My thoughts on content marketing

It’s hard

Making viral content is hard. You are competing versus a lot of people. These people often have different reasons for wanting to go viral - some want to be full time influencers as their careers, some may just like posting and of course other people marketing a product or company.

Whatever the reason, there is a lot of competition and your goal is to make your content stand out so it gets seen by the maximum number of people.

With AI leveling the playing field in engineering and design, distribution has become more and more important. While the largest tech companies (Google, Apple, Meta) have their own distribution, many companies and especially consumer companies end up paying. The end goal of content marketing is to gain followers thus increasing your own distribution.

Increasing your follower counts on social media platforms also increases the chance your posts do well which then increases the chance you get more followers. It’s a self perpetuating cycle but we’ll touch more on this later.

Platform

TikTok, Instagram, Youtuber, Reddit and Youtube are the biggest social media platforms.

When creating content, you’re a fish in an ocean. Your content needs to be able to stand out. The best way to do this is through evicting one of the core human emotions:

It is also important to keep video content short. Reels have quickly become the most popular social media format partly due to people’s shortening attention spans. When making reels, a good rule of thumb is to keep it under 45 seconds.

Avoiding controversial content is usually good

Another good rule of thumb is that it is very important to avoid controversial content unless that is your goal. Controversial content usually gets disliked/downvoted and a bad proportion of likes/dislikes will cause the social media platform's algorithms to mark down your post.

Trend Following

Just like in competitive video games, a ‘meta’ tends to develop around the type of content that does well. A certain image, video or sound goes viral, people catch on and then it becomes repeated. Usually these trends can last from weeks to months. Replicating viral trends early does really well with its effect diminishing as time goes on.

Finding Trends

Content that goes viral is content that people like and you are people! Well, you’re a part of people. A good starting point for finding trends is to find posts that you like. Scroll reels or tiktok and content that you yourself like or has a good number of views is usually a good starting point. Of course, there is no guarantee that your sense of humor or style overlaps with the vast majority of people. In that case study what goes viral and try to mimic the content in those images/videos. While you don’t need to have the same sense or humor/style, it’s important to understand why select viral content does well.

Testing

While all social platforms have their differences, one thing is relatively the same. When you post something, the first 15 to 30 minutes matter. This is because the platform's algorithms look at the number of likes, views and the number of comments to judge the quality of the post. If engagement metrics reach a certain amount of threshold, your post will be shown to more people.

It should be obvious when you have a banger