Break Through the Noise

by Tim Staples

  The Headline

  YouTube calls this a title, but “headline” is the more appropriate term.

  Don’t forget to name your video. You’d be surprised how many videos are out there with titles like “Risotto edit 3.” And when you do name it, don’t use some bland, generic headline like “Risotto Recipe.” That doesn’t explain what makes your video distinct from any of the other risotto recipes out there, so no one will click on it. Also, don’t start making clickbait headlines like “Exploding Risotto” or silly things like that, unless you are actually blowing up risotto and filming it with a slow-motion camera. In that case, explain that in the headline!

  Make your headline unique, clear, and descriptive, such as “How to cook a perfect risotto 4 ways. My Italian grandmother’s secret recipe revealed!” Of course, you should look at the competition in the category and see what has worked for them. You want to use keywords that have generated high traffic, and you want those words at the start of the title. If you have branding or episode numbers or other un-catchy details that have to be included, they need to go at the end. You should also test your headline to determine exactly what options will resonate the most. (More on that in the next chapter.)

  The Thumbnail

  Pick an image you happen to like from the video. And never, ever allow the YouTube algorithm to select the image for you. It puts zero effort into this and it selects at random. You might as well be pulling options out of a hat blindfolded, and that’s not a way to select what will drive people to click.

  Put as much thought into the thumbnail as you have into the rest of the video. Use a still photographer, or at least a decent camera, to capture beautiful and eye-catching images that will make for a distinctive thumbnail. That doesn’t mean a freeze frame from your video won’t work; in fact, sometimes it will still be the best option. The key is that you put the time in to find an image that will grab attention.

  The Description

  Don’t make it generic or thoughtless. The first few words are absolutely key to making people watch, and the rest is the key to keeping them engaged. Repeating the headline and then dumping a bunch of tags and links underneath won’t make anyone click anywhere.

  Remember your audience. In this case, they are probably out looking for risotto recipes, and you have the best one! You are a match made in heaven, provided you make them understand that, and fast! Give them a brief summary up top, with all the things that would entice someone looking for this recipe to check out your video. Is it fast, easy to make, a sure-fire way to not fail? What are the key components of your particular recipe that make it unique? Put these qualities up front. After that, give them more details, be personal, and don’t forget to be helpful by providing shopping lists and written recipes. Tell them you will do that in the initial description, so they know that if they click on your video, you will make things easy for them.

  The Tags

  Don’t forget to add tags. They are key to how the search engine works. Tags help users find your video when they search the site. When users type keywords related to your tags, your video will appear in their search results. If you don’t use the word “truffle” in your text anywhere, the people searching for truffle risotto recipes will never find you. Also, don’t misspell or use generic, irrelevant tags. The word “great” won’t get you anywhere, but the words “tasty” and “tastiest” might help, while a misspelled “tastyest” won’t do zip.

  Use the platform to help define your terms. You have the world’s largest-reach engine at your fingertips, so please look at what it suggests. It’s as simple as searching for things related to your risotto recipe and watching the autocomplete suggestions that pop up. Is the word “instant” included? I bet it is. See if it applies to your video. Maybe it should even be in the headline? From the word “instant,” what other keywords can you glean? People want to make risotto “fast” using a “5-minute recipe,” perhaps? This is also where the algorithm can be very useful; it is perfectly designed to extract tags from your video and from your competition. Take a look at the Keyword Suggestion Tool. Also, do include your name or brand name. This is surprisingly often overlooked, but you want people searching for you to find your content, so add away. And one last thing: pull all your tags into a spreadsheet so that you can sort them by relevance. All the words and phrases that include “instant” or “fast” should be grouped together, so that you can determine your core choices. You just don’t want to add hundreds of tags: you want to make sure you are adding the best and most relevant ones, and you want to make sure your very best ones are at the top of the list. Pulling them into a spreadsheet can be really helpful.

  These steps will give you a good start, but remember, YouTube is the archive library of online video and your content can have a second life at any time, so keep all your metadata fresh by updating it periodically.

  And please, at the risk of sounding like a dusty old schoolteacher, pretty please with sugar on top: Check your work! Failing to proofread is a sad reality and, amazing as it sounds, people will work for weeks on a video and then post it with a typo in the headline.

  Of course, throughout all this, the most important thing to remember is to stick to your voice and to be authentic. There was a trend a few years back where people would try to game the system by adding keywords that were hot search topics at the time but had nothing to do with the video. It worked for a while, but YouTube clamped down on this practice pretty hard, punishing posters and even taking down videos that tried to ride trends that had nothing to do with their videos. Since then, the algorithm has changed, and if you try stunts like that now, the system will slap your fingers and punish you by dropping you in the rankings or blocking your video altogether.

