Viral Short-Form Video Formats for 2025
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Secure your future by getting your tickets at socialmediamarketingworld.info. I hope to see you there. Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing Podcast, brought to you by Social Media Examiner.

I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners and creators who want to know how to navigate the ever-changing marketing jungle. Today, I'm going to be joined by Brendan Cain, and we're going to explore viral short-form video formats that work in 2025. If you want to create short-form video content that goes crazy organically, and you're looking for a

a model or a formula that you can latch onto, I think you're going to want to listen all the way to the end of today's episode. By the way, if you're new to the show, follow us. We've got some great content coming your way. Let's transition over to this week's interview with Brendan Cain. Helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide.

Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Brendan Cain. If you don't know who Brendan is, he's the author of multiple books, including Hookpoint, How to Stand Out in a Three-Second World. His latest book is The Guide to Going Viral, The Art and Science of Succeeding on Social Media. He's also the founder of Hookpoint.com.

an agency that helps small businesses develop their video strategy. Brandon, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Michael. It's a true pleasure to connect with you and everybody that's tuning into this. Well, I'm super excited that you're here today. Today, Brandon and I are going to explore video storytelling, which is something I'm really excited to learn a lot about.

Before we get into the video side of storytelling, I want to hear your story. How did you get into video marketing and all the things? Start wherever you want to start. So initially, I got into the space because I wanted to be a film producer. So I actually...

went to film school to learn the business side of filmmaking. So obviously going to film school, you learn a tremendous amount about storytelling. So for those of you that haven't gone to film school, it's kind of like what you see in the movies. You sit down, you watch classic films, you learn writing, you learn directing, you learn acting, all the different elements of what it means to create a story in that specific format. And

And then when I moved out to LA to pursue a career in film, there was a reawakening to digital after the dot-com bust. What I kind of recognized was, you know, like everybody else, I started at the bottom making coffee, copies, deliveries and things of that nature. And I

when higher ups, because obviously when you're starting in the mailroom and those things, you want to connect with people at the higher level, studio executives, producers, actors, directors. But when you get that shot to communicate with them and they ask you, well, why did you move to LA? And I would say, well, because I want to be a film producer. I could just see everybody's eyes glaze over, you know, because it's just like you're one of a million people. So I had to really take a step back and identify, you know, what is my hook? What is my way of really standing out at the highest levels to connect with these people? And

One of the things that I realized, and it still holds true today in the film industry, is like the studio I was working for, every time we finished a piece of content, we would spend tens of millions of dollars on a single piece of content. And then we were committing tens of millions of dollars or more to promote this piece of content. So there'd be a sense of anxiety and stress that would come over the office.

And while I was going to film school, I created a few internet companies just to learn and experiment what it really took to build a business because they don't really teach you much about creating businesses in film school. So I noticed at the time, this was around like 2005, YouTube came on the scene, Facebook, you know, MySpace and Friendster were kind of the prominent players, but like YouTube was formed and was starting to blow up. And I just noticed that these were

platforms and communities that the film industry wasn't tapping into. I mean, in reality, no brands are really tapping into it because it wasn't a big thing.

And one of the things that I just noticed was we were working on a movie called Crank with Jason Statham. And it's an action movie, but it's not like a $100 million action movie. It was like a $12 million budget. So in retrospect, it sounds like a lot of money, but in comparison to like a Fast and the Furious movie where they spent $150, $200 million, it's small in comparison. And

And I was tasked with, well, how do we effectively market this movie, leveraging alternative mediums? Because we are over-reliant on the traditional ones, television, print, and things of that nature. And I just saw on YouTube, at the time, there was no such thing as an influencer. Influencer wasn't a term. Nobody was really paying attention to it. But I saw these...

people on YouTube creating audiences of millions and millions of people. So I just made a list of the top ones and I just direct messaged them and said, do you want to interview a movie star? You know, and I got like five of the biggest ones at the time to say yes. And we didn't pay anything for that.

So that's kind of how I got started in the space of like video storytelling and kind of the video aspect of social media. So bring us along the continuation of the journey as you ultimately started doing all these other things like writing these books and all this other stuff. The first to do I worked for, I worked for a few years and, you know, like that was the first influencer campaign on YouTube that we did for Crank and just in general and did

did some other aspects of building digital divisions for movie studios, but I kind of got stuck in the corporate culture people think of making movies as this really sexy and creative endeavor, when in reality it's another corporation. And there's a lot of red tape and things that kind of slow down the process, especially if you're an entrepreneur. It's just not like a great environment for an entrepreneur, and that's what I am at heart. So one of the things that I did is I went to

I did an analysis of when MySpace was bought for Fox or acquired by Fox. It was acquired for, I think, like $600 million or something like that. And I wanted to understand, well, how are they actually going to monetize this asset and get back the investment they put into it? Because they were reliant on third-party advertising, the banner ads and third-party networks. Because at the time...

