Brendan Kane - Social Media Expert | The Secret To Going Viral

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As a kid I would watch movies and every time I'd watch a movie I'd be like, I want to be that character. When I was in high school, I picked up a camera and I was the kid that was always shooting. Then I decided, why don't I go to film school? But that's how I kind of got got the start into really studying this art form.

In a world where attention is currency, Brendan Cain has cracked the code. From pioneering the first ever YouTube influencer campaign to managing $200 million in marketing spend, he's built digital platforms for icons like Taylor Swift, Rihanna and Adriana Lima. For years, he was the mastermind behind the scenes until he used his own methods to gain 1 million followers in just 30 days.

The first YouTubers would let you in like they're your friend. And that's a big mistake that people make with social media is they think it's one to many. When it's really a one to one platform. You need to be able to grab that attention and hold that retention through retention. And that's what a lot of the.

Top creators were doing at the time. When I first started, like back in 2005, we're talking maybe a few million people on these platforms. Today it's close to 5 billion now.

At hookpoint, his viral content model has generated 60 plus billion views and 100 plus million followers. Redefining what it takes to go viral. This is Brendan Cain and some people.

Think of virality as Mr. Beast. To me, it's like what is important for the impact that you're trying to have and the brand that you're trying to build. Work on yourself. As entrepreneurs, as business people, we're so focused on optimizing and scaling the business when a lot of times the core focus first should be optimizing yourself.

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So Brendan, what made you first start studying the mechanics behind viral content?

It actually interestingly started in movies. So just to kind of take a step back, like as a kid I would watch movies and every time it was crazy. Like every time I'd watch a movie I'd be like, I want to be that character. Like, if it was about firefighters, I want to be a firefighter. If it was about like a baseball player, I want to be a baseball player. Not realizing that it's really the mechanics of the storytelling. So when I went to, when I was in high school, I picked up a camera and I was the kid that was always shooting videos and editing of them of our friends. And then I decided, well, why don't I go to film school? So in film school, that's where you kind of start really starting to learn the mechanics of great storytelling. It's not necessarily virality in a sense, but it's like great storytelling of like through this format of a movie that can really stand out at the highest levels. Then I moved to LA in around 2005, to pursue a career in film. I wanted to be a film producer. And like everybody, I started at the bottom making coffee copies, deliveries and things of that nature. And, you know, when you're trying to rise in any industry, you want to connect with the top people. So that was like the head of the studio, directors, producers. But when they would ask me, why did you move to la? And I would tell them that I wanted to be a film producer, their eyes would glaze over. Like, it's just like, oh, this is just one of a million people that have the same pipe dream. So I really had to take a step back and be like, okay, how can I grab that attention of these top people and offer the most amount of value? And I just noticed at the time, for the studio that we work in, every time we finished a movie, we had invested tens of millions of dollars into this single piece of content. And then we were going to invest tens of millions of dollars or more marketing this piece of content. And this isn't like traditional business where you have years or decades to build a brand. You're talking about six months to a year for hundreds of millions of people to know about this piece of content around the world. So at the time, like, everybody was reliant on traditional media. So it was television, print, radio, things of that nature. And social media was just coming on the scene. So it was like MySpace was like the predominant player, but YouTube was starting to gain some momentum. So I just went to the head of the studio and I was like, I know we're spending all of our money on these traditional media outlets, but let's pay attention and create a strategy for these new emerging platforms, because it's going to be a fraction of a cost, and in some cases, free. In the case of, like, I did the first influencer campaign on YouTube and in 2007 for a movie called Crank with Jason Statham. And I just kind of realized there was no such thing as an influencer at the time. There was just these people creating content that were massing millions and millions of views. And at first it was, well, why don't we just tap into that so that we can market our movies? But then it started to introduce me to the psychology of, like, well, how are these platforms actually operating and why are they gaining so much momentum? What is the actual difference between a video that's generating millions of views and one that's generating thousands of views? So that's how I kind of got the start into really studying this art form.

Yeah, no, I was going to say.

When you, when you started to look.

Into what these individual content creators like really early nascent stages of social were doing. It's interesting, I'm sure you saw it from a professional lens because this is what you went to school for and you worked with the best of the best. But were they doing anything that was taught in film school at all, in, in sort of best practices for creating compelling content at all? Was there any similarities or was this radical shift in almost a 180 from the way Hollywood was doing it actually serving them better?

Yeah, so it's a great question. There were some major differences and there was also some similarities. So in terms of the differences, one.

Of the big differences that was kind of overlooked in the beginning was you have these, most of the, kind of like the bigger influencers at the time. And again, they weren't called influencers, but there are people in their bedroom on web cameras and a lot of people wrote them off because of that. They're like, oh, it's just some kid in their bedroom on a web camera. But the difference was, you know, if you think about movies and television, it's a very passive experience. Like you're just kind of engaging this with this content from a past, if you're just watching it, consuming it, versus in the. And it still holds true today with social media. It's a very active experience. Like the first YouTubers would let you in like they're your friend, like they're connecting with you in a one to one basis. And that's a big mistake that people make with social media is they think it's one to many when it's really a one to one platform. Because if you think about when we're mostly consuming social media, we're sitting on a couch, on the train, on a bus, whatever that may be, by ourselves, consuming that content. So that's a big distinct difference. Now similarities is you're still having to tell a story. Like you need to be able to grab that attention and hold that retention through retention and have some type of payoff.

And that's what a lot of the top creators were doing at the time. That was a different type of storytelling. They're not using like the three act structure in terms of how those stories were unfolding, but they were still telling stories even if it was about their day, of what unfolded or things of that nature that was causing the people that were really rising to the top to connect and you know, generate that level of engagement. Initially.