  When used in the right way, and with an authentic voice, YouTube can be a wonderful place for people to discover your content, the same way someone might find this book in their nearest public library.

  Facebook: The Town Square

  We spent a lot of time on YouTube and for good reason. It was the first platform, and in our imaginary city, this public library was the first building ever constructed. Everything else has, in one way or another, been built in response to it. We will go through the other platforms in just as much depth, but much quicker, because we’ve now established our reference point.

  So, if YouTube is the public library, Facebook is the bustling, cobblestoned town square just outside it. This place is so pivotal and so ingrained in our society that we take much of its offerings for granted, even as new stores keep popping up faster than the old ones are closing. Yesterday, it was a peaceful square where we could reconnect with friends, but now it has a movie theater in Facebook Watch, it has a set of phone booths through Facebook Messenger, a market through Facebook Marketplace, and the dating apps are being installed as I type.

  In many ways, Facebook is the exact opposite of YouTube. You leave the relative quiet of the library and step into a busy square jammed with people from all walks of life, happily shouting their opinions from every corner, eager to show you their food, the event they are going to attend on Thursday, or the pictures from the fabulous vacation they are having.

  In short, while YouTube is an archive with a very long tail, Facebook is all about the immediate experience, about what’s in your face right now. That’s because it’s a feed-based system. This is a fundamentally different beast, and one that many social media platforms have adopted. The concept is self-explanatory: When you open up Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, for example, what you see is your “feed.” This is the stream of content that the algorithm has decided to put in front of you, based on whatever criteria you have established over time.

  On Facebook, if you liked one of Lisa’s posts, the algorithm will be slightly more prone to show you more posts from her over time. If you continue liking them, more and more will follow, and before long, you’ll be living in a Lisa-centric bubble. This topic has been the cause of much debate, and Facebook is actively tr
ying to change the algorithm to counteract this phenomenon. They are making progress, but to some extent the problem here is not one of Facebook’s making, but rather one of human nature.

  Say you are walking through the town square to your favorite coffee shop, and there’s a loud gathering outside. Perhaps it’s a bunch of people who have opinions different from yours on some passionate topic, and they happen to be screaming their ideas at one another. Wouldn’t you rather go to another coffee shop, so you can have a quiet moment to catch up with your friends?

  Of course you would, as would most people. We’d all rather sit in peace and quiet with our friends to chat, happy in our own little bubble, than to confront and deal with a loud crowd.

  This act of human nature, when extrapolated into the Facebook algorithm, means that if you are a left-wing liberal, you are very unlikely to see conservative viewpoints in your feed. We are very quick to point the finger at Facebook for this problem, as if they were somehow actively trying not to let us see the other side, when the reality is that we actually choose not to see it. We choose to sit in the coffee shop across the square.

  Of course, the square is also littered with all kinds of propaganda. There are people who are actually robots in disguise, telling us to have opinions about anything from world politics to brand-new hand towels. Because we aren’t used to robots yet, we still tend to mistake them for real people. The algorithm is learning how to spot them as well, so the only real advice here is to be aware when you wander around the place. Some people really aren’t what they appear, and some aren’t even people at all.

  The square is also an excellent place to hide in plain sight. Think of it like the proverbial water cooler at work, the gathering place where people stop to exchange stories from their lives, talk sports, politics, or entertainment. The big difference here is that as you entered this square, you were handed a magical cloak, straight out of J.R.R. Tolkien, giving you the power of invisibility. You can step right up to the water cooler, listen in on conversations, and never even reveal that you were there. Again, this comes down to one’s choice. It’s only when you choose to engage that you must take your cloak off and reveal yourself.

  So what does all this mean if you are looking to step into this noisy and loud and busy place and somehow break through? It means you need to grab attention. Something big and loud and eye-catching that makes everyone in the square suddenly turn their heads to look. It won’t last long, no matter what you do. Facebook posts have a far more dynamic spike than videos uploaded to YouTube. Views, reactions, and shares come quickly after a post and then typically drop off significantly over the first week or two, or until you repost the content in the future.

  This is all because of the Facebook feed-based system. As soon as your post hits someone’s feed, something else is coming right behind it, ready to gobble up their attention. Everything on Facebook is a flash in the pan, come and gone in an instant. But that doesn’t make it any less efficient—actually, quite the opposite.

  Because Facebook is driven so heavily by the algorithm, rather than by human input into a search field, you can tailor your content to be hyper-efficient with your audience. The audience segmentation tools on Facebook are unparalleled. When the time comes to zero in on who should see your message, no other platform (with the exception of Instagram, which is owned by Facebook) comes close.