And it took a while. These platforms didn't have their own ad networks like they did today. Like, you know, Meta has their business manager and Swede and Google has, you know, AdSense and AdWords and things of that nature. That didn't exist for social media at the time. So I actually went to the president of the studio and I had an idea of building what became the first ever influencer tech platform because I noticed people were putting

you know, movie trailers, commercials, things of that nature on their MySpace profile because it was, if you remember way back, it was like all about customization and self-expression, but nobody was making money off of it. And that was the most valuable form of advertising is friends, you know, telling friends about a product or service.

So I built that technology with seed money from the president of the studio. And then we took it around to several companies and ended up licensing it to MTV and Viacom and created several iterations of that platform, one of which was in partnership with Vice Magazine when Vice initially started creating their video arm.

And then created a few other tech platforms with Viacom and licensed that to them, one of which opened up the doors to work with celebrities like Taylor Swift and Rihanna and others like that to kind of figure out, well, how do you maximize all of the traffic from social platforms? How do you turn that into commerce? How do you build community and things of that nature? After working on those tech platforms, I helped one of the first...

kind of social media advertising optimization companies. So once it transitioned from kind of third party advertising platforms to actually, you know, YouTube creating their first ad platform, which was TrueView and Facebook later created their ad platforms. I helped scale one of the first companies that was optimizing YouTube's TrueView advertising. So we were working with like Fortune 500 companies. And at one time we were the largest advertising

of outside advertising spend to the YouTube TrueView platform. We scaled that company to managing about 100 million a year in ad spend. And that experience was truly eye-opening to me because, again, we were working with Fortune 500 companies and it was interesting because these companies would come to us with creative assets that

that were predominantly designed for other platforms, like for, think about like a TV commercial or a print ad or things of that nature. And then they would want to spend millions of dollars on it through a social advertising network, thinking that that asset is just automatically going to perform or pique the interest or grab attention, hold attention. And it just didn't work. And even as it progressed, and you even still see it today,

Even if they're designing content for social platforms, they're typically using creative models that were designed pre-social media.

So when I saw all of that, I left working on that company and started building the foundations of the creative model that we use at Hookpoint today. And we can dive deeper into that, but that's become like the foundational pieces for my three books. The first one being One Million Followers and the second one Hookpoint and then the latest, The Guide to Going Viral. But that was kind of the progression process.

into where I'm at today. And who do you help right now and what do you help them do? Yeah. So we, we work with solopreneurs all the way up to multi-billion dollar corporations. And essentially what we do is we help them create content that breaks through, you know, you can call it virality. Some people just want to call it breakthrough, but we help them, you know, we're in a

market where there's 5 billion people on social media and you're competing against billions of pieces of content. So we help them break through with their messages. Love it. Mostly in video content, right? Yes. Yeah. So, all right. Thank you for that backstory. It was really intriguing. Now for the marketers that are listening right now that are creating video content,

Why is story so important? Why should they pay attention to what we're about to talk about today? What's the upside if they get this right? So when I think back on my career and when I first started in this space,

you know the beginning of the story we're talking about a few million people on these platforms producing content at that time and for the first i don't know five to seven to eight years it was far easier to break through with content because there's less content being pushed on these platforms but when you fast forward to today and there's five billion people on social media and

And if any one of us were to open up our favorite app, no matter what it is, there's probably 150,000 pieces of content and a minimum that the algorithms could push to you based on the people you're following and the content that you've engaged with. And the reality is, well, what causes content to break through? What causes something to get a thousand views versus 10 million views? Well, that is the algorithms. And the most simplistic way on how these algorithms work is

I can definitively tell you it's not they're shadow banning you 99% of the time. That's not the case. And they're not suppressing your reach to get you to pay for it. What they're designed to do is to keep you on these platforms as long as possible. Retention. And I'm sure most people listening to this have heard that term. So the longer people spend on these platforms, the more ads they can serve, the more profit they generate. So as we think about, well, how do we retain audiences? You know, especially in a world where

We as individuals on social media, we consume so much content. We've become professionals at consuming content on these platforms. So that means we can, in an instant, and a lot of this is happening on a subconscious level, we can instantly tell like, is this going to be entertaining? Is this person selling me something? Is this just a branded piece of content? How do we typically retain attention in any type of medium, whether it's books, articles, movies, television, we tell stories, right?

So that is one of the best retention mechanisms. Even if you're having a conversation with a friend or a colleague and they say, let me tell you a story, typically their ears will perk up. And try that in a conversation. If you're having lunch with somebody or doing something, say, let me tell you a story and see kind of what happens to their attention.

So, as we are entering in this ultra competitive landscape, we need to master the art of telling stories so that we can retain that audience as long as possible and thus win that retention game and prove to the algorithms that we are professional content creators, we're professional storytellers that can help serve their underlying goal, be the fuel to their engine. I love that.

