousand views a video and they have several videos over millions of views you may know graham steffen he teaches finance to millennials graham steffen for example is a perfect thing is like if he did a video that says hey i want to teach you about finance for millennials nobody's going to care but again when we talked about the algorithms you have to make the widest audience possible care for the algorithms to care and push it to as many people as possible so

you need to contextualize your message so that anybody would be interested in in one of graham's top videos is how i bought a tesla for 78 anybody would be interested in seeing that and he's teaching people the principles of finance but he's contextualizing it in an interesting way there's another guy ryan sirhan who's a luxury real estate agent he sells properties that are 10 20 30 50 million dollars so his audience is very small but he gets this that i need to expand and make the average person care about what i'm saying so that i

can generate millions and millions of views on my videos so what does he do he's like i'm gonna take you on a tour of a seven million dollar closet i'm gonna take you on a tour of a 250 million dollar ranch and what he knows is he's playing to the general audience so he'll generate millions of views but even in those millions of views if only one percent is his core target he's out beating every other luxury real estate agent and he said that he's sold 10 20 30 million dollar properties off of youtube because

he's contextualizing his message so the average person cares and that's the the big challenge but that's the big opportunity that's really how you consistently go viral i just want to tell everybody this conversation is not scripted it's not premeditated as a testament to your thing about reaching a broad coalition an audience my son yesterday told me about a guy who produced a video about how you can get a tesla for 78 i've seen the same video my son is 18 i'm 50 years old proof is in the pudding here and with your confidence in saying

that we can help anyone in any vertical in any industry produce consistent viral content what does an engagement look like with hook pointer agency can you give us like the broad outline of like what engagement looks like if somebody wanted to work with you yeah it's interesting because we're making a big transition with our business because we've been training organizations in our viral content engineering process for the past year and a half and what i realized is research is the core element for the reasons that we talked about but even when we train people in

the model they don't do the research either because they don't have the time they don't want to do it or it takes them a while to identify those nuances so we created a new community where every week we do new research and insights and deliver it to the people in our community that's kind of like at the the base level is that every week we're delivering and obviously you get access to our past research but we're delivering these nuances we'll break down a top tick-tock creator we'll break down a top brand or a viral video

or several viral videos and explain these nuances to them and then we give them access to the research sheets and activation guides and how to do it for other people that want to take that next level we'll actually do custom research for them so they'll say hey this is our product or this is the brand that we have we're just looking to to scale so we'll do the custom research and the custom social media strategy and then train their entire team in our process our job is because we don't produce a creative for people we

want to empower people to learn as much of this as possible so that they're not reliant on us or anybody else for the long the long term so the agency doesn't do any production content creation it's research and insights my goal is to help as many people as possible and it's not infinitely scalable to have a creative agency i know people that and we actually service creative agencies as well i just know that there's nobody out in the market that's doing this granular level research and insight so i'd rather double down and super focus on

just being best in world class at that and i think through that will help so many more people that could take those research and insights and and create their own content effectively you talked about this a little bit because it was one of the questions they're going to ask you but you kind of already started to answer it which is so some people are like well what's the whole point of getting an audience and having viral content i need sales man i have to move product i have to close business do you also share insights

on how we can create content that actually helps with conversion and sales you you talked about the real estate person who is able to get millions of people to care about the content that's tremendous social proofs of his one percent of the people watching that is is the natural client then that totally works are there other smaller examples of somebody's not selling 100 million dollar property with millions of views what they can do yeah absolutely and the way that i like to position it is let's just say your average video right now is generating a

thousand views a video and of that maybe it's 50 is your core target audience so it's like with every video producers 500 potential people that can buy your product or service now let's say you learn how to consistently go viral and you take your video performance from a thousand to a hundred thousand views a video and your core target audience is going to drop because we're taking that generalist approach but maybe it drops down to 20 we just went from 500 potential customers that we could reach with each piece of content to 20 000 that's

