What You Should Post to Dominate Social Media

All right, so today we're going to talk about whatever Neil wants to talk about first.

So I did an analysis to see what kind of content works best on social media. In essence, I have new data that will help you figure out what kind of to perform, or I have new data which breaks down what content will perform the best in social media in 2024. So we looked at the 6 major social networks. To give you an idea on the 6 major social networks, I'm talking about Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, and X. And we looked at 6,302,491 pieces of content to see what performs the best. And we did this over the last 30 days to not really figure out, all right, what's been working in the past? Because if you look at a whole year's worth of data, it can skew the results and it can show you what used to be working. And no one really cares about what used to be working. Everyone wants to know what's working right now so that way you guys can plan out your 2024 content calendar. So when we looked at which type of posts have the highest engagement, Short-form video was at 31.38%. Long-form videos was at 15.51%. Interviews, podcasts, or expert talks were at 13.84%. Live videos was at 12.37%. Memes was at 10.31%. User-generated content was at 10.12%. And other was at 6.47%. Now here's where it gets interesting because a lot of people like creating text-based content. Text-based content was in the other category. It just shows how many more people prefer videos these days and short-form videos versus text-based content. But when we looked at text-based content and just at a text base to see what's getting the most engagement, keep in mind some social networks don't really allow text-based content. How-to videos, or I mean how-to text-based articles or text-based content was getting 38.53% engagement. Wow. Of the engagement, and that includes how-to-based posts. Listicles, 32.71%. And then there's a huge drop-off. Current events, 7.49%. Research reports, 5.02%. Interviews, 3.97%. Just shows if you're going to do an interview, it better be video-based. Stories, you know, people breaking down a story over text, 2.38%, and others was 9.9%. So if you're going to create text-based content, it better be how-tos or listicles. And then if you don't have the time or energy, you don't have the resources, you want to leverage UGC-based content, the platforms that love UGC-based content, Instagram won at 28.19%, YouTube at 27.04%, TikTok at 23.94%, Facebook was at 9.58%, LinkedIn at 5.59%, and X 2.39%.

Dude, here's what I think about all this. So you know what's interesting? So this graph, unfortunately we can't share screen because we're live in person right now, but there's a, There's a graph that Neil has here. Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, that seems to add up to about around 85-ish percent or so of the platforms that you— which platforms love user-generated content the most, right? And it's like, okay, well, if that's the case, when you think about all the short-form content that's being produced right now—

You're right. That adds up to 79%.

Okay, so 80%, right?

Yeah.

Call it that. And look, type of content that generates the most engagement, short-form videos, right? Long-form videos. This is what we're doing right now. Like with this 15-minute segment that we're doing for this episode, We're going to chop it up to a ton of Shorts, right? And we're going to distribute to 5 different channels. And then also at the same time, we're going to, we're going to post a long form to YouTube. And I know that's just going to compound over the years. We're just going to keep doing this. I don't see us stopping. And now, like, Neil, we talked about this a couple, maybe like a couple of weeks ago, but there are people, there are agencies out there that will help you, help you pump out 2,000, 3,000, 5,000 pieces per month, right, across these channels. And here's the thing. I talked to someone yesterday that's spending the $35,000 to $40,000 a month for like 5,000 pieces a month, right? I'm like, tell me how it's going right now. So he said— she said this agency—

5,000 pieces of content, text-based.

Yeah, but it's actually 1,000 unique pieces because you're distributing it to 5 different—

Got it.

Yeah, not text-based, short-form video.

Okay. Right.

And I was like, okay, so how's it going? So they guaranteed 30 million views. Right? In a span of 90 days. What they— I was like, so what did they get for you? 62 million views. I was like, okay, so what was the ROI of that, right? She said, it's too early to tell right now. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to check in with you in 90 days or so to see how it went.

So wait, they're creating short-form content, then they're distributing on other people's profiles or your own profile?

Yeah, good question. So it's basically imagine for Marketing School, like we have, we would have a lot of different accounts. So Marketing School Clips, Marketing School Motivation, marketing school, like SEO or whatever. We just have a bunch of different profiles and then they just, you just be publishing hardcore every day. The style's like a little different for each one, but it all ultimately drives to the main thing and then everything lifts up. This is how Andrew Tate grew. This is how Iman Gadzhi, like these are like both really strong on like YouTube, right? That's how they grew their viewership a lot.