And you're right. I agree completely with this. And you've come up with a really good model. I believe it's called the viral content model. Is that correct? Is that what it's called? So we're going to break it down into various steps and let's start with the first part of your model. Where do we begin? Yeah. So the first step in the model is research. So

This step can be very in-depth. It can be at a high level. So let's just start at a high level because I don't want people to feel like they have to be expert researchers to succeed in social media. Like the...

The first step at a very high level that you can take is instead of using, because I'm sure everybody listening to this, myself included, we use social media to kill time, to connect with our friends and we get sucked into the vortex of the addictive aspect of what they've built. So once we are using these platforms is turned from a passive experience of just consuming content into an active experience of starting to look at

what is working and what's not working. So one of the lenses that we use in terms of research is we are looking for storytelling structures or patterns that have proven to be successful over and over again. And we call these formats.

So just to give you some examples of what a format is that I know everybody has seen, one example is called man on the street, which is exactly what it sounds like. You interact with somebody on the street and you capture that reaction, right?

So this format and pretty much all formats can be used for different subject matters, different industries. So this format, for example, a friend of mine and a client, Alex Stemp, is a professional photographer, approaches random strangers in the street, offers them a professional photo shoot.

He captures that experience and tells the story through that lens. So he's using it from a photographer. There's another guy that you've probably seen. He's doing extremely well, Simon Squibb, who approaches random strangers on the street and asks them, what is their dream? And then tries to help them in that process of achieving that dream, whether it's investing in them, giving them advice,

Another example is an account, School of Hard Knocks, where he approaches entrepreneurs, asks them business advice on how they can be successful. So that's an example of a format. Before we get too deep into the formatting, I would love to go back to...

to the research side of it, because in my mind, I'm thinking to myself, okay, like, do we need to understand the formats before we do the research? I mean, help me understand. We do? Okay, then keep going. Okay. So basically, and just very quickly, and I'll go into just another example is what we're researching is we're finding the formats. I see. Okay. Finding the formats. Just to give you another example, two characters, one light bulb, we call it.

You've probably seen it on TikTok or Instagram. It's on YouTube Shorts. It's the same person that plays two different characters. They play the expert and the novice, and they debunk a common myth. So a creator that's done really well with this is Erica Kohlberg. She's a lawyer. She reads the fine print. What happens when you miss your flight? What happens when your AirPods break? Things of that nature. Mark Tilbury does it about finance.

So I just give those two distinct examples just to kind of show what a format is. Now, our team's done about 10,000 hours of research, identifying formats and breaking down the formats. And I'll explain how to do that in a minute. But what I really like, if there's one piece of advice that I could give to people coming away from that is just understand that there's a format because most people, when they're creating content, they're

They're just going out there and blindly creating content. They're coming up with an idea and producing something out there. So in this first step, we understand what a format is and we're starting to look for format. So how do we look for a format? So, you know, it could be as simple as I'm just using Instagram on a personal time. And I see this video by School of Hard Knocks has 80 million views. Like what's going on here? So what I'll do is I'll click on that account and I'll see, well, are they doing that over and over and over again with success? Right?

So that's the research process of like going through and finding formats. And our teams identified over 220 of these formats. And I say that because I don't want people to think, oh, I have to do man on the street. I have to do two characters, one light bulb. There are so many different options out there in the market that you can identify. So that is that first step of research of

going through and looking for these formats that are repeatable with success. How do we actually know where to find these formats? If you, I mean, let's say, okay, let's just say we're looking for a man on the street. Okay. How do we go find that?

Is it just randomly coming across our feed or are we seeking it out or what are we looking for exactly? So two things. One, you're being seeded formats right now. Anytime you open up one of these apps, you're being seeded formats because these are the things that are succeeding on social media. Okay. That's number one. Number two is you can go to the Explorer feed. You can start searching for content. Like, for example, let's just say that...

we're a nutritionist or we're a cook or we're, you know, some type of food brand. Like you can go into the Explorer page and start typing in like food hacks or, you know, cooking recipes or things of that nature. Or if you're, you know, a coach or something, you could do entrepreneurial advice.

And it'll start seeding things in the Explorer page and you can start seeding through content. And then again, you're training the algorithms. If you do that for a few minutes, the algorithms are going to start seeding you more and more and more. The most important thing is, a big distinction I want to make right now is we're not talking about trends. So what's the difference between a trend and a format? Well, trend is fleeting. So trend is like ice bucket challenge. It's like people aren't still doing the ice bucket challenge today. It's very fleeting versus a format is,

is repeatable. It's used over and over and over again, like the man on the street format that's been used for years and years and years and still yield success. So there's many different ways, but our team passes formats back and forth because we're just using content from that passive perspective. And we just built like a massive library of it, but there's not like a

A true like secret way to doing it other than going into these apps, you can do some searches and things of that nature and just start scrolling through and identifying certain things. It's interesting because I think about the kind of stuff that I see. I see a lot of fishermen that are doing interesting things like they're trying out weird baits.