the power of it now in terms of how you actually monetize that there's many different ways you go go about it and one of the research that we do is how do you subtly integrate calls to action into content the other way you can do it is you're building an audience that you can retarget with ads so sometimes we'll do with clients is you're using organic to earn the right to make the sale and you may not make the sale in the video itself but you can retarget that audience with the sale but there's many

examples of companies out there like we mentioned the dollar shave club video like that launched that business now obviously they eventually started running paid against it but they generated tens of millions of views organically because that content was so good same thing with the harman brothers with their videos yes they put paid behind it but there's so much organic lift there that there's a lot of free earned media then you look at some of the extreme cases like kylie jenner and kylie cosmetics she built a billion dollar empire off of her ability to foster this

audience this connection with them so when she launched kylie cosmetics or any product she can authentically connect with them to do that it was similar to the initial work that i did with taylor swift she was really on kind of like that inflection point of taking off and she had built so much trust and credibility with her audience that once we really started to get into e-commerce it was just so natural because people are bought into this person or you look at mr beast for example one of the most successful influencers of all time he

launches beast burger he launches his chocolate bars he launches all of those things or the the campaign he did to raise 20 million dollars to plant 20 million trees for him he authentically can deliver that message a because he's an expert in communicating with his audience but he's provided so much value through his content that the audience just really wants to support him in anything that he does it's part of the idea the discipline to not think as transactional like do this today for this sale but to think more long term and to build an

audience so that mr beast didn't do beast burgers on day one it's like many years into his content creation journey and kylie jenner is able to translate her audience or the the rabbit fans that she has into launching a line is that the discipline or is it or is it something totally different am i missing it like we were talking about earlier there's not one way to be successful there is the long-term game and the long-term game is very effective in building brand loyalty building an audience that will purchase your things but then there's also

the direct response marketing game where you can if you are a really effective storyteller and copywriter you can sell somebody that knows nothing about you from a single ad so i think about my friend craig clemens who's probably one of the world's leading copywriters in the world that created a company called golden hippo and they've done about 2 billion in sales off of social media ads and most of those sales are somebody just watching one video and purchasing the product so again there's different ways that you can go about it a lot of times the

people they want to work with us is they're they're in it for the long game and they really want to build a meaningful brand build that connection because the other approach can be very costly and resource intensive to make work you've been sharing a lot of things around best practices things that we should do what we could do when you're studying these accounts that do really really well and understanding their content what are some of the worst things that you see people do maybe we get to worst practices i would say that most people that

i run into are typically batch producing content they'll plan out content for a week a month a quarter and there is i don't want to say a myth because at one point in time it did work but people are really convinced that frequency is the key to scale and the challenge with that i'm not saying frequency never worked you know seven eight nine years ago when the platforms there's less competition and i'm not saying it can't work but people get caught in this thing that they they haven't made anything go viral or maybe they made

one thing go viral but they don't understand how it goes viral so they think hey i'm just going to just keep producing a ton of content and the algorithms just because i'm producing a ton of content are going to grow we focus on and working with clients it's really quality over quantity we want to do the research we want to identify identify the performance drivers so that we can get our format dialed in and once we have our format dialed in then you can go to frequency and grow if you're just constantly batch producing content

you never really learn what it takes to be consistent over the long run and maybe you hit it because you got on instagram reels early or tick-tock early but soon as the algorithm shifts or there's more competition in the platform and your your performance nose dives then you have no solid foundation to understand what do i need to do next that i think is the biggest mistake that i see and again i'm not saying that frequency can't play a role like i know content creators like a friend of mine alex stemp just hit 20 million

followers on tick tock and he talks about frequency and i said alex it works for you because your content is so dialed in you spent so much time you spent years dialing this in that's why it works for you but for everybody else out there just to get in the process of just creating content every day it's not going to lead to the results because they're just playing the lottery they're hoping for luck and if they get something to go viral they don't understand why so that they they can't produce it and then there's a

