Avoid this huge social media mistake in 2024

Welcome to Content Dept.

This newsletter is designed to give you a marketing edge.

Each week, I break down top 1% content and share the most important marketing learnings/trends that will help grow your business faster.

VARIETY SHOWS

Variety Shows

If you want to grow on social media in 2024, you need to avoid making this one mistake (spoiler alert: 90% of brands are making it).

I call it, the Variety Show Trap.

A common social media strategy is to build your social channels like a variety show:

• Lots of different formats (e.g., news recaps, founder vlogs, trending audio, photo compilations, etc.)

• Content centered around the creator/brand vs a single topic (e.g., posts could cover fashion, food, travel, and more on a single channel)

The theory was, “Our followers view our channel as a variety show about our brand, so I’m going to entertain & educate them across lots of different formats. This will show our range and let us be max creative.”

And this was the perfect social media strategy between 2015-2022.

But it’s the wrong strategy in today’s era and is probably the reason you aren’t growing as fast as you want.

Let me explain…

During the pre-2022 social media era, social algorithms were based on follower graphs.

This meant that when someone followed you, they were opting in to see your content.

When you posted, your content only went out to a subset of those followers.

In simple math, if you had 200,000 followers, and posted something, you’d likely have 4,000-8,000 people see it. Of course, if it got high engagement, the social platforms would show it to more of your followers.

The only way to grow a channel during this era was to:

1. Have existing followers share your content with new people on the platform

2. Drive people onto the platform (from off platform) to follow you

In that previous era, you could get away with a variety show style approach.

In fact, this was probably the smartest strategy because it meant your followers wouldn’t get bored with the same content over and over again. Because all they saw on their feed was content from people they followed.

During this era, many brands treated their social channels like a TV network (TBS, TNT, HGTV, or ABC)…there was a variety of different programs, and it all angled towards a single topic direction.

But in 2022, we transitioned into a completely new era…For You (thanks to Tiktok)

Followers no longer matter.

Because now, users get served content mostly from people they don’t follow.

And if you don’t believe me, go look at the view split analytics of your last few top-performing posts.

I’d bet everything that most of them look like this…

No matter how well your video performs, the majority of your viewers will not be existing followers.

So what does this mean?

• The good news: Post-2022 social algorithms give you a chance to get in front of tons of new people with every single video. This was not possible before and should be looked at as a huge opportunity

• The bad news: If you want to grow, you need to think how to get social algorithms to spread each new video to as many “on target” viewers as possible

You can make variety show content in an attempt to entertain your existing followers…but you will not grow, and there’s a good chance that even less of them will see it than before, because they are all watching content on the For You feed.

Here’s the truth…

Current era social algorithms don’t evaluate your videos based on follower fit anymore… they evaluate them based on target audience fit.

Let’s break this down…

Every time you post a piece of content, the algorithms take that individual video, sample it with your existing followers, and then try to audience match it with an all new group of strangers.

Their goal is to show it to as many people as possible (so long as they all like it).

The cheat code is that the more times in a row you make the same type of content for the same audience archetype, the easier the algorithm can find that audience, and the better your content will do.

Said another way, you want your content to be super similar.

And this is counterintuitive to how things used to work. In some ways, the reason my content does so well now is because I wasn’t a creator in the old era (so I never built the old behavior pattern).

Let’s break this down further with an example…

Let’s say you’re a creator that likes food, travel, and tech.

In the old era, you would have tried to create your version of a variety show around your life.

On Monday, you post a cooking video. The algorithm goes out, samples with a small subset of your followers, and then tries to share it broadly to strangers that like or follow cooking.

Cool, your video gets 4,000 views (20% your followers that like you, 80% strangers that like cooking).

On Wednesday, you post a tech video.

When the algorithm goes out and tries to reshare with people that liked your last video (in an attempt to audience match), the video performs poorly. This is because there is a low percentage of cooking fans that like tech.

This poor performance signals to the algorithm that it should throttle down your tech video because it’s a “bad video.”

The truth is, it wasn’t a bad video…it was just aimed at a different audience.

Social algorithms, in the current environment, are not suited for multi-topic channels.

The best way to win in the current climate is to have one channel dedicated towards one topic, one audience, one format, and to hammer that over and over and over.

It turns out, the best performing social channels are not variety shows (TV networks), they are more like a single sitcom with thousands of the same type episode (e.g., Friends or The Office)

When you watch Friends, the setting is the same, the characters are the same, the timing is the same, the number of ads are the same, but the plot differs.

When people see that it’s an episode of Friends, they instantly know whether they’ll like it or not.

And more importantly, after 10 episodes of Friends in a row, the algorithm will know the exact audience archetype to show the 11th.

If you want to grow on any social channel in this era (short-form or long-form), you need to take this into consideration.

How can creators/brands take advantage of this tactically?

Here’s exactly how I advise my brand clients…

To begin with, most brands have a core brand account. Let call that your “first account.” Put that to the side for now.

Step 1: Your goal is to find a content format aimed at your intended audience that performs well 3 times in a row.

To do this, start a new account (consider it a burner, your “second account”) and experiment freely.

I’d make this account look like a human (@janedoe) or a movement (@walkthestreets) vs a brand (people don’t interact with brand accounts in the same way they used to).

