The Raw Reality Of YouTubes Algorithm

The algorithms are really, there's a lot of misinformation and frustration about them. One being that they suppress your reach on purpose to get you to pay for reach, which you and I know. They don't make money off of you getting you to boost for posts. They get money off of like the best direct response and biggest brands spending millions or tens of millions of dollars a month. The algorithms are designed to do one thing and that's keep people on the platforms longer. So the longer they're watching your videos, the more ads they can serve, the the more profit they generate. So this isn't like Netflix where they invest billions of dollars in original content to keep you on their platform. They rely on us as content creators to be the fuel that runs them. So they want to see us succeed, they want to partner with us. And the way the algorithms work is a high level analogy is like you'll post something and let's say they seed it to 100 people and they'll measure how effective you are in terms of stopping the scroll and retaining that audience. And if it's successful, then I'll do another hundred. And if it's successful there, they'll keep extending out, out, out, out there. But if with those first hundred people or at any of those benchmarks, it's not effective in stopping the scroll and holding attention, they'll cut the reach right there because they're just gonna favor other content. So they'll just suppress your reach. And that's oftentimes where you see people with a large audience that have low number of views or engagement. It's just because that piece of content's not holding up to the standards in the world that we live in today. There's no free wins with social media. It's not like back 10 years ago where just because you had a certain audience size, you're automatically going to reach 30 to 50% of that. And the reason is we've gone from a world when I started with a few million people on social media, now there's close to 5 billion people on social media. And every time any one of us opens up our favorite app, there's probably at least 150,000 pieces of content it could see to us based upon the people that we follow, the content that we've engaged with. So they're looking for that content that's going to grab and hold attention as long as possible. So it's critically important to understand these variables about how the algorithm works. It's not out to get there, get you. It's just telling you that the way that you're trying to contextualize your message is not breaking through. Most people are messing up those first three seconds because they have too much going on. They have, like, a caption or they have a title card, captions and somebody speaking at the same time. So there's three different things that somebody has to focus on in those first three seconds. And once the subconscious feels like it's getting left behind, it's just going to move on to the next video. So be very clear on what your visual hierarchy is in those first three seconds. And it does not have to be you speaking. It's. It could be focusing on a caption or a caption at the bottom or a. A title card at the top. So that's a big kind of element to really understand as you're going into this. And. And then with Instagram or any other platform is really understanding what drives performance, what causes you to break through versus causes you to suppress. And that's the algorithms. The way that we look at social media is we look at it through that specific format and a specific platform, and then we go really deep in it. And the way that we go deep is a process that we call gold, silver, bronze. So we'll look at somebody using a specific format, for example, like School of Hard Knocks. On the surface level, it looks very simple, but there's a lot of depth to it. So what we would do is we would take a channel like that and pull 10 to 20 of the top performers, which is gold. In that case, it's, you know, a few million views plus. Then we would take the average performers, which we call Silver, 10 to 20 of those, and then 10 to 20 of the underperformers, which are bronze. So those are like less than 100,000. And what we're looking at is we're looking for something called performance drivers, which are contextual elements of how you express a specific format. So those can be things like pacing, tonality, what's happening in the first three seconds, captions, title cards. In the example of man on the street, the reaction of the person that you're interacting with. So we have a library of like 200 of these performance drivers. And what we're looking for is what's happening in those high performers that's not happening in those low performers. Again, not from a content perspective, but from a context perspective and really kind of measuring those elements. And through that process, you're learning a lot about what actually drives up your chances of using that format versus driving it down because most people will see a format like man on the street or any format out there and be like, oh, I see what they're doing. They're just interviewing a person on the street. I'm going to do that. And 99% of people fail because they just, they're not paying attention from the contextual element.

Like save the funnel. I have a book funnel too, but it's not working. I don't know why it looks similar. Why not?

Well, I mean you missed the art I can attest to it is like I ran book funnels on ClickFunnels for three years and it took us a long time to figure that out. Is on the surface level, it looks super easy. Oh, you just say you give away your book for free and charge shipping and handling. But there's so much nuance in kind of all those different elements. And we're looking at social media in the same way.