lot of people that are still stuck on time of day hashtags things like that where again at a certain point in time when there's less competition on the platform it could yield results but what i always say to people is focus on the content don't focus on these all these other variables because it's just having the right hashtag posting the right time of day posting every day is not going to make a crappy piece of content amazing you have to be a student of the game you have to learn how to really contextualize your message

for what audiences are looking for and what the algorithms are looking for i really like what you're saying there brendan because there's a lot of content that's out there that tries to teach you little tweaks and hacks around hashtags time of day or these little things that might get you a short-term gain but what i'm hearing you saying right now is there are foundational skills that you can build that are evergreen that are universal that you can take with you once you understand how to create content that people care about that touch on the facts

the fun and feelings and if you master that you can write a book you can make a movie you can make a commercial you can do a three second piece of content or 30 minute piece of content and people will care and i really like that because now we're moving away from jumping on a trend or something and we're really looking at building real skill that is translatable you mentioned something about research and as a person who deals with research there's a gap and it's creative and then execution i think something like that right research

creative and execution so you're the supplier of really beautiful insightful research and if somebody doesn't get the creative part they can't translate that to something good otherwise we'd all be geniuses making viral videos so if somebody's stuck in the creative part do you have any advice or thoughts on how here's the research but this is how you connect it so one of the things that we do with clients that we find highly effective is in our research we identify a reference that we want to emulate again not from a content perspective but from the nuanced

storytelling mechanisms we never tell people to copy content and also a big distinction i want to say is we never when we work with somebody it's not changing who somebody is not changing their message not changing their values their brand or changing the way it's expressed so when we do the research we identify a reference we identify those performance drivers and then we have the client create a piece of content based upon that and that what we do is one side of the screen we put the reference on the other side of the screen we

put the piece of content they produce and we have them play it side by side and by doing that you will learn so much about what you're missing in terms of how you're delivering your content you know and still it takes time to get good at this it's not going to happen overnight but when you start doing those practices you have that level awareness you're comparing your content with the reference you understand why the reference works then you will see a light years of improvement in your content and your process when people put their work

side by side against the reference is it self-evident to them or do you have to like point out certain things so that they can understand that it depends on the client it depends on the performance drivers i would say it's about 70 they get it and the other 30 percent we need to to point out to them what we've just found is the more you do it the more you catch on to it and that's really why i wanted to turn our company into a research and insights company is i want to be delivering new

breakdowns new research every week so content creators can look at it from different perspectives you know we can look at a clinical psychologist that's going viral on tick tock one week a lawyer that's going viral on instagram wheels another week an insurance company that's you know using the communication algorithm to diversify because and i would love to hear from your perspective i find that the more you entrench yourself in this the more you you learn the more that you look at the more that you study from a creative perspective you then you start picking up

those nuances but it takes time you need to really immerse yourself deeply in it i think i remember it on an interview i don't know if it's on a stage or a podcast that you did with fishing about six things or something six categories six variables that you look at at a piece of content to see how it's doing is this what we're talking about when you look at content to break it down or is it a different model that you're using yeah so we look at what we call again performance drivers and initially when

we started this we we just looked at those five or six things but we've now expanded it to over 50 things it's looking at your your title or your caption if you have a thumbnail what are you doing in those first three seconds what is your pacing what is your delivery what is your tonality what is happening in the background how are you creating you know intimacy in your framing initially when i wrote one million followers it was at six but now with my team we really brought it out to almost 50 of these things

that that we look at i'd be interested in comparing notes with you for youtube when i talk about youtube and growing on youtube it comes down to i think two things click-through rate and then engagement that's like youtube terminology but basically how many people who see your content actually watch it and then what's the percentage of completion and those two things i mean could get more complicated and more nuanced than that but those two things seem to drive whether or not your content is going to be seen by a lot of people are those your

