Supercharge your social media content!

When starting to scale your marketing on social media, traveling through the gauntlet of creating and failing doesn't need to happen. We will show you five strategies we use right out of the gate to start gaining views. So, let's jump right into it.

1. Start With An Instant Payoff

We saved the best for first. An instant payoff gets the audience's attention immediately. Starting with an instant payoff stops the user while they are endlessly scrolling through social media. This instant payoff also helps users stay on your videos longer with the power of a hook. Setting up your videos to have similar payoffs throughout the video helps to keep your retention rates high. This is done by having a sense of consistency within your content.

This is the first step in supercharging your engagement. A study from 2015 found the average attention span for a consumer is 8.25 seconds. Just for reference, a goldfish has an attention span of 9 seconds. That means when someone is consuming our content, we must hook them multiple times to keep them engaged. Once engaged, our audience can pay attention to one task for up to 30 minutes. This is the viewer that we are all looking for. We need to be able to get them over that hump called engagement.

Here are a few examples of hooks that you can use in your videos.

1.1 Ask Intriguing Questions To Your Audience

"Ever wondered how some people travel full-time?" (This is an excellent question for someone who has a travel Instagram)

"Do you know the secret ingredient to a perfect morning routine?" (This is a great, engaging question for everyone who is trying to get a morning routine going)

Ask Intriguing Questions Bonus Tip: 

Q: Out of the two questions, which do you think would be better as a video?

A: B would do better than A. We know this because more people are searching for a perfect morning routine than are wondering how someone can travel full-time.

By creating content that is suitable for more people, you will have a greater reach by appealing to a larger audience. Here is the kicker: content is better when it benefits the audience.

1.2 Make Bold Statements

"You've been using hashtags all wrong." (Great statement for a marketing influencer)

"This is why 90% of diets fail." (Great for a fitness influencer)

By using bold statements, we turn viewers into engaged viewers. If the statement invokes an emotional response, it is considered bold. The beauty is that any response that triggers an emotion turns a viewer into an engaged viewer. Making powerful statements is excellent for having people comment within the video to refute or align with your bold statements. This is why content creators like Andrew Tate and Ben Shapiro have been using this approach to solicit any response. 

1.3 Shocking Facts

"Less than 10% of your followers see your posts because of this one mistake?"

"Venice is sinking, and no one can stop it"

Using a shocking fact entices the viewer to the potential payout of your content. People want to understand and learn about facts, and shocking facts lock the viewer into your content for the payout.

While there are many different ways to approach a hook, this is the first step in creating compelling content for your audience. With this alone, you will make better content than most average users on the platform at a faster and more consistent rate. 

2. Leverage Trending Topics with a Unique Twist

Using trends can help skyrocket your content for a short period. However, you should only use this type of content for short-term gain and not for long-term success. By leveraging trending topics, you can ride the wave of others, piggybacking off of their success. This can be through trending sounds or even copying full videos. The most important part of this is that you add a twist to your content. This will make your content original instead of being a complete ripoff.

This type of social media content requires little effort, but adding a twist makes it uniquely yours, which can lead to better-performing content for your page or channel. As a reminder, this type of content is short-lived. If you post it too late, you will seem to be behind your peers when scaling your marketing.

One of the most successful versions of this was used by Ryan Reynolds Marketing Agency Maximum Effort. A week later, they took a failed Peloton commercial and turned it on its head. They took advantage of the bad publicity Peloton was getting at the time and used that leverage to create something great. When used effectively, these ideas can achieve amazing results in the right hands.

3. Collaborative Content Creation

One of our best-performing videos for engagement falls within this category. 50% of our audience either liked, commented on, or shared the video. This was all due to the power of collaboration. Making content with others is something that is picking up more traction as of late, with podcasts, interviews, and reactionary content performing higher than others. 

Collaboration, when done right, can include a great hook and leverage a trend. In one video, you can hit three of the best-performing marketing strategies. This can open up your content to an audience that has never seen it. 

E.g., you are a pest control company (I chose a difficult company to work with). By collaborating with a home rental agency, you can create content with them, expanding your reach to an untapped market in some cases. 

This isn't only limited to working with other companies. Coca-Cola invited fans worldwide to create and share "Real Magic" during the holiday season by combining their iconic brand assets with the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology.

Fans of the brand were generating digital greeting cards by reimagining iconic Coca‑Cola images and characters through AI tools. Personalized cards could be downloaded and emailed to family and friends or posted to social media. 

Collaboration is only limited to the avenues you can think of, and using AI can be a great way to jumpstart the content creation process.

4. Creating Relatable and Authentic Content

Each section builds off the previous one, and creating relatable and authentic content for social media is no exception. Creating media isn't about what you are trying to sell; it's about crafting a story where someone can relate to your content. The next step in that chain is making it authentic. This is one of the most difficult parts of creating content for some, and this can be the easiest for others. Authentic content is something that shines through and is immediately noticeable. You can tell the person behind the camera is showing you the person they are when the cameras aren't rolling. This can be challenging content to create if you don't like to talk about your personal experiences.

This type of content doesn't need a high production value. Just be genuine; you will be surprised by how many people like your content. This content can skyrocket your social media strategy in a world where being authentic is hard to find. 

Sam Sulek is an excellent example of this. He is the type of person with low production value but gives his community a relatable and purely authentic version of himself. He is just another guy in a gym with experiences relatable to his community.

When creating your content, make your hook at the beginning, leverage trending topics with a twist, and build collaborative content while remaining authentic. Imagine how hard it would be to click away.

5. Providing value to your audience turns into nostalgia

Everyone loves a good cat video, a video of someone falling, or even a jump scare now and then. We remember the best parts, the content that lives in our heads rent-free. However, the content that sticks with you the longest provides value to you.

Take a step back and remember key points in your life that provided value. It could be praise from a teacher, working hard and achieving your goals, or even some of your failures provided you with feelings of nostalgia. This is the feeling we are trying to accomplish when creating our content. You want someone to think about your content and how they feel about Coca-Cola or sitting with family for Thanksgiving. 

This is one of the most powerful tools in social media creation: to let your audience feel genuinely connected to your messaging. Your audience can look back at your work throughout the years and feel a sense of belonging. Creators like Pewdiepie and Mr. Beast have done this, as their content has affected the lives of so many that it has become "core memories" to millions of people.

While it is hard to create content like this, making videos and content of this caliber takes a lot of time and effort. You don't need to hit all of them at once, but if you focus on getting each one down over time, you can provide the community with something valuable, relatable, authentic, and unique. I have difficulty putting any of these labels on one channel, but this drives Addzey's content creation. We hope that we can help you create content that achieves your goals with our marketing training courses.