Or they're in a really unusual location. And then all of a sudden they get a fish that's really hard for them to reel in. And then they reveal the fish at the end. I would imagine that is some sort of a format. I don't know what the heck it is. I'm also seeing like construction videos where people are taking a log and they're making something out of it, you know, like a craft thing, a really fine craft out of this thing that's really weird and ugly. These are kind of formats I'm assuming, which is some sort of a transformation or something. I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, there's within what you just said, there's different types of formats. So, for example, like the fisherman thing, there could be a challenge format. I'm going to try and catch fish.

a massive fish with X, Y, and Z. Yeah. Frozen peas or corn or something like that. Right. Yeah. Or we have a client, John Malecki, a former NFL player, and he's a woodworker now. So he'll do like a challenge. It's like, I'm going to try and build a $600 table out of a pallet that I pulled out of a garbage dump. Yeah. Or something out of Amazon boxes. Yeah. So there's that, there's that type of challenge. And then there's just pure transformation. Like there was an account and I can't remember the name of it, but it's

This plays into another point before I get into this account is people sometimes think, well, my subject is not sexy enough. It's not interesting. It's super niche. Like it's not going to go viral.

There was an account the other day that I was looking at that this guy's a lawnmower. Like he mows lawns and he's got like 3.6 million followers on Instagram. And basically it's a combination of man on the street and transformation where he'll go up to the door of a house. Oh, yeah. I've seen this with all sorts of weeds and stuff and you can't even see the sidewalk anymore. Things like that. And he'll just be like, hey, can I –

you know, clean your yard or mow your lawn for free. And they're like, why do you want to do this? And he's like, well, I have this account and people like to see the transformation. And then he completely transforms it.

He's taking lawn mowing, like one of the most obscure things to do. I've seen these and that there are sidewalks underneath some of this stuff, right? Because it's so old and stuff. Yeah. Transformation is a big one. And like, if you think about it, there's patterns to what has worked in television before, like man on the street. If you remember, like Jay Leno would use that format all the time. Like,

the transformation you think about like the home transformation TV shows, how many of them are out there where people are remodeling shows and things of that nature. So a lot of these formats and patterns have been proven in other mediums before social media and this being applied here.

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Okay. So the first couple steps of this are really to, first of all, understand that there is a formula

format in the most successful video, some sort of a storyline for lack of better words that's happening. The man on the street, I would imagine the story there is like something fascinating from a random stranger, right? Or somehow helping a random stranger. I've also seen a lot of these videos where someone goes up to someone who's down and out and they share their story and then they give them something of value and then they capture the reaction. That's the kind of stuff we're talking about here, right? But

just so people understand, how are these formats, stories, like bring the story element into all this. So we think about Alex Demp or just even the lawnmower one, because we were just talking about that and it's kind of fascinating. So the story is, and it's very simplistic because again, like we're talking about some short form formats here. Like we're talking about a story being told in like 60 to 90 seconds. We're not talking about a two hour movie here. Okay. So it's very condensed, but the story is, and some of this is happening on a subconscious level, right?

So you see this messy yard. Okay. And if you haven't seen these videos, like these yards are like disaster areas. It looks like the grass hasn't been cut in like five years. It's not like, oh, it's a little overgrown, but it looks like a disaster area. And then he goes, he's going walking up at the door. So the first thing is, who's the person that's living there? Who would actually let their lawn go like this?

The second thing is, how are they going to respond to this interaction? What's going to happen there? And then if they say yes, then it goes to, well, what is the transformation? What is this yard and house going to look like once it's done? And then the climax is, well, what's the reaction of the person after they see this massive transformation? So that's a micro little story there that pays off. So it's very simplistic. Now, like man on the street with photography, it

It's the same thing. It's like you're approaching this random stranger on the street. What is that initial interaction? And that's one of the parts to the man on the street is you don't just know how that initial interaction is going to make offers a professional photo shoot. They're taking all the photos, but you don't see what the end result is until the end.

They show the end result and then you show the reaction of the person. Like a big part of success with man on the street is the actual reaction of the person. But that's like a microcosm of, you know, like a short, short story. And then also I think about a lot of these transformational videos that I see. They'll show the finished product for like a microsecond and then they'll show how it's made. Yeah. So maybe they're taking a log of,

you know, and they're making it into this like beautiful bowl or something like that, right? That's got all this intricate stuff, resin and all this stuff in it or a table. So they'll show it like at the beginning and then they'll show how they make it all. What kind of a framework is that? Because I seem to see ones where it starts with the finished product and then all of a sudden it shows you over a 60 second how they got there.

Otherwise, you're just looking at some random log and you don't know kind of what the end is. So is that a story as well where they sometimes show the beginning, the end at the beginning, and then they show how it's happened? Yeah, it's kind of what we call it is promise of value is like if you just have a log that's there, you...