same observations or do you have different ways of looking at it it's the same because again going back to what we're talking about earlier the click-through rate is your ability to grab attention and then your watch-through rate or your retention graph is your ability to hold that attention and again that's all youtube cares about like i'm sure engagement factors in but like if you had a high click-through rate and everybody clicked the like button in the first minute but then everybody jumped off i don't think that video would go viral because youtube's too smart for

that and it's not allowing youtube to serve more ads so we really look at when we talk about youtube is that effectiveness of in suggested videos to click that thumbnail and headline and then your ability to hold that attention for as long as possible so that they can serve more ads and keep people on the platform longer i want to dive deeper into the title as we transition to concepts from hook point but before i go there i just as a designer who makes thumbnails what are you seeing is really effective for thumbnail designs for

for youtube specifically yeah it's a great question and it really depends on on the subject we often find is the thumbnail and the headline have to play off of each other and oftentimes what we see is the thumbnail and headline basically say the same thing so it's not adding layers in addition and it's not just for thumbnails but for even like the first three seconds of a video on like a tick tock instagram we talk a lot about and you'll know this term chris uh visual hierarchy is what do we want the attention to be

and oftentimes what we do is we overwhelm the viewer because even with a thumbnail headline or scrolling through a tic tac or instagram if you overwhelm them with too much information like they're just gonna just gonna scroll past because they have so much content so looking at the the thumbnail and headline from a visual hierarchy most people are gonna focus on the thumbnail first and then the headline second so what is it that we can capture the attention with the visual nature of it and then back up the justification of why they should click on

it with that headline attention grabbing visual i'm intrigued i've stopped the scroll for half a second title then explains why i might want to dig deeper into it is that about right yeah and i think a great master class for this is looking at mr beast's thumbnails again it's not about the content because most people's brands are not going to be relevant to the content that it produces but he has tested it extensively and you could just see the thought process in there and again what we talked about earlier our job with the thumbnail and

headline is how do we make it intriguing to the widest audience possible and it breaks the old paradigms of what marketing was built on which is create a very niche piece of content for a very niche audience and then the action will happen well when we're talking about organic social it's it's the reverse it's how do we make it interesting to the widest possible audience on the subtextual level want to talk about what your geniuses expertise or the value your brand offers but with thumbnails and headlines i think people often make that mistake is they

are essentially niching down too far to try and attract a large audience and the algorithms just don't really care about that at this point unfortunately one last question on the thumbnail designed the visual component of it are you noticing specific patterns just broad strokes here in terms of like what seems to work faces no faces an image from the actual video or can it be just like a wild expression that you come up with after the fact that communicates it but isn't actually in the video itself any patterns you notice yeah it's interesting you asked

that question because we we constantly do research every week and it's changing so you know you talk about faces it's not just about the face what is the facial expression you know what's happening in in the background so i hesitate to always give blanket answers because i think it gets people into a lot of trouble to say hey if you use faces your click-through is gonna grow exponentially because it's like well what is your facial expression what's happening in the background and things like that like faces can definitely work i've seen examples of it not

working so it's again getting down to that nuanced level but i think that the best exercise i could give people to help with this is take a screenshot of a video with a suggested video thumbnails on the right-hand side if you're on desktop create your thumbnail and headline and then photoshop it into it and see if it stacks up against the rest because that's what you're going for you're competing against these other thumbnails and headlines and what is going to break that pattern what is going to cause it to stand out that's the best exercise

i could give you in addition go to a youtube account and you know again do the research and find the highest performing videos in your niche or from other content creators and put the titles in a google doc and then start taking them and start tweaking the language for your content for your video when you get into that practice it forces you to get out of your own head of how you would represent it and you start matching it up against the best content creators in the world and you're kind of learning from their genius

to contextualize it for what you want to say that's a very practical exercise that you can use to gauge whether or not your your thumbnail design and title are going to hold up to look at what youtube thinks is the competition to your video and if your video disappears against that column of thumbnails then you have a real problem i really like that thank you i want to shift over to your second book i've been talking to to brendan kane he's the author of two best-selling books one million followers which we've been talking for or