Yeah, no, I just, if I think about, I mean, I've looked at a lot of your work and you really pinpoint and you, like, you, you slay some, you know, sacred cows and really some really sort of, you kill some ideas about what creates great viral content that I think are incorrect. I think that's probably some of the best work that you do. And I think that you sort of reposition and refocus people on what they should be focusing on and what they should be sort of over indexing on and what they should be paying attention to when it comes to creating viral content. That's really, in my opinion, like, that is your life's work. And when you think about what has created these early influencers versus what creates viral content today, do you think it's the same things? Do you think it's changed over time? Do you think that it's evolved or are like there's core fundamentals that you have studied, you believe to be true, you've seen replicated again and again and again and again that hold true over the lifetime of social media?

I think it's definitely changed. And there's one, there's one key ingredient that's caused that dramatic shift and that's the number of people using social media. So when I first started, like back in 2005, we're talking maybe a few million people on these platforms. Today it's close to 5 billion. And the reason that shifts that dynamic is the sheer amount of content that's being produced. And what that means is you have far more competition. So what worked and broke through in 2005, 2006, 2000, even through 2010, the barrier of entry is much lower. So your storytelling didn't really need to be as dialed in as it needs to be today. In addition, people have been using social media for so long that they've become professional consumers of content on these platforms. Meaning they can tell within like a split second or less than a second. And it may not be a conscious decision. It may be subconscious. Am I going to consume this piece of content or am I going to scroll to the next one? So there's a lot of fundamental kind of storytelling dynamics and nuances that go into what makes successful content today versus if you were doing it back in like 2005 through 2010.

But I want to, I want to differentiate between successful content and viral content. Are they, are those different kinds of content? Or in your mind, can all content be viral content?

I love that question. That's such a great question because virality is a term that's like thrown around and some people think of virality as Mr. Beast, but other people getting like 50,000 views on a post is going viral. Like, to me, it's like, what is important for your business? What is important for the impact that you're trying to have and the brand that you're trying to build. Now when we're analyzing content to try and understand what are the patterns, what are the structures that we need to emulate, we're looking at a certain benchmark of, in the millions of views to kind of gauge and dissect the content. But for an individual, for a business or brand, fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand may be considered viral or more maybe success. And that's more kind of what we're after is like, what is going to have the impact, the bottom line that you're going after with your content and not saying that, like, if you're a, you know, a dentist or a nutritionist or something like that, maybe a hundred thousand views is all you need and you can consistently do that and you have more business, more impact than you know what to do with. And that's completely fine.

You know, you, you've put out work about how to build a massive audience, massive following in your mind. Now if you sort of like, if you look at what's been most impactful in, in your life and your career and whatever metric you're tracking, do you think that brands should even focus on that? Because a lot of people throw around the word like vanity metric, and is it useful? Is it not social proof? Does it add value? Is it actually driving leads, revenue, all that? So I mean, you wrote a whole book on how to grow your following. So is that a metric people should even track anymore? Was it ever a metric people should track? Talk to me about that.

Yeah, it's. There's a lot of levels to that question and it's really intelligent question. So when I first wrote the book, 1 million followers, that was 2017, I wrote the first version of it, and I've released like three or four different versions of that book. But back then, following meant a little bit more than it does today. From the standpoint is the amount of reach that you would get with each post. Like you. Around that time, if you had, say a million followers, you could get like reach of like 30 to 40 to 50% of that audience with the content that you're publishing. But as we just recently discussed, like, the more people are on the platforms, the algorithms really have to determine, like, what are the pieces of content that are going to retain audience because there's a lot of demonization and myths around the algorithms. They're there to serve one goal, and that's just to keep people on the platforms longer. The longer people spend on the platforms, the more ads they can serve. 99% of the time, they're not shadow batting your shadow, banning your content. They're not suppressing it to get you to pay for reach. It's just they're looking for the best content that can grab and hold attention over other content. So if any one of us opened up our favorite app today, like whether it's TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, there's probably 150,000 pieces of content it could see to us based upon the accounts we follow, the content that we've engaged with. So they can't just because you're following an account, make sure that every piece of content they're going to see because there's all this other competition out there. So just because you have a lot of followers doesn't mean you're going to reach a lot of them. So. So that's kind of number one. I always kind of say focus less on the number of followers and focus on like, what is the impact that you're having with that content. Typically we're looking at views to see is it breaking through, is it holding attention? But to your point is like, why are we doing social media? And for people, it's different reasons. Like, for some people it's like pure leads. Like, I need to generate leads for my business and I need to generate, you know, you know, sales calls, sell products, whatever it may be, whatever that foundational piece is, like, that should be your guiding light in goal there. For some people, it is getting kind of the recognition having a number next to their name so they can get on stages, get book deals and things of that nature. So it really kind of depends on the individual. The one thing that I will say though is there is a big distinction between organic social and paid social. And a lot of people misunderstand organic. They think that organic social is meant to sell your product. It's meant like, I'm going to do a product shot, I'm going to talk about my product and things of that nature. Organic social is about building that trust that what we call to get people to know like, and trust you. If people know like and trust you with organic, they're ultimately going to want to buy from you and take that next step. But you can't lead with the sale, you know, paid media, you can kind of lead with the sale and go more direct response. But that's a big distinction is like organic is really about how you build that relationship, how you tell that effective story so that ultimately people want to take that next step. Then as you get more experience and more success, you can play paid and organic off of each other. That's where you can really maximize it. Just to give you an example of that, because it kind of seems counterintuitive. It's like, why am I going to make content if it's not selling my product? We were working with a leather craftsman. His name's Tanner Leatherstein. And he came to us really struggling with social media, didn't have a lot of experience. He has like 2,000 followers. And the challenge and problem he was having was he was trying to sell his products and what his products were with leather goods. It was like leather handbags and purses and wallets. But we took a step back and said, well, what is the way that we could best express his expertise and genius Through a storytelling format. Build that know like and trust where it motivates people to go and buy the product without having to talk about his products. So we helped him design a format called is it worth it? Where he'll. He'll buy like a $500 Chanel handbag, deconstruct it on screen, and tell you whether it's worth the money that you paid for it. So that format took him from 2000 followers to 2.5 million across all of his social channels. And if you watch his content, there's no CTAs, he just has the link in his bio. And previously he was spending ads on like pay per click advertising, search advertising. He was generating 10,000 visitors a month. But when the organic took off, it jumped to 100,000 purely organic. And his most expensive items, the items he was selling for thousands and thousands of dollars that were custom made, he couldn't keep them on the shelves. So I just use that as an example. Is first, he's a very niche kind of like expertise, but also he's not trying to kind of sell you the product. He's trying to kind of build that relationship. And by building that relationship, it ultimately pays that dividends. And you think about like, why do. Why does Nike and Reebok and Adidas and all these beauty companies spend billions of dollars on like celebrity endorsements, athlete endorsements, and things of that nature? Because that inherent relationship is already built there that you're just tapping into it that leads to that ultimate sale and conversion.