Because a lot of this communication has to happen in the first few seconds. Otherwise, people will scroll past. And if you scroll past, that's the first signal to the algorithm that you can't hold attention. So sometimes there's certain signals that you need to send to the person. It doesn't necessarily always have to be the end result, but people do use the end result successfully. Like

One of the most successful YouTubers is Mark Rober, amazing content creator. And like one of his top videos is like trying to make a pool out of jello. Oh, there you go. And you see it in the thumbnail and you're like, oh, can he make a pool out of jello? Like what is the end result? Is it? So he's setting that expectation with a thumbnail and headline. And then he's unfolding the story of how he's actually achieving that goal. Okay. So just before we get into this a little bit more,

What is a format, for lack of better words, that any kind of business could use? Because a lot of the examples we're talking about have pretty extreme payoffs, right? Yeah. What about for people that don't have extreme payoffs? Yeah, so there's a very simple one, like a very, very simple one that anybody can execute. It's called walking listicles. And this is a short form one. There's a guy, the founder of Silly Bands, his name is Robert Croke, uses this very successfully. And basically, basically,

He takes a camera and he's walking around the block and he does like a format called walking listicle. So like one of his most viewed videos is if you want to be the first millionaire in your family, follow these three steps and then he'll walk through those three steps. So he's in motion quite physically while he's talking. Yes. Why is that important? It gives it energy. It gives it also a potential way.

what's going to kind of happen with this. You know, sometimes when people are just sitting behind a desk, the potential energy feels stuck a little bit. I'm not saying that you can't do it that way. You can, but there's just something to that dynamic energy of flowing with the movement and talking into the camera. Also, it can kind of feel a little bit more like,

Like he's talking to you like almost like on a FaceTime call versus high production. This feels like an ad type scenario. I love that. And that's something I've been doing for years. I've always noticed that a static set is not as exciting as a actual moving set. And when you're actually moving, there's obviously chances that things are going to happen that might make its way into the video. Right. And I would imagine he probably keeps in there sometimes.

stuff that flies into the scene or if he trips or anything like that? Or is that generally not suggested that you have these kinds of things? I know in longer form video, it kind of makes sense to include the stuff that's actually going on, but I don't know if that makes any sense in the shorter form kind of stuff. I mean, it can, again, I think it just, it plays to, first off in terms of, you know, static versus moving, it's what feels authentic to you as an individual. Like even my team and I are having conversations about newsletters.

new formats that we're exploring for myself and is like, there needs to be like a chemistry with the format. Like some people try and force them into like a specific format because they see somebody else having success where the chemistry of the personality and the individual is just not there. And thus it can, you know, truly deteriorate the actual

performance of it. So to your point of like things popping in the screen or something, I think it just depends on like the personality. Like for some people, I think that they can really turn that into an asset. Some people would just come off super distracting. It just, it really depends. So when we're on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube shorts, and we start seeing videos and we look at them and we see that they have lots of views. And then we go and we look at the creator and we see that this is kind of a

this creator uses over and over again, that's usually a sign that we can reverse engineer something about the way that they're doing what they're doing, right? And when we reverse engineer that, I think what I'm hearing you say is we have to look for what's the story that maybe is going on either subliminally, right? Or obviously, right? Because most people, when they think that they have to tell a story,

They're not thinking the way you're thinking, right? Because they don't have a lot of time to tell a story, right? So we're basically studying these other people that have been successful and kind of trying to reverse engineer what is this story format they're following. And then I would imagine we ask ourselves, could we adopt something like that in our content? Is that kind of what we're talking about here?

Yeah, exactly. And this is still all within the first step is like we're going through, we're finding formats, we're making sure. And when we're going to the person's channel, we're not just seeing are they using it over and over again. We're seeing can they successfully use it? We say at a minimum, they should have gone viral with it or broken through at least five times. If they've done it once, it's probably not reproducible or you look for other content creators that have been able to do it.

And then to your point is just like, then you start asking yourself, is this like a format that I am excited about? And typically what we do with our clients is we'll show them a bunch of formats. We'll put them in a spreadsheet and we'll start ranking them like on a scale of one to five. How excited are you about this format? Like five being the most exciting, one being the least excited about it. And then we go through until you identify the most exciting format.

out of that. Because again, just because it works for somebody else, like if you're not super excited about it, if you don't think it matches your personality or your resources, like walking listicles, you can just do on your phones. Other formats, you may need somebody to help film and edit it. You need to kind of look at all those variables to make that determination. Okay. So first we've got research, then we've got choosing formats and kind of doing the analysis to kind of understand what's actually going on.