  This means a number of things, all of which fit into the concept of full funnel marketing. Funnel marketing, simply put, is the idea that you grab massive awareness at the top of the funnel to make everyone know you exist, then you guide people down the funnel with more engaging content, and ultimately convert them, meaning you drive some of them to take an action, such as signing up for a newsletter or buying a pair of shoes, whatever your goal may be.

  The way we think about this, for Facebook in particular, has a number of interesting and unique differentiators. I will walk you through three detailed examples to demonstrate this.

  1. The Traditional Funnel

  The top of the funnel is massive awareness. Traditionally this was done through TV, radio, and print ads. You simply spend a lot of money and plaster the town and the airwaves with your branding, so that when people think of your product category, you are top of mind. This used to be very effective, and if you have bazillions of dollars you can still go this route; it just happens to cost more and tends to be less effective these days.

  On social media, the rules are different. The core idea—that you need awareness and attention—still holds true, but where you used to have to indiscriminately blast your message across the rooftops in order to reach as many people as possible, you can now target your awareness campaigns and aim them directly at the precise audience that you want to sell to.

  Let’s say you are the Ford Motor Company and you want to sell the brand-new Mustang. In the old world you would buy a Super Bowl ad and a bunch of prime-time television commercials, plus radio and print ads in all the glossy places, and your message would be seen by everyone. But these days, these questions need to be asked: How many of the people you are reaching are in the market for a new car? How many are in the market for a muscle car? How many of those also happen to like American cars over all the European or Asian competitors? The percentage is heartbreakingly small. That means you have spent millions of dollars putting your message in front of people who will never in a million years buy the car. Even if they love the ad you made, it doesn’t change the fact that they may already have a brand-new car, or they are only halfway through their current lease, or they hate muscle cars, or they are looking for a mini-van to cart the kids around to soccer practice.

  Bottom line? That’s a lot of advertising money poorly spent.

  2. The Social Media Funnel

  On social media, and in particular with Facebook and Instagram, you can create a hyper-targeted and segmented audience. To start, you define your core audience by setting parameters in four different categories:

  I. Demographic

  Age, gender, relationship status, education, workplace, job titles, and more. This is the first and most basic step in segmentation.

  II. Location

  Geographic area targeting, down to a radius around any specific location of your choosing. Want to reach people at Wrigley Field? Create a custom radius and only target people in that specific area.

  III. Interests

  Cluster groups of people based on what they like, their hobbies, favorite movies and TV shows, leisure activities, and more. Selling hiking backpacks? Zero in on people who like camping, hiking, and outdoor sports.

  IV. Behaviors

  You can customize your audience down to specific purchase behaviors, such as what device they like to use and a whole host of other activities. Selling an app that’s available only on Android? Skip iOS users with a click.

  Of course, the more targeted your audience is, the more expensive they are to reach. This is because of the auction-based media system on most social media platforms. We will dive into this in more depth in Chapter 9, but it’s important to understand the basics here.

  Auction-Based Media: An Overview

  On traditional media, all ads are created equal. If you are spending $300K to place your 30-second spot in an episode of The Big Bang Theory, the network really doesn’t care what your ad is, how good or bad it is, or what the audience might think about it—it’s still going to cost you the same. The networks care only that your ad is not offensive and that it meets their standards and practices for broadcast, including any FCC regulations—but they do not have any opinion on the creativity or effectiveness of your ad. Want to spend $5M on a Super Bowl spot that has an action sequence full of explosions or simply text on black? Producing them might have different price tags, but the Super Bowl media buy is the same.

  But on social media, it’s all the exact opposite.

  Remember, these platforms are created for their users, not for advertisers. Selling eyeballs is an add-on, not a core mis
sion. Because of this, social media platforms are most interested in serving their audience. That means if their audience doesn’t like your ad, the engagement and view time will be low and you will be kicked lower in the algorithm, meaning they will charge you more money per view to serve the ad. Conversely, if people are engaging with your video, it will rise in the algorithm and become cheaper to serve as an ad (which we will cover in the next chapter).

  We will go into more detail on this later, but for now it’s important to understand this core principal of how media buying works on social media, so that you can maximize your content for the different platforms.

  This is especially important on Facebook, simply because it has been around longer than any other feed-based platform. That means the algorithm has had more time to develop and mature, making it more and more sophisticated over time.

  On Facebook you can select a very narrow target audience, but go too small and your impact will be limited. This is simple math. If you give your content to 100 million people and 1 percent like it, that’s a million people! If you narrow your audience size down to Wrigley Field, that’s only 40,000 people if the ballpark is sold out, and how many of them check Facebook through the game? Okay, probably half of them, let’s call it 20,000 people. If 1 percent of that audience likes your content, well, that’s only 200 people.

  The way you want to play this game depends entirely on what your objectives are. But it’s important to understand what drives the platform in order to intelligently pick an audience that is right for you.