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Yeah, I think that there's, there's a few different elements. One we talked about where they're approaching social media and social media organic content as an ad. Let me place a shot of a product, let me put a discount through that. Like nobody, just think about yourself when you're consuming social media. Nobody logs on saying I want to see a great ad, I want to see a great branded piece of content or I'm looking for a discount. So that's one thing. They're, they're essentially treating their social media profile and their content as if it's their website and it's just not that secondarily is. We're talking about, you know, close to 20 years on social media. It's relatively new. And the challenge is there's a lot of creative practices and creative models that were, that are being used, that were designed pre social media. So there's, there's, there's a lack of adapting to like a creative process that works for these platforms. Third, that we talked a little bit earlier, I think one of the biggest inhibitors of success is the fact that every one of us has one of these devices in our pocket. These, these phones that we can literally open, click, record and post. So it's a true blessing in the fact that we can do that and reach the masses. It's democratize your ability to, to reach millions of people. Because pre social media you had to have connections with a television station, radio station, news. It wasn't available to anyone. The downside is, is it doesn't take a lot of thought. So people think just because I took the time to pull up my phone and press record and post it, or just because I took the time to load up Photoshop and create a graphic, or just because I took the investment to hire a social media manager, that I am owed that level of success. And that's where like the blaming of like algorithms, like, oh, it's out to get me, it's shadow banning, it's, it's there to, you know, force me to pay for reach come in. But I think also, like, again, we need to think about the world that we live in versus pre social media. Because if you think pre social media, like how many content creators are really on the planet? Less than 10 million probably, you know, because you had the traditional medias, but you kind of had bloggers that were coming on and in, in news outlets and websites. And if you think about 30 years ago, it's probably less than a million. Maybe it's the hundreds of thousands today you're talking about 5 billion people on these platforms. Even if we think about entertainment in general, it's not like we just go to the movie and we just have 300 cable channels now we've got like Netflix and Amazon prime and all these things. And YouTube's becoming a player in this space. So again, it's like we have so much content to choose from as consumers that we really need to up our game and really justify why should somebody spend the time, even if it's 30 seconds, paying attention to what we have to say versus the hundred thousand other pieces of content that we could be seated and engaged with.

And you know, that's actually, I'm curious because I'm in this game, I'm in the podcast game and I, I don't quite understand, I don't quite understand why podcasts have as much influence as they do because it seems like everybody loves short form because they're always looking for this next dopamine hit and that's how the majority of social set up. And a lot of people ask me, you know, as, as, as somebody who has the podcast, a business owner would be like, hey, like should I start a podcast? And I, I say yes because I see a high amount of trust with my audience and I, when I advertise products, those ads do quite well. And, and I see what Joe Rogan's doing and how he has, you know, influence over elections to a degree. And obviously podcasting was a huge piece of it. So when we think about all the different kinds of content because you live in the world of social and short form social, but you also study all kinds of what, what is the what, what's the psychology there? Why are some consumers sort of going to both ends of the spectrum? Super long three hour podcasts on one end are very popular and on the other end you have short form, you know, 15, 30, 45 second. Because as a business owner who doesn't understand any of it, it's very confusing which direction to go in.

Yeah. So it's, it's really interesting because people say we live in a micro attention world and the truth is we do live in a micro attention world in terms of grabbing the attention. But once we've grabbed it and justified we're worth paying attention to, then people are willing to sit there and watch and consume long form content. Like you just said, people will, will spend an hour with you on your podcast. They'll listen to a three hour Joe Rogan podcast, Heck Squid Games 2 just came out. They'll sit there and binge watch the, watch the whole thing in a day. So it's, it's the short attention span is there but, but it's from grabbing that attention. But if we're able to sit there and grab that attention and justify this is worth paying attention to, people will spend the time with it. Now there's an interesting kind of dynamic if you look at the social media platforms and this has been, you know, this has been going on for over a decade in that like Facebook, Instagram, you know, TikTok, they're all short form and their, their consumption behavior that they've ingrained in their users is short form. People go to TikTok or Instagram reels or Facebook with a train from a subconscious level. I'm going to give a piece of content 30, 60 seconds. I'm not there to watch something for three hours. Now Facebook has tried really hard, TikTok has tried really hard to shift that dynamic. Like you look at like Facebook's history. They did Facebook lives, you know, they did, you know, Facebook tv, you know, and Instagram tried Instagram TV to kind of shift that human behavior and dynamic and it just really hasn't worked out versus YouTube. YouTube from the beginning was ingrained. Like this is a long form platform. When you go to YouTube, you're going in knowing again, a lot of this is happening on a subconscious level. I'm willing to give something 5, 10, 20 minutes, like my behavior. Like I use YouTube probably more than any other platform. I just download podcasts, download clips and then I just listen to it. Like that's my behavior. And I know the stuff that I listen to. Like sometimes I'll listen to like a three hour podcast. But I know that behavior is ingrained in. Now the interesting thing is YouTube got scared of TikTok and created YouTube shorts because they were worried that they were going to lose out in that audience. But that's kind of the real kind of element of like short form versus long form is understanding the dynamics of the platform you're playing on, but also understanding you can hold attention. Now the numbers may not be as big as, as short form, but as you've seen, the impact can be massive because you know, somebody listening to each one of your podcasts for an hour at a time and they spend, let's just say they spend five hours with you a month versus like on an Instagram reel. Like maybe they spend equivalent of like 40 minutes a month. Like there is like a huge difference there. Now that's not to say that you can't play the two off of each other or one's, you know, that that short form can't be valuable. It definitely can. It's just the strategy and how you deploy it for the end goals that you're going after.