And then what's the next part of your process? Once we've identified the format, the second one is the selection and the analysis of that format. So step two is we say, this is the format that I want to do, but we have to take it a step further because 99% of people will kind of just stop there. They'll just choose a format. They'll be like, oh, School of Hard Knocks is going on the street interviewing entrepreneurs, or this lawnmower is just going up to people and cutting their lawns.

without understanding what truly makes that format successful. And if you do that, 99% of the time you're going to fail because there's so much nuance that goes into actually executing on it. It's kind of like saying, you know, again, me coming from the movie industry, it's like saying, oh, I just saw the latest horror movie that did $100 million at the box office. I'm just going to do a horror movie and it's going to be successful. Well, we know that's not it. Whatever your favorite movie genre is,

Every time you sit down to watch a movie in that genre, it's not good. Or the medium that we're talking on is a podcast. If you see Joe Rogan or Lex Friedman or Michael, your podcast, uh,

And you're like, oh, they're having success with their podcast. I'm just going to create a podcast and it's going to be successful. No, there's a lot of nuance. You've been doing this for so long. You learn the nuance of going through it. So once we've identified and chosen our format, now we need to analyze what actually makes that format tick, what actually drives the performance.

So we have a process that's called gold, silver, bronze. So what we'll do is we'll take a format. Let's just say School of Hard Knocks, Man on the Street. We'll go to their channel. We'll create a spreadsheet. We'll take 10 of their high performing videos. So for them, it's 10 million views plus. So we'll take that. Then we'll look at their average performers, which is probably like 800,000 to a million. And then we'll look at the underperformers. It's probably under 300,000.

And then what we do is we cross analyze, we watch the high performers against the low performers and see what is the difference? What things show up in those high performers that don't show up in those low performers?

And this is less about the content and more about the context. So it could be things like, what is the pacing? What happens in that first three seconds? What are the captions or the title cards? Like man on the street, reaction is a big one. What type of a reaction are we getting? How is that reaction captured? Sometimes it can be facial expressions, body cues, environments, all these different things. But we're basically trying to identify what happens first.

when this format goes super viral versus when it really underperforms. So through that process, we're starting to learn, well, how do we successfully execute that format? Which is what 99% of people on social media do not do. So if you just did that, you're going to be light years ahead of other people because the blessing and the curse of social media is anybody can pull out a phone, press record and post something. So that's a blessing because we all have the power to reach the masses online.

With a single click of the button. The downside is it doesn't take a lot of thought to do that. So what we're doing is we're trying to apply what I talked about in like film school of like sitting down and analyzing this format of telling a movie, all those different elements to social media where we're really cross analyzing, well, what is a successful use of this format versus the unsuccessful use? I love this. So basically what I'm hearing you say is, um,

You know, especially if it's one creator and you're comparing that creator against him or herself, it's going to be very easy to do this. It might be the way the story was told. It might be the payoff at the end of the story. It might be the very beginning of the story, the way it's kind of introduced.

It might even be the setting, right? Maybe it's a setting that's in motion versus one that's not in motion. It could be all sorts of little factors. I mean, are those the main things you're looking for? The words they say, the reactions and the settings, are those kind of the main things that we're analyzing here?

So, I mean, we get pretty detailed. So there's over like a thousand different performance drivers in our library, but typically we're trying to break it down to like three or four things per format. I'll just kind of go over kind of some of the most common things that people miss and then

As you get into it, you can get a little bit more nuanced. The first one kind of pertains to the hook of it is like what we call as a generalist principle is like most people are using this methodology that was designed pre-social media of create a niche piece of content for a niche audience. And that doesn't work as we're talking about organic social, because again, they're playing the retention game. They want content that gets seen to millions of people and hold their attention. They're not going to do the heavy lifting and find the exact audience that

and try and target it. In addition, if you're designing a niche piece of content for a niche audience, it typically comes off like an ad and it's lacking story. So it falls flat. So if we go back to the lawnmower example is if that guy was just talking about the mechanics of a lawnmower and how a lawnmower operates, it's probably not going to get any traction, but he's taking this generalist principle of this format of transformation, man on the street transformation. So

So that's one of the biggest mistakes people make is they're looking at specifically the niche audience that they're going after, which is important, but lacking the kind of oversight. Well, how can I take my core expertise and still make it interesting to my grandmother or my sister or brother that have no interest in what I do? Like a prime example of this, Graham Stephan, the YouTuber. One of his most successful videos is how I bought a Tesla for $78 a month. Now, Graham teaches finance to millennials, right?

And he created a brilliant hook. If that hook of that video was, let me teach you, you know, if you're a millennial, let me teach you the five principles of financing your first car, would have gotten 10,000 views instead of 10 million views. So that's one of the kind of,

core elements to start with. Other elements to get down is really the pacing of it is like, if it's going too fast or it's going too slow, you can lose the audience right away. Another element that people really mess up on is doing too many things at the same time, especially in those first few seconds, you'll have like a meme card or title card at the top. You'll have somebody talking, you'll have captions and potentially them moving at the same time.