That's a smart strategy. If we had to sum it up on what you should do for 2024, create long-form content, videos, and that could be through interviews, podcasts, or expert talks, or you just talking to a camera, then clip it up into short-form videos. And then you can even take nuggets from the long-form and turn it into text and make it listicle-based or how-to-based. And if you do that, you should end up generating the most engagement for 2024 based on the current data.

All right, so I got one more over here and then we might have some time for one more from your side. So there are 5 types of AI content that helps convert because people are like, oh, AI content doesn't convert customers. Number one, I'll start with number one because we're actually testing this right now, is AI-generated CTAs. You know what I'm talking about?

Yes, because I saw the Single Grain image. Oh, you did? You liked it? Yeah, I liked it on your tweet. But you want to explain it to people?

Yeah. So basically, let's say I have one page on conversion rate optimization. Our standard call to action for Single Grain, which is an ad agency, right? Get a free consultation as an example, right? Now, instead of get a free consultation, the call to actions are now dynamically changed based on the content that's on the page. So we'll prompt OpenAI's API and say, hey, based on the content on this page, what is the best possible call to action we can have to help drive more free consultations right now? Instead of saying get a free consultation, it'll say optimize my conversions or something. I'm totally making this up right now, right? But we got a 47% lift in free consultations on that specific page. And this is a We believe it's statistically significant enough because we've already, we've had 2,000 clicks per page. So it's like, call it like 90%, 95% or so. We don't always need to aim for 99%.

Dude, you know, AI through the conversions, what you're talking about, it can do wonders. And it's so funny on how very few people add in conversion CTAs within their content. And some people just do it on their webpages, like in the header or the side, but it's like, if you have all this AI-written content, have you ever thought about just adding CTAs within your text? Like little basic things like that. Like if you have an article on marketing, be like, yeah, here are the tips. By the way, if you just want us to do the marketing for you, check out our ad agency, right? And you can just do a standard text link. Little things like that drastically boost the conversion rate. But most people focus on the content and they focus on promoting it, but they very rarely focus on getting the conversions from it.

Yep. Look, we have a couple minutes left, so I have 4 more here. I'm not going to— we're not going to go through each one. We'll probably describe each one. But here, Neil, I'll throw you one over here that you can describe. One of the numbers here of the 5 is content upgrades. What's a content upgrade, Neil?

So let's say you have a list, a listicle-based post, and your post is on the 10 best ways to use ChatGPT to grow your traffic. And your blog post has a list. Within your blog post, towards the top section or even the bottom, you can end up putting a content upgrade. So it's this design prompt or it's a designed image that says, want 10 more ways to grow your traffic using AI? Fill out your name and email address and we'll send you an email on it. And you would include 10 different ways. You wouldn't just talk about the 10 that you gave away in the blog post, you'd talk about 10 more ways. And this only works if you actually have useful ways to get people to grow their traffic. Like if you show them the same 10, people aren't going to upgrade for that. But if you offer something that's more value and you've already intrigued the people who are reading, there's a good chance you can get a name and email and then you can drip those people with your products, your servicings, your offers to get them to convert into a customer over time.

Yeah, what conversion rate have you seen I'll throw this one at you from content upgrade versus just a standard opt-in.

So most standard opt-ins, you're not going to get anywhere near 1%. Content upgrades, if you can't look at the overall site's traffic, if you just look at that web page's traffic and how many people who read, you know, they don't even have to read the page, some will, some won't, but all the people that landed on that page, if you have a good upgrade, like you gave 10 AI hacks and you give 10 more that are very related, and your original 10 were good, and that's an important caveat, because if your original 10 sucked, no one's going to opt in for your second 10. But if you do that, you should be somewhere between 2% and 3%. It used to be where I was getting like 4% and 5%, but those days are gone.

Yep, so it is significantly higher at the end of the day. You know what's interesting too? I think a lot of these things that we're talking about right now, it used to be, there used to be a lot of SaaS products for this, right? Or like, you know, like plugins.

Now you can just build all this. Like AppSumo, right? Like AppSumo, like, oh, you plug in and it does a lot of this stuff, but—

SumoMe.

Oh, SumoMe, yeah, sorry.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sumo's the deal site.

Yeah, my bad. Same company though, but it was SumoMe, not AppSumo.

Yep. Um, and my point of saying all this too is like, I think you're gonna see because these— the AI, you call them GPTs or whatever— at the end of the day, now each developer can become like a 10x developer and they can build a lot of these solutions where you don't necessarily need to go to someone or pay for a plugin.

Dude, remember BounceX?

Bounce Exchange?

Yeah.

Yeah, weren't they crushing it? Weren't you buddies?

I know the founder. I haven't talked to him in so many years.