I think that's very smart. And if I think about even how the biggest podcast grow in, the strategy that we use as well is it's short form to capture net new and then that's sort of the top of funnel for lack of a better term. And then they sort of start to discover you.

Well, they do discover you.

Then they explore all the other types of content you create, and then some of them convert into long form podcast listeners and long form YouTube viewers. But if you think about that first piece, that, to your point, that viral first piece, the hook that brings them in, that captures their attention and sort of is like the, for lack of a better term, gateway drug into all the rest of your content. I know that you study what makes that first piece, that short form piece, so effective because you've done it successfully for yourself. And this is, this is the playbook that I think people really have a hard time wrapping their mind around. And I know that you studied all these different sort of elements of what creates viral content with a good hook and something that captures people. So let's talk about some of those elements. But I want to. First we can talk about the things that do work. But I think what's more important and a little bit more fun would be to talk about some of these, I mentioned it before. These, these sacred ideas about viral content that people hold true that are definitely not true and really have almost zero impact on the performance of your content. What would some of those be?

Yeah, so a lot of these myths, and I'll say that at some point they may have held true because there was less content on the platform. So we're talking like 10 years ago. So one of the big ones is frequency. Frequency is the key to going viral. It's just not. It's like, it's the storytelling elements. And you look at, for example, like some of the best content creators, like a Mr. Beast or like a Mark Rober or Veritasium, like these guys are, you know, Mr. Beast has ramped it up, but for a long period of time, they're producing like one piece of content a month or every six weeks, like, and they're engineering every aspect of it. You know, frequency can come into play once you've kind of really mastered the art form of understanding how to tell a story. But it's not the driver to your success. Like it's not the driver to, to you breaking through. And we can kind of talk a little bit about kind of the, the, the elements of why this is true. But a lot of people will say, well, I'm just going to throw a bunch of things at the wall and hope that one's go. One goes viral. But the reality is, let's just say you post 50 pieces of content and one goes viral. You don't have a process or a model in place to understand why so that you can replicate it. We can talk a little bit about that. That model in a bit, but that's one. You know, there's an overemphasis on hashtags. There's. The one thing that I always hate.

Is like, in 2025.

Yeah, still. You'll still see it. Yeah, you'll still see it. The one thing that I can't stand is use this trending audio and you'll go viral. Because if you click on the trending audio and you look, 99% of the content's not going viral because you don't understand the. The dynamics about it. But there's. There's. I think that the biggest thing is there's this overemphasis on, you know, quantity versus quality. The other thing is people are chasing trends. You know, that's another big thing is like, like, if you think about trends, it's like, nobody's still doing the ice bucket challenge today. You know, it's just like, that's a fleeting thing. It's. And I kind of think of if we. We talk about mastery and like, everything that we focus on is like, how do you become the top 1% of. On social media if you think about mastery of anything? Let's just say we want to master a musical instrument. Well, you wouldn't, like, week one, start with a piano, and then week two, switch to a saxophone, and week three, switch to a flute. Like, how are you going to master any of those. Those different elements? So those are like some of the big mistakes that, that, that people are. Are falling into. And I can kind of dive into the model that we've built and how they can kind of overcome those and the things that they should focus on, because it's super easy to say, oh, these things don't work. But what are the things that do work? Like, how should you go about it?

Yeah, no, please. I think that's. And I wanted to. I wanted to highlight things that don't work. Another thing that I. I've heard you speak about before, even production quality, any of these, Any of these sort of ideas that you have to have the best equipment or the best lighting or the best audio, does any of that impact at all? I believe that you can. And I've seen a lot of creators with just picking up a phone and recording in the middle of nowhere do quite well. But is there any merit to that?

So it depends on the format and structure you're using, and we can get into what that means in a minute. But the quick answer is no. There are certain formats that do require it. Like, if you look at Diary of the CEO and Stephen Bartlett. They're creating an experience and that experience is reliant on certain production elements. But you look at somebody like Robert Croak that does walking Listicles, he walks around the block and records himself on his phone, super successful. You look at the man on the street format, which school of hard knocks does Simon Squibb is doing My friend Alex Stemp. Like we can shoot those things on iPhones. So there are certain formats that kind of dictate, you know, higher production value. But by no means do you need to start there and no means is it required for success.

Okay, so let's talk about the Playbook. Talk to me about first. How did you, how did you build this playbook? What were the different things that you studied? How did you come to this conclusion? How did you test it out, sort of validate the Playbook and let's talk about what it is.