So we call it visual hierarchy is like, you need to make sure you have a clear visual hierarchy of like what you want to focus on first, second, third, things of that nature. So I would say that those are probably like three of the biggest ones that we see, but they're,

I always just recommend like you start doing this analysis yourself. And again, it doesn't have to be overly complex. Let's just start by you taking the same format from the same creator. Like let's just say you put a video with 1 million views on the other side and 10,000 views on the other side and play them side by side and just play

look like what is the difference between them and again just focus less about the content and more about like what are the dynamics that are going on as the story's unfolding sweet i love this what's the next step in the process so the next step is typically where people start which is ideation so we've chosen the format we've done the analysis of the format now we can come up with the ideas most people will just jump to the idea phase and just create ideas

But as we can see, like if we jump to ideas and we don't have a structure that we understand, then it's less likely that it's going to succeed. So once we have the format, that format will typically dictate kind of the ideation process. So for example, we were working with a leather craftsman. His name is Tanner Leatherstein and he sells leather goods, briefcases, handcrafted material, like really high quality stuff.

And prior to working with us, he was following the same model that most people were. He's creating basically commercials, like displaying his products and how beautifully crafted they are. But it wasn't connecting. He was stuck at like 2000 followers. So we helped him design a format called, is it worth it?

So basically he'll take a $500 Chanel handbag, deconstruct it on screen and tell you whether it's worth the money that you paid for it. So that single format across all of his social channels took him to 2.5 million followers. So with that format, it makes the ideation super clear, meaning, okay, what we just did is a $500 Chanel handbag worth it. So let's do is a $2,000 product purse worth it. Kind of reminds me of Will It Blend way back in the day. You remember that?

Yeah, exactly. Very similar. Is a Louis Vuitton belt worth it? Like those different elements. But once you have that format and that structure, it makes the ideation process a lot cleaner and a lot clearer versus then starting with the ideas itself. But like, yeah, will it blend? A perfect example of a format. You know, he killed it early on with it. Like, will the iPhone blend? Will the iPad blend? Well, what are all those things?

If you think about that format, it makes it super easy to come up with the ideas within that structure. Love it. What's next? So then we go to what we call single production iteration planning. To simplify that, we make a single piece of content at a time. Most people will go to straight batch producing a content. So they'll sit down, they'll produce 10, 15, 20 pieces of content at a time. The challenge and danger with that as you're starting out is, let's just say you sit down and produce 10 pieces of content. The first one fails, right?

you're typically not going to sit down there, analyze it. And if you do analyze it and figure out what's wrong, it's not likely that you can fix it in the other nine videos. So what will most people do is they'll go post the other nine videos, they'll forget about the mistake that they made, or they're just not even going into that exercise of trying to understand how and why something failed or how or why something succeeded. But if you do one video at a time,

it forces you to really look at what didn't work or what worked, which goes to the fifth and final step is reviewing and analyzing. So with this model, there's no opportunity loss, meaning if something doesn't work, our model is set up for it because we've done the research, we know the format, we've done the analysis of that format. And if something doesn't work, well, we just go back to the beginning.

And we look at, well, what wasn't about that worked? We put, you know, some of the exercises we do is we put our video on one side of the screen in like a gold standard of the format. On the other side of the screen, we play them side by side. What was it that it missed? And typically there's two reasons that a piece of content doesn't work if you're following this model. One is...

you didn't really understand what drove the performance. Like you chose the wrong things. Like maybe you think, oh, the person was wearing a red hat. That was a reason for it when it was like the pacing or the introduction of the video or the captions or the hook or one of these things. Or you just didn't execute it at the level that you need to. But what it does is by producing a single piece of content at a time and reviewing it,

against that, the research that we've done, it starts giving you clear answers and clues as to what you need to fix for the next one and the next one. In addition, if it does work and it goes viral, now you understand why, because you just followed this process. You know, when the TikTok kind of era came in, the algorithm made it super friendly that most people could get a video that goes viral and gets millions of views. The problem is they don't know why. And thus it makes it more difficult to reproduce those results.

So that's the fourth and the fifth step is producing a single piece of content at a time and then reviewing the results. Now, as you get better and better and better at this and understand what truly makes the format tick, then if you want to batch produce it because you really understand the dynamics, then you can go and do that. Okay, a couple of questions. Does it make sense for a Cree

creator or content marketer to only stick with one format? Or do you recommend trying out a bunch of different formats to kind of see what sticks? Typically, what I recommend is start with one format and go through the process of understanding how to master that format and then move forward.

to another one if you want to. But if you're trying to do too many different formats at the same time, typically you can get confused. You can get burnt out. You just get lost in the fray. It's kind of like if you think about if you've never learned a musical instrument, are you going to have more success sitting down and learning one like the piano or

first or are you going to have more success doing more than one? Or like another example is learning a language. If you've never learned a language outside of your native language, are you going to start with one language and learn that process of learning the language or are you going to try and learn three at the same time? So now I want to take this to businesses, brands, people that have physical products. How do they make this model work for them? Because so much of what we've been talking about

It makes so much sense for people that offer a service or are creating a physical product or are kind of a domain expert or are in the media, you know, but what about for companies that have like consumer products? How in the world do they work this into the story? Yeah. So it's a great question. And the first place I want to start is number one, when we talk about going viral, we're not talking about going viral for the sake of going viral. Like it always has to be

tied into your expertise, your service, the type of products you have in some way, shape or form. I'm not sitting here and telling you to mow lawns if you don't do anything in relation to mowing lawns or taking photographs if you're not in the photography industry. Number two is a lot of what we've been talking about is

organic content. We can talk about paid if you want to get into that, but there's a huge distinction that most people don't understand or get wrong about organic social media. Organic social media is not meant to sell a product.