about for a period of time here the second book i'm holding in my hands and thank you for sending this to me is hook point how to stand out in a three second world that is an alarming title a three second world and i i know where this is going but we'll talk about this in the book you write about five steps to creating an effective hook point what is a hook point and then can you tell us what the five steps are a hook point is designed to rise above the noise to break the

pattern to stand out at the highest levels so going back to the beginning of my story my hook point when i moved to the film industry was hey i can tap into these traffic sources to help you promote these movies cost efficiently so a hook point can be something like that a hook point can be like 1 million followers how i built a massive social audience in 30 days a hook point could be a video how i bought a tesla for 78 a hook point has many different applications it can be in the offline world

the online world but it's designed to break the pattern of what everybody else is saying so that you can stand out at the highest level and get people to pay attention to what you have to say but as we've talked about in addition it's just not about grabbing attention how are we effectively holding that attention because we're not talking about tricking people we're not talking about click bait here because that would ultimately not lead to monetization and monetization is critical to keep everything going because otherwise you're going to get crater fatigue and burning out so

that is what it looks like from a high level perspective and when i talk about living in a three-second world yes we live in a micro attention world but it's micro attention for grabbing attention because once you have that attention you can get somebody to listen to a two-hour podcast in the case of joe rogan you can get netflix can get you to watch squid games and binge watch 10 hours of content over the weekend this world as i mentioned we went from a million people on social media to four billion people it's an extremely

noisy world so we really have to master the art of grabbing that attention so that we can share our difference our our value our zone of genius okay you talked about the hook point rising above the noise we're over communicating to every single day we're bombarded with ads and messaging everywhere everything's fighting for attention and it's really fractured so if you want your idea to be seen for you to pull people in you and to be able to hold them you have to learn the art of creating things that people care about in ways that

connect with them what are the five steps to creating the hook point again hook points can be studied in many different ways you could look at youtube thumbnails and headlines you can look at captions and tic tac videos sometimes we do this for landing pages what are what is the title of a landing page what's the title of a book the most effective way that we've found to do that is what i mentioned before is take the most successful hook points you can find put them into a google doc modify them to your product or

service but then take it a step further then create original ones after you've done that exercise and then put them in like the top 10 into a spreadsheet or google doc and then you rank them and then if you want to take it a step further then send them to your friends send them to your colleagues and have them rank them and i would even throw in some of the ones that you did the research on to see how far off you are and what i also recommend if you want to do it further is

pay attention to the billboards the books the ads the thumbnails and headlines that don't grab your attention and obviously that takes a lot of awareness to go into that thing so you can see the things that aren't working but the whole goal is pattern recognition is identifying the patterns that are working the patterns that are not working and then try and learn from the ones that are working and apply them to the hook points that you develop like again going back to the first story i told you is when i started making coffee and copies

for a movie studio and i would tell people that i wanted to be a film producer i realized i was falling into a pattern and that pattern wasn't going to get me to where i wanted to be so then i had to take a step back and say how can i break that pattern how can i say something that is unique and different than anybody else that's trying to reach people at the highest levels in order to grab that attention for the years in which i was teaching at a traditional art school we struggled with

trying to understand what conceptual design is and after working at it for some time i would tell my students conceptual design as it relates to advertising or main title or anything that they want they might make is about disrupting an expectation and you use very similar language i think you use subverting expectations and they're they're basically the same meaning and the way i described to my students is first we must create an expectation and this is what magicians do it's like we think a tiger's gonna appear over there and then instead something different so there's

patterns that we see that we set people up for through the art of misdirection creative lighting composing the frame a little differently we shift their perspective and as soon as we shift that there's this really kind of i don't know what happens is not a brain but then all of a sudden it makes a smile inside like oh i get it i'm in on the joke and the trick with you and i was delighted i pay attention and i light up inside so i've noticed on your account i was checking out yesterday on your instagram