Yeah, so as I mentioned, I started in social like 2005, built digital divisions for movie studios and then built some technology in that space. And then around, I think like 2012, I helped kind of advise and scale one of the first social media advertising agencies. So if you think back when social media first started, they didn't have their own ad networks. Like they were relying on like, you know, bottom basement, you know, CPMs of banner ads and using third party networks and things of that nature. And then I think I could be wrong, But I think YouTube was the first one that came out and they created TrueView, their advertising platform. And our agency was the largest third party provider of ad revenue to TrueView when it first launched. And we helped scale that agency to managing about 100 million a year in and media spend across these social platforms for Fortune 500 companies. And the reason I say that is I learned so much about the inefficiencies in terms of the creative. So we had like, you know, major corporations and brands, you would know, come to us with a piece of creative that was designed for television or for print or radio, or maybe it wasn't, it was designed for social, but it was using these outdated models of like how you create content for those platforms. And what I would ask them, I was like, how do you know that this piece of creative is going to like work to the tune of investing millions of dollars? Like they were talking like anywhere from like a million to $10 million against a single piece of content without testing it, without any validation that this piece of creative is going to work. And I just kept seeing that over and over and over. Again, I was like, this isn't, this isn't sustainable. There's got to be, you know, a different way of going about this. So I left, I left working in that company and I started building the foundations of the model that we use at Hook Point today. And one of the first experiences that kind of really started to refine and understand this is I was brought in by a journalist named Katie Couric when she moved from traditional television, the Today show, to Yahoo. And she was really struggling because Yahoo didn't have a really strong sense of organic social media. So I helped her kind of reframe the interview process, the creative process. We did about 220 interviews together, ranging from like Joe Biden to DJ Khaled to Jessica Chance to Chance the rapper, Kim Kardashian, all these different people. But one of the things that I did is I created a system and a process that we could rapidly test and iterate to understand, well, what is the right format and structure for each interview. Because typically if you think about an interview is like you just like, what are the questions that I'm going to go in and ask this person versus I wanted to take a step back looking at social understanding what structures and patterns are actually resonating and then back into those. So like what are the initial hooks that we think are going to perform and go in with the hook rather than the question. So over those 220 interviews, we tested like 75,000 variations of content, just rapidly iterating and testing and testing and testing all these variations to the tune of generating about a billion views in like 18 months. So from that I kind of started seeing the success through that model. And then that seeded the idea for my first book, one million followers, of running the experiment of myself, of generating a million followers in 30 days. And then we kept evolving and evolving and evolving, evolving it. So this model that I'm about to break down, this playbook, has been in the work for like eight or nine years. And the team we've done, we've done about 10,000 hours of research into understanding how and why things go viral. But the process, the playbook, is five different distinct steps. So the first step is what we call research. So most people at a very simplistic high level is they're using social media from a passive experience, meaning they go, they're just consuming content, not really paying attention, not really learning. Versus again. When I went to film school, you sit down and watch films and then you dissect them. Like you understand, like what made this Scene work, this scene not work. Like getting into those nuances. You read screenplays, all those things. So the first step in the research process is to understand, and I mentioned this term a few times, is that there's these clear storytelling structures and patterns that have proven to succeed and we call them formats. Now with film, it's the three act structure. Everybody uses that format when they make a movie. On social media, there's hundreds of these formats. So we've done analysis on over 220 formats. So I'll give you some examples, but I want you to kind of just think that there's a lot of choice out there. So by no means am I saying these are the examples that you have to use to be successful. So one of the ones that I mentioned is man on the street, which everybody has seen short form. You approach a random stranger on the street and you interact with them in some way. So Simon Squibb is blowing up with this format, saying, what is your dream? My friend Alex Stemp is a fashion photographer. He approaches a random stranger on the street, offers them a professional photo shoot and shows the result. School of hard knocks approaches entrepreneurs and asks them like business and entrepreneurial advice. So that's a clear format. Now that format can be used for any content. You could use it for legal, for finance, for nutrition. So that's a format. Another example of a format we call two characters, one light bulb. So it's the same person playing two different characters. They play the expert and the novice and they break down like a misconception about something. So like Erica Kohlberg uses it for law. Like what happens when your AirPods break or your flight gets delayed. Mark Tilbury uses it for finance. So those are examples of formats. So in that research phase, all I want you to do is to start recognizing these formats, start looking into them and seeing, oh, this has got 10 million views. Is this a format? So the way you know if it's a format, you click on the person's profile and then you look, has that person used that same structure at least five times and broken through. And typically when I say breakthrough, it's a million views. Now it can be larger, it can be smaller. It's not like a hard rule. The format kind of dictates that, like YouTube, the formats, the views can be less like in the hundreds of thousands. But you want to see, has it been repeatable for success. So that's step one. Step two is now we're going to choose a format. So what format do we want to use now? People ask me this all the time and it's one of the things that we do with our clients. The biggest piece of advice I can give you is, is this a format that you are super excited about? Like, are you gonna love doing this format? And the other thing that I just mentioned is when you're doing this analysis, don't necessarily look for an apples to apples comparison. Like, if you wanna do man on the street and you're a nutritionist and you can't find anybody else doing it as a nutritionist, that doesn't mean it's not gonna work for you. People kind of need to look at it again from the context, not the content. So first, like, are you gonna be excited about this? And then to your earlier question, resource wise, is this a format I can pull off with the resources that I have available to me? And again, there are formats that literally you can shoot on your iPhone. We have a hand doctor that started at zero followers, blew up on TikTok, got a TV deal, a book deal, and she literally is just shooting content on her iPhone, telling stories to her iPhone. So making sure that you're choosing the format with the resources that you have available to you. So once you've chosen that format, now we have to do analysis of it. Because most people will look at it and be like, oh, school hard knocks. He's just interviewing entrepreneurs on the street. I'm just going to do that. I guarantee 99% of the people that do that will fail. Why? Because they don't understand what's really driving the performance of the format. The format itself is not driving the performance, it's the execution of that format. So when we think about, like a simple exercise that everybody can do right now, when we think about the format driving the success versus the execution of it is you just think about your favorite movie genre, whether it's sci fi, horror, whatever it is. Every time you sit down to watch one of those movies, it's not going to be great. Like, I'm sure everybody's had an experience where they have that level of disappointment of like, oh, I love sci fi, but the movie just sucks.