I would post as frequently as possible (up to 3x per day if your team can handle it). Your only goal is to find a winning format. This is the period to be creative because you have zero constraints.

Ex: Let’s say you’re selling a sleep supplement.

All of your video attempts should be aimed at your desired customer archetype (people that aren’t sleeping well) and all of the video topics should be about sleep or related health concerns, but you should experiment widely with format types.

Is it meme based? Customer interview testimonials? Product reviews? Recaps of scientific studies? News reactions? Founder Stories? Man on the street? Etc.

There are tons of formats you can try and your only goal is to find one that shows outlier potential 3 times in a row. I define “outlier” as something that gets at least 10x your average view threshold on the main account.

Step 2: Once you find a format that works, triple down and make only videos in that format on that channel.

This channel then becomes a satellite channel to your main brand account. If you want to help kickstart this new second account, run collab posts that are co-posted on both your satellite account and main account. This will help show the new format to existing followers on the main account and some will follow.

Now here’s where people mess up…

And this is going to sound weird and unintuitive, but your goal now is just to pound that same format over and over and over until it stops working on the satellite account.

If you have the urge to be creative and want to create other types content, start a third account and begin this process again.

The reason you don’t want to continue experimenting when you’ve found a format that works is because your goal is to hone the algorithm as tightly as possible around the format <> audience match you’ve created.

The future of social media, at least in its current form, is not a single brand page…it’s a network of brand pages, all interconnected via bio links and collab posts, that each focus on a single format + topic + audience angle.

And again, the reason this is the case, is because the algorithms build lookalike audiences based on your content and try to match those audiences when you post new content.

If the match is there, they boost it. If the match isn’t there, they throttle it lower.

Here’s a tactical example to show what I’m talking about.

My friend Kevin founded Immi Ramen, it’s a better for you ramen product.

This is their main brand account on Tiktok (@immieats):

You can see, the videos aren’t getting a ton of views and it looks like there is a variety of formats they are testing.

Now look at their satellite account (@ramenonthestreet).

On this account, they focus only on “man on the street” style content.

You can see other than their pinned videos (which are to help explain and introduce the brand), they are consistently hammering the same viral format…find stranger, chat with them on street while eating ramen.

This account is 5x bigger and drives more of their sales.

Now, you may be looking at this and thinking, “multiple accounts on every platform, this is way too much for my small content team to maintain.” 

I agree.

For most creators with limited resources, I’d recommend focusing on one channel with a single format + topic + audience. The problem is that most creators will find this boring and lose the creative spark because it takes the fun out of the process.

But if you’re a brand, you need to prioritize investing in this.

There is no better ROI for your marketing spend than cracking this formula.

Because once you crack a format that works organically, you can:

• Run paid ads on those video to juice the conversion

• Hand this working formula to microinfluencers to replicate

And yes, I always put my money where my mouth is. Here’s how I know this works:

• For my first 21 months making content: I made 250 videos, drove 1B+ views with 99th percentile engagement, but my following didn’t grow as fast as some of my friends (I only added ~500K followers). Upon investigating, I was churning followers and my videos were underperforming. I didn’t understand why. Now I know…it was because I was making content about tech, business breakdowns, travel vlogs, and marketing strategies all on the same account. I was working against the algorithm vs with it

• For the last 3 months: I split out my accounts and only focused on a single type of content format + topic + audience per account. The growth has been insane

If you want to check out my channels to see how I break them out (showing IG/YouTube):

• Main channels (tech & AI focused): @kallaway/@kallaway

• Tech channels: @kallawaytech/@kallawaytech

• Marketing/Content Strategy: @kallawaymarketing/@kallawaymarketing

If this breakdown doesn’t make sense, reply to this email with your question and I’ll try to answer it.

VIDCLUE

Vidclue

In each episode of Content Department, I like to share one content tool I’m using that will make your life easier.

This week’s is Vidclue.

It’s a free database with hundreds of short-form video styles and examples.

On the left side, they show categories of videos (e.g., Educational, Internet Trends, Creative Devices) and then when you click on one, the right side shows you viral short-form video examples in those styles.

It’s also designed with a retro interface (sounds included) that is super satisfying to use.

This is an amazing tool to help you pick formats to experiment with in Step 1 from the above playbook.

Keep Vidclue bookmarked as a reference guide.

Vidclue is free to use and I have no affiliation, just thought it was cool!

GENERATIONAL OPPORTUNITY

This is a Generational Growth Opportunity

Here’s a quick teaser for next week’s post…LinkedIn short-form video.

This is a screenshot of my LinkedIn traffic over the last 28 days:

37M impressions in 28 days. Thousands of new followers. Hundreds of DMs. 😳

I’m convinced there is no better growth opportunity than making short-form video on LinkedIn.

Next week, I’ll walk through why it’s such a massive opportunity and how exactly you can take advantage of it.

MY VIRALITY FORMULA

I just dropped a video on YouTube breaking down my formula for making viral videos.

Out of the 340 videos I’ve made:

• 170 have gotten 100K+ views

• 68 have gotten 1M+ views

• All have maintained 99th percentile engagement

Simply put, I have cracked the code for short-form virality.

In this video, I break down my full formula (btw this is a brand new YouTube channel dedicated to content strategy and marketing so make sure to subscribe for more videos like this).