chapter 2
content is king?

The internet has changed many things, but easily the biggest changes have been in how we communicate and how we consume what is communicated to us.

Social media is no longer the new kid on the block. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, TikTok and many more platforms that come and go are part of the new normal, and as they've matured they've changed the way we live and interact. Call it evolution, call it an addiction, but you can't call it a fad. Social media is here to stay and the advantage it has over all other media forms that preceded it is in the way it rapidly and constantly evolves. Combine social media's ability to change with the fact that almost anyone on the planet can access it, and you have a domain worth investing your time in.

For too long the focus has been on social media forms when it should have been on content. You simply can't be successful with social media without focusing on content.

The fact that you are reading this book tells me you already understand that the time to focus on being your own broadcaster starts now. So what does it mean to be a broadcaster? It means more than uploading a few posts here and there. It means being committed to an audience, always showing up and constantly delivering value.

Success in the new media world doesn't come from using scheduling bots to religiously post three, six or 50 times a day. Success isn't decided by hashtags. And it doesn't come from copying the latest trends?-?in fact, make that the first note you write down here. Copying the creative videos that have already gone viral will only cause you damage. Success or failure in this game comes down to the experience you provide, the level of activity you can stimulate in someone's brain. The question you should always be asking yourself is are you providing enough stimulation in the content you are delivering? Are you making people care?

There's one piece of advice I drill into the clients I work with. It's time tested, having held true since prehistoric men and women were drawing stories on cave walls. If you want them to share, first you must make them care.

New ways to deliver, engage with and share content

Social media is the most dynamic and complex media environment there ever was. Identifying audiences, scheduling events, cross-platform promoting, collaborating, listening, researching, re-targeting?-?all of this and more before you even start creating content.

But while the platforms are forever changing and tweaking their algorithms there is one element in the whole social media formula that remains unchanged.

Humans. And, in particular, the way the human brain absorbs and engages with content.

People and their behaviours around processing content remain much the same. While social media is often billed as the great disruptor, the truth is that human attention and what captures it hasn't evolved nearly as rapidly as the platforms themselves. The way our brains consume and process images, text and videos hasn't changed?-?only the way we access, deliver and share them.

Technology has changed how we access the things we have always and will always crave?-?stories, information, entertainment, news, art, drama, music?.?the list goes on. So the best way to manage the ever-changing digital landscape is to adopt a strategy that targets natural, instinctive human behaviours. The part of social media that people like Mark Zuckerberg can't change. As you will learn throughout this book, this is an evergreen, win-win approach. First, your audience craves content that is created the way their brain is designed to digest it, and the social media platforms crave and survive on content that delivers and holds people's attention.

Viral videos exist because the platforms have created an environment in which they thrive, where the content that triggers the greatest levels of engagement is rewarded. Before the emergence of social media, stories, scandals, jokes and gossip still spread and circulated through society; it just didn't happen so efficiently. People naturally, instinctively communicate with one another, as they always have. Now we've just developed more and better tools for doing so. The internet has put the rumour mill on steroids; one-to-one conversations have become one-to-thousands interactions.

The internet provides radically different ways for an audience to respond to content, triggering the platform to spread it further. The interactions we make still occur in the moment; what's different is the ease with which we can reach way more people than previously possible.

While the printing press, radio and TV increased audiences massively through their greater reach, the act of commenting on and sharing that information remained at a face-to-face, human-to-human, word-of-mouth level. Sharing a cave painting with others is necessarily restricted to your own immediate social group. Today's social media platforms, on the other hand, are built around interactions and engagement on a vast scale. 'The Facebook' started as a (rather sleazy) way for college students to share whether they thought one of their fellow students was 'hot or not'. Opinion that was usually reserved for locker rooms and parties enjoyed a cyber injection and spread across campuses at a frightening rate.

This layer of interaction on top of content, the ability for all to be involved, was clearly addictive. On Twitter everyone can have their say; on Facebook every moment can be celebrated; on Instagram every success can be posted. Our appetite for being a part of something bigger than ourselves, and for projecting an image of our life as better or fuller than others', feeds not only our egos but also our hunger for content. For platforms fighting to maintain greater levels of attention, content that draws a crowd is golden, and those creating it are rewarded.

In the early days of YouTube you could actually consume every video posted. That ceased to be possible a long time ago. For brands, the situation is flipped: posting content on social media is in itself no guarantee the audience you are targeting is ever going to get to see it. That's right. For all the uproar about being safe online and never posting things you wouldn't want to share in public, the truth is most content is only ever exposed to a tiny fraction of the people you hope will see, read and engage with it.

A viral video overrides the usual limits on reach and exposure, which is why understanding how to identify and implement content using your unique Viral DNA code is and will continue to be so powerful and important. I like to say that by empowering more people to make better content, we are actually saving the internet, one bad video at a time. This is my mission.

Identifying high-quality, relevant content is by far the greatest challenge for social platforms, closely followed by promoting the quality content to the right users, so we don't end up drowning in irrelevant posts and traffic. We all know how the final chapter reads when platforms fail to manage carefully what they serve up to their user base?.?Myspace anyone?

The research I'll share with you in this book will help you tackle these challenges and massively boost the engagement levels of your content. The answer, essentially, is about creating content using the Spread Factor.

The power of social media lies in the ability to properly understand how it works and why people use it the way they do. The 'touchdown play' is to enter any social media ecosystem and tell a story in such a way that it becomes sought after, is easily validated, and generates a desire in people to share it and pass it on. To achieve this, you first have to understand what it means to operate natively and seamlessly where you are targeting?-?that is, to create and post your content according to the particular nuances of that platform and the behaviours of the people who use it. For example, Facebook and Twitter handle content in very different ways. If you were to post your Tweets as Facebook status updates, you would create a friction that would turn people away. By posting natively you will be able to better convey your message with little friction and fewer distractions for your audience.

You, the new viewer

Since 2015, TV viewing habits have changed dramatically because access to content has changed. Only a few years back the internet and mobile data were expensive to access; now they're affordable. Ads were the price you had to pay to watch a TV show; now they're avoidable. Technology has made content relatively easy and cheap to produce, and social media has opened the gates for anyone to build a following through broadcasting their message.

What this has meant is the consumer is no longer locked into only watching TV. Growing up before the internet, brands had me cornered. Between Masters of the Universe, Hong Kong Phooey and Justice League cartoons, my TV viewing was filled with sugary cereal ads and commercials for the latest Mattel toys. If you have kids, or know any, take half an hour out of your day to observe how and what they watch.

Watching how young human beings interact with content is the first step in building an understanding of what and why viewers Like, Comment, Share and Buy. Kids get frustrated by comic books and...