Of course. Yeah.

So it's the same thing with social media. When we look at, again, like the school of Hard Knocks or in man on the street or maybe like Erica Kohlberg and the two characters, one light bulb. We can't just look at the success and be like, I see what they're doing, I'm just going to do that. So what do we do? Like, what is the playbook so we created a process called Gold, Silver, Bronze. So what we'll do is we'll take an account like School of Hard Knocks, Erica Kohlberg, one of those. And we'll create a spreadsheet. And what we'll do is we'll take 5 to 10 of the top performers. So that's usually in the millions of views. Then we'll take 5 to 10 of the average performers and 5 to 10 of the underperformers. And what we're doing is we're watching, like, what are the things that are happening in those top performers that are not happening in those underperformers? And again, it's less about the content, it's more about the context. So these can be things like, well, what's their pacing? Like, what's, you know, a man on the street? What type of reaction are they getting? What's happening in the first three seconds? Like, what type of captions are they using? What's their facial expressions, their body cues, their environments? Like, what's the editing like? We're trying to spot the difference of, like, what happens in that high performer versus that low performer. So we call these things performance drivers. These are things that can drive the performance up or they can detract the performance and cause it to fall flat. Now, any format, even if they're like the top creators, you will see those underperformers in there. And that's where most people don't look, is they think of like somebody like an Eric Kohlberg who has millions and millions of followers, and. And don't think that they have any underperformers, but they do. And that's really where the clues are to understanding what causes that format to succeed versus what causes it to fail. So once we have that understanding, that baseline understanding, then we can move to the third step, which is creating the ideas. Now, this is where most people start, is they just say, I'm going to sit down, I'm going to create some ideas for social media, and I'm just going to go after it. Well, without that structure to it, it's not going to work. It's kind of like thinking about, I'm going to come up with an idea for a movie, but never understanding, like, how a script is written or what the structure of a script is or how dialogue works or things of that nature. We need to have that format and structure first. Then we can come up with the ideas. And I can definitively tell you it's so much easier to come up with ideas once you have the format, like when we were talking about tanner leather scene earlier, that is it worth it format? Well, it's super easy. Like, okay, well I just did the Chanel handbag. Let me buy a thousand dollars product person and deconstruct it. Let me do this biz, belt these things. It makes it a lot easier to kind of understand what the ideas are that fit into that format. Then the fourth step is we do a single piece of content at a time. Now, why do we do that? Because we want to make sure that we're encapsulating the learnings of this process, that we understood everything that we just went through to learn what the format is, what makes it work, the idea that goes into it. So we produce a single piece of content at a time, which is the fourth step. And then the fifth step, we review the results. So what typically happens if something doesn't work is one of two things. Number one, you've paid attention to the wrong performance drivers. Maybe you thought it was this thing that was driving the performance, like it was the caption, but it wasn't really the caption, it was this other element. Or two, you just didn't execute it properly. So one of the exercises that we give people is if something didn't perform is put your piece of content on one side of the screen and then the gold standard from the reference and the research that you did and play them side by side. And oftentimes we'll tell clients to do this before they post so that you can get a real, true, honest assessment. As long as you're honest with yourself, you will see a massive difference in terms of what like a high performer does versus a low performer. So the reason that we follow this process and do one piece of content at a time and analyze it in this way is like, most people are batch producing content. They're doing 10, 15, 20 pieces of content at a time. But the challenge with that is like, if you post the first one and it doesn't work, what are you going to do with the other 19? Typically, you're just going to post them. And thus there's this opportunity loss for learning from that first piece of content and applying it to the next one and the next one. Now, once you've mastered your format and understand it, then, yeah, by all means you can increase the frequency. You can sit down and do multiple posts at a time. But we want to have this underlying structure and foundation in this creative model. So even if your post doesn't perform, there's no lost opportunity. Here you can learn from it, understand where it fell flat and and fix it for the next one. In addition, if something does work now we have a foundation to understand why it worked because we followed this process and we can replicate it over and over again.

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When people first of all, thank you I appreciate the breakdown. It's very useful when people sort of start on this journey. I'm trying to think of. I have a couple different questions in my head. I want to think about which one I want to ask first because there's. I know that the audience will have questions about a few things. First of all, is this platform specific, meaning that if I execute against this, will there be nuances that are slightly different from TikTok Instagram YouTube shorts? Let's start with that because I think it's a very obvious question if you're trying to sort of be everywhere.

Yes. So there are performance differences in formats from platform to platform. And kind of my recommendation is start with one format on one platform, master it. You can still post the content on other platforms, but don't really get caught up in the performance of that format on other platforms. Focus on dialing in on that platform first and then see, are there certain, you know, tweaks and ways that you can get it to perform for others? Now there's some formats that will perform on others. It's typically all short form. Typically long form doesn't translate, especially when you're talking to, talking about taking like a YouTube video and putting it on like TikTok or Instagram or things of that nature. But yeah, there is typical. There is a bit of nuance to it. Like, you think about, like TikTok, for example, it's less polished, it's more kind of, it's more kind of feels authentic in terms of the, the, the production value and things. Like, you see a lot of podcast clips and things work and less polished stuff versus Instagram. You can see things that are a little bit more polished, but there are nuances to, to each platform and you can, sometimes you can just do small tweaks to a format to make it work on different platforms. Sometimes it takes a different format. But the one thing I want to stress for people is like, if you really nail it on one platform, you're going to have more traffic and attention than you know what to do with. It's like, yes, people say have content in every platform, and I don't, I don't. I'm not against posting content on other platforms, but focus on getting really good at one. And if you get really good at one, like, you're gonna have so much impact in terms of what your goals are that it's gonna drive a lot of benefit to you.