Pre-COVID. What are they called? They're called something else now.

It went from Bounce Exchange to BounceX. I just went to their site and now it's saying they're now Wunderkind.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wunderkind.

And when you look at it, it's just like it was a pop-up, content upgrades, little things like that. But like, I'm not trying to talk trash on the company. It's a good company and they're really creative with their copy and their strategies and hats off to them. But like, I don't know who's going to pay for those features when you can just hardcode it yourself and save the money.

Well, here's the thing, right? Like, software margins previously were like 80, 90%. That's a good software business, right? I think with this stuff, it's going to bring the gross margins down quite a bit.

Yeah, it's competitive. But like also, I don't know what they were charging, but back in the day they were— I know there was customers that were paying them well into the 6 figures. Like, you're not going to pay someone $200 grand anymore for a pop-up. Yes, you're paying them for their creativity. But once you learn it all, you're like, all right, cool. We're just going to cut the contract, hardcode it, and save the money.

That's why 37signals is trying this once thing, right? Where you're just paying once for software. Because when you pay for Slack and it costs you like $2, $3, $4 million a year, Because you have a lot of employees, that it just becomes untenable. And so I think a lot of these people are going to just start to build solutions internally. And I know certainly like our developers are.

So 37signals is doing once with what, Basecamp or something else?

No, they're building a Slack competitor.

And you just pay once and that's it?

You pay once, yeah. But I think it's like you pay like a licensing fee if you want to keep it updated.

It works well. I've been doing this with Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic for a long time. You can pay once and you never have to pay again. Yep.

So that's what it is. So we covered 2 and then working towards wrapping up here. So landing pages, obviously. So like, look, AI is going to eventually in the next year or 2, you can just have, hey, build me a content upgrade for this one and wrap it, you know, tied in with my email service provider and they'll just probably throw them in there for you. Lower funnel topics. So lower funnel topics means like if it is digital marketing agency, for example, or best marketing agency, like those are examples of lower funnel topics. funnel topics. Landing pages are just landing pages. It's like if you want something like— we do have our programmatic SEO pages. Those are landing pages that are low funnel topics. So we cover 2 at once. And then we also layer on the AI-generated CTAs in there. So we're covering 3 in 1 page there. And then the last one here, Neil, is product-led AI content.

Dude, so I've messed around a lot with ChatGPT to get it to produce the ideal prompt to drive conversions. And I'll read off the prompt that I use. And this post on Twitter got 568,000 views. I guess a lot of people haven't been using prompts that are this descriptive. But my prompt that I've been using to not just create content but could drive conversions, although I still manually create most of my content, is I want to write an article about X topic that includes stats and cite your sources and use storytelling in the introduction. The article should be tailored to, and then you insert your ideal customer. The article should focus on, talk about what you want to talk about. Instead of, and then tell it what you do not want it to talk about. Please mention, insert your company name or product, in the article and how we can help, insert your ideal customer, with, insert the problem that your product or service solves. But please don't mention, you know, insert your company name or product more than twice. And wrap up the article with a conclusion and end the last sentence in the article with a question. And what I found is it starts creating content that's more relevant to your ideal customer because that's super important. Writing content that's not targeted to your ideal customer is just going to get you views. And then having it talk about your products and service and how it can help them solve a problem. And you can then, when it creates an article, you just hotlink it to your website or your landing pages where people can fill out a form Or to the product that they can just add to cart.

You know what's interesting? I think that one got a lot of views too because people like saving, they like bookmarking prompts. It's like, oh my God, it's a prompt right there I'm going to come back to later, right?

Dude, straight up, it had 10,000 bookmarks while 2,600 hearts.

There you go. So that's another lesson. Why don't you test this? Like just start posting a bunch of prompts each week.

I already have. The one I did from this morning is doing really well and it's the same thing. It's like more than double the amount of bookmarks than hearts. I'm copying the same philosophy. I found this on Twitter, which is very true. If you can find something that gets a lot of likes but a lot of bookmarks, it tends to do really well.

You know what I mean? This is a side lesson. We can, we can, we'll wrap here. Um, when you think about content upgrades and when you think about prompts and templates, people just want to collect them. Like, I collect a lot of bookmarks. It just makes me feel good when I do it. It makes me feel like I've done something even though I haven't really done anything. Um, and that like, oh my God, I got this resource and email, right? At the end of the day, it's like, it's It's just a psychological trick at the end of the day. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Check out this next video over here and also subscribe to us on YouTube because that is where you're going to see the magic happen, whatever that means. Bye. Bye.