It is meant to get people to know, like, and trust you. So they're motivated to go buy your product. Love that. So when we talk about Tanner Leatherstein, for example, he had products that he wants to sell. He wants to sell his leather goods, you know, his briefcases, his wallets and things of that nature. If you watch his content, especially in the, is it worth it format, which he's generated hundreds of millions of views, he doesn't sell anything. There's no CTAs. There's none of that in his content. Right.

All he has is a link in his bio. And what we saw happened to his business, he was getting so much attention and because the format was designed around his specific expertise to show he knows what he's talking about, like he's a true leather expert.

people automatically want to take that step and click the link in his bio. Did it impact his business? 100% it did. So before, all the traffic to his website was through pay-per-click advertising. So he's getting about 10,000 visitors a month. Once it started to kick off and start to scale, it jumped to 100,000 visitors a month organically. His most expensive products, the products that are thousands of dollars, he couldn't keep them on the shelf because they would sell out every time.

So that's a really important distinction is, yes, you definitely want to find a format that fits your expertise, your kind of niche. Like even like the lawnmower guy, I don't know his business model. I don't know him, but I bet you anything that his business explodes and I bet you get to his business.

I'm sure it's landscaping or something you would think. Yeah, 100%. And another example, just to kind of reiterate it, and we talked about this in our previous conversation, just to show that it really can be used for anything. There is, and I'm sure some people have heard of him, there's a luxury real estate agent named Ryan Serhant out of New York. He now has a show on Netflix, but he's not successful in social media because of that show on Netflix.

And he was on a show, Million Dollar Listing. He's not successful because of those shows. I worked in Hollywood and I can point to so many people that are in movies or television that are not successful in social media. He is successful in social media because he gets it. But if you think about his business,

His business is selling properties in Manhattan that are from $15 million all the way up to $250 million. So, you want to talk about a niche audience that drives the revenue of his business. So, what he does is he plays the generalist principle that we talked about earlier where he goes and says, let me take you on a tour of a $6 million closet. Let me take you on a tour of a $250 million ranch. Ah.

So he's doing that because it plays to the general principles, like who wouldn't want to see that? He uses that to generate millions and millions and millions of views a month. And he knows if less than 1% of those millions of people are his core target, he beats out his competition head over heels. And he's even said that he has sold $30 million properties off a single video. So this-

this model that we're talking about, this concept of formats and the generalist principle can be used to sell anything, but you cannot expect organic social media to be, I'm going to produce an ad for my product. I'm going to do a product shot. I'm going to post it to Instagram or Tik TOK. And all of a sudden people are going to buy it. Like,

That's not the case. Now, there are certain formats, like you mentioned, you know, will it blend where the product is inherently in that blend, you know. The blend tech. He's featuring a blender in that, but he's not sitting there creating a commercial saying, hey, my blender has XYZ technology, it has these speeds and things of that nature. Now, with that said is once you get the organic dialed in, then you can start using paid to retarget that audience because as the audience scales, you can retarget that audience with direct response, more kind of like,

buy it now, not in those stern language, but kind of buy it now type ads and things of that nature.

Brendan Cain, thank you so much for sharing your insights and answering all my questions. If people want to connect with you on the socials, what's your preferred platform? If they want to check out your business, where do you want to send them? So if they want to get like a quick glance at this process, you can go to my Instagram pages under my name, Brendan Cain. And you can see me doing kind of these side-by-side breakdowns that you can kind of get a high level overview of it. If they want to learn more about the business, they can go to hookpoint.com.

And just for your listeners, they can actually get a free copy of my new book, The Guide to Going Viral, which breaks down this process in more depth by going to hookpoint.com forward slash SME. Brendan Cain, thank you so much for sharing your insights. Again, folks, go to hookpoint.com.

dot com slash SME. And what's waiting for them there? A free PDF download of my new book, The Guide to Going Viral. Sweet. Thank you so much. No, thank you. It was a pleasure to connect with you and everybody that was tuning into this.

Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over at socialmediaexaminer.com slash 653. New to the show? Follow us on your favorite podcast app. Been listening for a while? Would you give us a review? And would you let your friends know about this show? And do check out our other shows, the AI Explored podcast and the Social Media Marketing Talk Show.

This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner.

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