Almost to the point where, like, I've seen, I actually see it a lot with, with big YouTubers and this is more a comment on long form, but when I see people build massive YouTube audiences, you see that audience start to trickle down and follow them everywhere and consume their content everywhere. I do believe that some platforms have more loyal audiences than others. I think you do is probably one of the best. But yeah, I think that for we're talking to business owners that are looking for leads. We're not trying to, you know, get somebody that owns a, like a, whatever, a consumer goods brand, ice cream shop, a car wash or whatever it is they want to do a, even a financial consulting, tax advisory. They're not trying to be the next Kim Kardashian. They're trying to grow their business. So we're not looking for followers. We're looking for business impact, which is exactly what this is going to do in spades if you nail it. The other question is, if somebody's doing this and that content is working, do they just do this style or this format of content for all of their content, or should they include other things, other styles of content, or does it hurt them if not every single piece is like a knock it out of the ballpark winner. Because even if I look at Erica or Mark Tilsberg, like they do other styles of content as well as not just their main format that I think got them the majority of their audience. So how much should they do? Do they oversaturate? Is it every single piece? Is it a 75%, 25%? How do you think through that?

I would say that initially starting out, just focus on every piece of content being in that format until you master it. Once you've master it, you've gained a skill set that can be applied to any format or any piece of content. But the challenge is, even clients ask me, well, can we do two or three formats? I was like, you can do two or three formats, but start with one and just really master that skill set. Again, it goes back to the analogy of learning a musical instrument is like if you want to learn a musical instrument, you're not trying to learn three at the same time. You take one at a time. Yes, I like and believe in diversification of content, but I also am a firm believer in like focusing in on one thing at a time, in understanding the dynamics of what it means to create a successful piece of content. And then once you do, through focusing on one format, you can apply that to any other piece of content that you're creating.

You mentioned something else about making sure that the content you created, the format you choose, is not a trend and You've identified like true formats, but is there a lifespan on these styles of content? Like for example, the man in the street, that was Daniel Mack. And what do you do for a living? Going up to people in nice cars. And then School of Hard Knocks is the same style and they killed it. And I love their channel as well. But will there be a point where it's so overdone and so oversaturated that there's so many men on the street, Simon Squibbs now that all of a sudden it starts to lose its virality factor?

It's a great question and I would say the answer is no. I think it comes down to the execution. So if you think about man on the street, like man on the street was well before social media. Like, I don't know if you ever watched Jay Leno, the late Night show, and I think Late Night Host did it before, but Jay Leno did like Jaywalkers, where he would, he would stop people on the street and interact with them. It's a universal format that it just comes down to the story of how it's executed. Like, I think that it, it typically falls out when the execution falls. So when I see a content creator that is using a format and the performance dips, it's typically because they have probably become less interested in it or they're kind of slipping a little on the dynamics of it. That doesn't mean as a content creator that you have to just only live with that format. Like, if you don't want to keep doing it, then find something else that you want to do. It's not like a hard rule or requirement to do that. But can formats dwindle over time? Sure, some formats can. Like it can, but I just want to say, like, you know, like Alex Stem, my friend, he's been using man on the street for like three or four years. This is not something people think. Social media is so fleeting. They think in concepts of trends that I need to be doing something new every week or every month and it's just not like that. Like also think about like movies. Like the foundation of movies in the three act structure has been used for like 70 or 80 years. So I don't think it shifts as much as it does. But also I don't want people to kind of feel like, oh, I'm getting locked into this thing and I can never shift or change out of it.

Out of all the other things that people pay attention to that I hear a lot about. So hooks, first three seconds, thumbnail, whatever, or Cover image. Are there any retention, are there any other metrics that are important outside? Of course the lagging indicator of success would be leads, revenue, clients. That's lagging indicator. What are some other leading indicators that you can look at or some other leading components that actually make a difference?

Well, you mentioned the first one and the most critical one is retention. It's just like how long are people spending with your content? Because again that's how the algorithms determine what content gets seen by a thousand versus ten million people is how long is it able to grab that attention. Now you mentioned like on YouTube, you'll click through on thumbnail and headline is critical because that's the indicator of intent to get into the retention. On short form content you can look at things like the number of views to reach that you have, which is a good indicator of how good you are at stopping the scroll. So typically we're looking at, we're looking at like a minimum ratio of like 30 to 40% of views to reach to understand like what is happening when people are being seeded this content because it's not as straightforward as on YouTube as like click through on thumbnail or headline. You know, with Instagram, there's a lot of talk now about, you know, shares, you know, because they're dynamic and their kind of hypothesis is retention is the key or one of the keys to retention is sharing and starting conversations in DMS around content. So that's one of the things that to look at but at a very basic level when we're talking about video content purely is like is your content generating enough views that is an indicator of how good you are at grabbing and holding attention. So if you look at nothing else at a very simplistic level, you can look at that, but then you can start diving in granularly of like what is happening in the retention graph? Where are they falling off? What's happening at that fall off point? Like, how can I fix that for the next time you're creating thumbnails and headlines, what's the click through percentage of things of that nature. But everything is through the lens of how effective am I at grabbing that attention, stopping the scroll or earning the click and then holding attention once I've.

Gotten it amazing last idea that I just want to float to you because you see it a lot with the business you work with in terms of creator, economy, influencers. Do you see that if, do you see that they still have a place in the future if businesses understand how to create great content? Or do you feel in the future that businesses are going to build their own influencers and their own influence. Kind of like Duolingo has. That's like a great example and how Wendy's does it on Twitter and there's some great examples of awesome business content. But do you see that influencers and creators also have a place outside of businesses? Or do you think they're going to be more even equity and incentive aligned or just built through, you know, built up through the business? Maybe employees that that business makes famous? Like, where do you see this economy going if businesses get it?