account there are three things that you had done two of them are following a very specific pattern i wanted to ask you about one video in particular because i couldn't understand the hook point on this one sort of so you walking with an umbrella i think it's raining outside and then money falls from the sky and you kind of look at it and i think you just kind of walk away i was like i didn't understand that video but it has a lot of views what is going on there one of the things that we've

realized in terms of what we talked about with retention is setting an expectation that something's gonna happen but you're not sure what's gonna happen so that's kind of why that video worked as you're like some guy's walking in the screen with umbrella you think something's gonna happen otherwise they wouldn't be posting it you're not sure what's gonna happen another viral video that we did uh where i break this down is there is a very talented musician called lainey garner and she had a cover from fleetwood mac that generated like 80 million views the reason that

video works so well is if you watch it it's on my instagram and facebook account what happens is you hear the song playing she takes a sip of cranberry juice and she like says you know hold on like playfully and she smiles at the camera she doesn't start singing until i think 15 or 16 seconds in so you're like you hear this really popular song you know a cover's coming she's kind of playfully holding that tension so you're like is she gonna be good is she gonna be horrible and then her voice is just astounding

and that's why it worked now if her voice was horrible the video wouldn't have gone viral but because her voice is good and she built that tension it took off now if she would have started singing in the first second or two it nearly wouldn't have that level of virality so when we set these these expectations for the viewer sometimes that expectation is something's gonna happen but we don't know what's gonna happen or like going back to graham steffen buying a tesla for 78 dollars if you really watch that video he doesn't reveal the numbers

until like eight or nine minutes in and it's not like he's filling it with fluff what we call and the youtubers call it the jenga effect if you've ever played jenga there's a stack of blocks in the tower and you pull out each one at a time you know what the end outcome is but with each block that you pull out there's tension and then once the block successfully comes out and you know that the tower is going to stand there's a release so if you if you look at any of these successful videos and

you look at movies there's ebbs and flows in the tension setting expectations releasing attention and back and forth and that's what is really solid storytelling that's how things go viral that's how content creators go viral so that video where you're walking in the street i now just glanced at it it wasn't raining you're just looking up like what is going on so you create the intrigue you're building tension and then you open the umbrella okay and then money starts raining down on top of you and so you're releasing that tension so this goes to a

lot of the things that we've been talking about today that first you have to be able to grab attention and then you have to be able to keep it retain it and by delaying the outcome of it deep into the video you've got at least a high percentage of completion in terms of somebody watching it and that that video that you mentioned about just waiting to sing and then belting out the notes and then delivering on that is helping so if you if you give too much away at the beginning there could be a satisfaction

and then they're gone and i've noticed this about when i write carousels uh so this could be even be applied to static things if you tell everybody what they need to know on frame one there's really no reason to complete it to frame ten and that's what you're talking about absolutely so i love the break yeah and in storytelling it's the same thing it's the creation and the release of tension that keeps us watching too much tension and we're fatigued and then if you release it all this this i'm i'm really bored out of my

mind at this point in hindsight i i think i would have done this conversation with you totally differently i should have just picked up 10 random videos or viral content and asked you to break each one down and then tell us because then we can unpack the lessons with you as we're referencing something now there's two other things that you've done that have over 700 000 views on your instagram account and they follow the exact same formula and so i can see the pattern right away one is titled why successful people know nothing that's not

possible so that's very attention grabbing and then you go into the video talking about how not successful people think they know everything they assume they know this and that so successful people do the opposite they pretend like they don't know so they can continue to learn so that was a great way of showing potentially attention grabbing clickbait title but you actually deliver on it by doing a little bit of like inversion thinking the one that's like two videos before that says never ask for help same thing give us the breakdown what are your thoughts creating