Interesting. So there's the. What'd you call. You can't you call it. Not frameworks. What'd you call the. The formats.

Formats, yeah.

Do you have. Is there a known number of formats? Just there's infinite number of types of formats or do you guys have. These are the 20 that work the best.

So, so we've done analysis on over like 220 and we have a team that researches like three to five new ones every week. But there's like different levels. Like man on the street, we've done 10 different research projects on that. So typically the way that we work with clients is there's kind of like beginner formats and advanced formats. So like there's 20 or 30 kind of beginner ones. And as a beginner it's not about like the content. It's more like if you're just getting into social media and you're trying to. Trying to master the nuances of communication, you may want to start there before going on. But it's also that there are specific formats to specific platforms. It's not like one platform is going to succeed across every single platform. They're typically dialed in for each one.

In one of your books you talk about the different formats. Where's the best spot for them to learn? Here's the ones to even look at.

The guide to going viral. So, so we break down our entire model that we spent the past six years building and invested several million dollars for that. And I'll actually we're giving away that book for free. It's not even shipping and handling. If they go to hookpoint,.com Russell. They can download the PDF or Kindle version of it, but I break. So we have a model called the viral content model that includes that gold, silver, bronze. And we break down the entire model and process in that book the way.

That you and your clients are moving people from social to the other things. Right? Because as much fun as is getting a million views or 10 million views on a video, that doesn't pay the bills for anybody. So I'm curious, like, what your. What's the core focus? I'll lead with, like, one of the biggest problems I've had in the past that we're trying to, like, remedy is I have so many funnels that when I come out and it's like we do a piece of content, it focuses here or this one here, different places that like, it waters it all down. And so we're trying to figure out the right strategy. And I'm just curious, what is the right strategy? Move people from social to. To the next step.

So I'll give you an example. So again, the way that we perceive organic is how do we leverage it to get people to know, like, and trust us to the point where they just want to ultimately take that next step? This is the reason that big brands spend billions of dollars engaging celebrities, athletes, influencers, things of that nature, because people know, like, and trust them. And if that person says, you know, go buy this, or just automatically, if they're associated with it, they sell a lot of product. So we worked with a very niche industry. A leather craftsman that had very little to no experience in social media was stuck at 2000 followers. And he was stuck there because he was creating commercials of his products, because he sells, like, leather wallets, handbags, purses, briefcases, things of that nature. So he was just approaching social media. The way most people do is like, I'm going to create an ad and use it for organic content. So we followed this model in this process to help him develop a format called is it worth it? Where he'll take like a 500 Chanel handbag and deconstruct it on screen and tell you whether it's worth the money that you paid for it. So in his content, there's no calls to action, but he used this format to build an audience of 2.5 million followers across his social media channels. And he's generated like 2 or 300 million organic views at this point. And the format is so successful, people getting to know him, his expertise, they trust him that he just has a link in his bio. And through that he sells out his most expensive inventory because he's built so much trust into that. Now, I'm not saying you don't have, don't have calls to action your videos. Like I said, you have them once you've mastered that. But as you know, when you're reaching that level of organic lift, the retargeting element, the retargeting audience that you can build through that is massive and it brings down your effective cost per action. So understanding your ability to retarget these audiences with your specific ads long form is a little bit easier to layer in kind of more organic CTAs of, especially with you of having different funnels, you can layer it in and just say click the link below that video. But the way that we're kind of using it with organic, as I mentioned earlier, is specifically with Instagram, which you're focused on is, okay, let's master the format, get that format performance up. And then that CTA can be super subtle. And with that cta, you can change kind of what you're giving away with it. And I'll actually, now that I think about it, another kind of tip that I can give in terms of CTA is specifically on Instagram that we found is don't have the CTA at the end of the video. Have the CTA about 3/4 of the way into the video. So, you know, if you'll see in my videos, we'll be breaking down, you know, like four, four elements of why this, you know, video did 10 million views versus 100,000 views. And after like the third point, I'll be like, and if you're enjoying this video, you know, comment below to get your free guide to going viral. And then I go, and finally, let's break down the last element of why this video went viral. Because it kind of gives the people a reason to stick around, versus if you put it directly at the end of the video, it cuts off automatically. Yeah.