Well, I think, I wish that businesses would get it. I think that some business, they will get it. But I think there's going to be a place for both. I mean, you even look at, for example, like, you look at another, like you look at Nike, like Nike is a master or Red Bull. They're, they're masters at marketing, but they're still doing endorsement deals with athletes and celebrities and things of that nature. I think there's always going to be the creator and the influencer, and I think that there's always going to be the businesses that get it. I'm hoping that more businesses will get it. I just like the stage that we're at right now is like, this is still kind of early and they're still trying to apply old principles to these platforms. So I'm hoping over the next five or 10 years, more business will grow. But there's always going to be a demand and a need for influencers, even like businesses that get it. Like, why wouldn't you use influencers? As long as you're really dialing in the performance of each channel that you're doing, like, you dial in your organic, you maximize the potential of it, but you can still leverage influencers and paid and things of that nature to really amplify and scale even further.

I guess I was really thinking along the lines of.

Going forward, are we.

Still going to have these, like two separate entities or are you going to have people that are influencers that start to take equity positions in small businesses and start to work like hand in hand with them, as opposed to being these two separate disparate groups? I don't know.

I mean, that's, it's. Honestly, it's one of the core focuses of our company going forward. We're kind of an incubator for identifying talent, grooming talent, and then, you know, either partnering them with businesses from an equity stake or helping them cultivate their own business from it. But I, I think you, you hit it spot on. Is like you look at some of the most successful businesses and it spawned out of that, that type of relationship. I mean, at the highest level, you look at Elon Musk and what he's done with his businesses and the amount of tension and in, in, in growth that that has driven. So I definitely think that there's going to be more of that type of model in the future.

You've spoken about a lot of different topics regarding to sort of what's worked for you in the past and what's worked for you now as well with Hook Point and some of your clients. What are some new ideas, some social media opportunities that maybe I didn't ask you about, that you're looking into now that you think could be opportunities for businesses in the next six months, one year? I know things move fast, but what are some new things that you're researching?

I mean, one of the big things that we're researching is AI. And you know, we've built like one of the largest data sets of like, qualitative analysis of what content goes viral. And we're very excited about kind of the future of the visual aspect of AI. You know, less about kind of like where ChatGPT is today and more about, like what Sora and Google are building from a visual standpoint. I don't know how quickly that's going to happen. I mean, it seems to move very quick. But I think in the next, like few years, you're going to see amazing kind of tool sets at your fingertips that are going to lower the barrier of entry for creating, you know, content in different formats so that you're not reliant on even the higher production formats. You're not solely reliant on that. I think that's going to present a unique opportunity. The one thing I will say about AI is a lot of people think it's the solution and it's not a solution, it's just a tool. So it's like the analogy I use is if everybody tomorrow woke up and was using AI to create social media content, there's going to be winners and losers. Just because you use the tool doesn't mean you're going to be successful. So I definitely wouldn't rely on the future of AI solving your problems of performance in your content, but more how you can learn and leverage these skill sets to become a master storyteller.

I've actually seen it do the opposite in the short term, where it actually hurts content performance because people are too reliant on it.

Yes.

And exactly some of the Copy that. You see some of the captions. It's just, it's just garbage and horrible.

Yeah.

And now you see AI, generative AI.

Tools dicing a video without people even looking at what that, you know, that 30 to 45 second clip, which is a great tool. I, I use OPUS tool. I can find timestamps, but then after I find the timestamp, I'm still finding a hook and I'm still going in, I'm still editing. Like I, I'm not just clipping it and posting it. And I've seen channels post 10, 15 clips a day just directly from Opus and you can tell and it, it looks like garbage. So, yes, 100. It's a tool.

Yeah. You're using it as a tool. You're an expert storyteller, so you know what to look in the output and you know what the prompt should be so you can leverage it successfully. But I agree with you, 90% of people using AR are using it the opposite way of just like, oh, it's going to figure it out.

For me, that's never the answer. If people want to connect with you, if they want to work with Hook Point, where should they go? Socials, website? Do you have anything else? Like, are you writing a new book? I mean, I don't have a book.

Yeah, I just launched a new book called the Guide to Going Viral that breaks down the entire model.

Amazing.

And just for your listeners, we're giving it away for free. I worked on this book for two books. This is not like an ebook or something. You can go and buy it on Amazon, but I'm going to give it to your listeners for free, the PDF. So they just go to hookpoint.comclary your last name. They can download the PDF for free. And it details the entire model that we talked about today. And if they just want to learn more about working with us, then go to hookpoint.com they can reach out on Instagram. My name Brendan Cain. I'm LinkedIn as well.

Amazing. Last question I'd like to ask, and this is more of, I mean, you've had an incredible career, you built a massive business. A lot of entrepreneurs listen to this show and I like to pull out one piece of advice at the end of these shows, just because we spoke a lot about tactics, but obviously success is not just about tactics. So out of everything that you've done in your life, if you could pass on one lesson to your kids, one of the most important lessons, it could be business lesson, could be life lesson, whatever it is. What would that lesson be and why?

I think it's to work on yourself. Like, you know, as entrepreneurs, as business people, we're so focused on optimizing and scaling the business when when a lot of times, the core focus should first should be optimizing yourself. Like, what are the things that you need to work on? What are the past traumas you've experienced? How do you overcome them, really? Because everything that every experience that we've had, good or bad, drives how we perceive the world and is the decisions that we make. And the more we've worked on ourselves, the more we understand how and why we do things, the better that we can show up and the more impact that we can have through the decisions, through our company, through our customers, through our employees, things of that nature. So I would say that that would be the piece of advice that I would.