that and then if you can just tell why did these two videos work really well as you mentioned and i don't suggest doing this all the time because your audience can get fatigued but it goes back to pattern recognition if you're saying the same thing in the same way as everybody else or the audience perceives that they're gonna scroll past it so with those two titles we're subverting expectation so we are stopping the scroll because there's like what that's that's not the case you should always ask for help but again you have to deliver on

it in the content as well it's not just about tricking people it's actually delivering on the storytelling mechanisms that we've talked about throughout this conversation so subverting expectation is a very powerful tool you've got to be careful how you use it and when you use it it just goes back to what we're talking about with pattern recognition you don't want to fall into the same pattern as everybody else so people think i know what this video is going to talk about even if you have a completely different perspective that will ultimately lead to people scrolling

past or not clicking i have one more question for you before we uh get you out of here which is this i'm curious with the amount of research and experience that you've had you're an early kind of pioneer in the social media space and you've been doing this for some time the question i have for you is this what current social platform excites you the most and why and what are you seeing yeah it's a great question and i appreciate you not asking what recommendation of a platform that you have people do because that i

get that question all the time and it's so dependent on the brand the resources the expertise and all of that but i think that youtube is a little bit overlooked you know the of you and a subscriber on youtube is probably 10x the value of a tic tac or an instagram or a facebook because of the length of time that they're consuming content i just heard a story that vidcon just happened the tick tock influencers no fans really showed up for versus like the youtubers like they had tons of fans and i'm not saying that

there's no value in tic tac or any of these platforms you can make every platform immensely successful and valuable for your brand youtube is is is super i think exciting because of that that loyalty that that deeper connection that you can foster with the audience because that's where our largest following is so i'm glad he said that okay i mean i have friends who consult for people creators are on tick tock and the number one thing he says your tick tock audience is very fickle they're usually really young people and they're into you one day

they're just they forgot about you the next day so it could be really nice that that hit of like reward of like oh my gosh my video went viral but the relationship that you have with them is very different i genuinely appreciate our audience on youtube because they seem to be there for the long haul and they're not just watching one and done they feel like they've invested their time and i want to continue to invest in them and is is this where your focus is is to to work on youtube for your own personal

channel or it's just an observation for you well it's just an observation i mean we're at a point in our business where all of our energy and resources is doing research for other people and building that up once we get that to a certain level then i probably will be investing more in youtube because you know from your experience like it building a youtube channel is a ton of time and work and energy and like if i'm gonna go into it we're gonna go into it you know full force so right now for the time

being it's about the research the insights and helping other people achieve their goals and i think you mentioned earlier that the reason why you did the whole thing on instagram was just so that you can get the litter agent to so you can do the book deal and once you hit that you achieve your goal and that's okay for it just to live like that for me yes it was an experiment both facebook and instagram were experiments you know do i want to be a influencer no do i want to be a content creator no

i like to teach i like to provide that value and i just found that the best way that we can do that for the time being is really building out this research and insights team and community so that we can just help as many people as possible we will get back to the content creation but as you know from running a business you've got to be hyper focused on where you spend time what a great way to end this conversation with you brendan it's been a real pleasure i really liked how you're connecting the different

books and ideas and sometimes challenging popular thought on what you should and shouldn't be doing i really also just to reinforce this i like that you're talking about this in a way that it's there's systems in place there's research there's thinking there's data there's analysis and there's creativity and these things i believe can be a skill that people learn and acquire not only for themselves but in terms of helping their business grow and to translate these same concepts into different applications because what you're talking about is pretty universal and if you master this there's not

a lot that you can't do absolutely thank you brendan now if people want to find out more about you where's the best place that they should go well if they're interested in the research and insights community they can go to uh goviral.hookpoint.com if they want to connect with us they can go to hookpoint.com or i do respond to dms on instagram messages on linkedin and things of that nature so those are probably the best resources to to start with and for our audience that are listening to this podcast will include in the show notes and

if you're watching this on youtube just check out the description below and you get all the information we'll include that right there thank you very much brendan thank you hi my name is brendan kane and you are listening to the future