Hey You,
This one’s special. I’ve never done anything focussed on content creation. But surely the first of many. And I’m pretty sure you’re going to find this one controversial.
But before we dive in, I release a crazy episode In The Haus: with Kislay Verma & Vikas Bardia, who are the founders of India’s newly funded ride-hailing business, Shoffr. If you’re from Bangalore, you already know them. But if not, this one’s to watch out.
This is the story of an investment banker and a techie, frustrated by the day to day experience of booking clean, safe, convenient taxis, decided to take on giants like Blu Smart, Uber & Ola in Bangalore. Claiming to be the gold standard of ride hailing in India, this episode dives into the mindset of building against incumbents in an extremely tough category in India, ride hailing.
The next few episodes for In The Haus are power packed with execution tips from some of the best operators & founders in India. And I’d love for you to subscribe to my channel.
Now, if you’ve been added by a well-wisher or you’ve signed up yourself, it’s going to be a fun journey from here on. You are part of avid readers of experiential (read: tactical) content on product, design & content. If you’re interested to read more about me, here’s my LinkedIn. No ads here I assure.
Ok, time to get started.
Let's go.
7 Harsh Truths About Content
1. Social Media isn’t to communicate your brand’s features
Lets understand a few basics about social: It’s almost like an addiction; which means no one’s going to stay on a post beyond 2 seconds until it gives them a dopamine high.
3 ideal things that give dopamine: educational content (where you learn something new), entertainment (humour, drama, sarcasm, horror) or inspirational (self-help, feel good kinda stuff).
So why do brands spend money with their social media agencies on building feature level content on social media?
I’ll tell you why.
It’s because they don't know any better. It’s not easy to be original. And brands copy from brands (who are all talking about their features)
Whereas in reality, the same brand managers and social media agencies, themselves consume content from creators.
So why would your customers consume content on your features?
Something to think about right? Maybe we crack open some answers here.
2. Customers will never buy into what you want to sell. They will always buy into what they want to watch.
Now that brings us to our 2nd learning: Sell the customer what they want to consume.
Find topics or areas that your demographic relates to.This could be content via your own pages / channels (which is ideal) or through pages / channels that you create or acquire if you don't want to dilute your own brand page.
(Here’s a controversial take btw: building a brand page to follow an aesthetic is a great way to remain boutique. If you aspire to have lakhs of followers, check out some of the largest brand pages in the world (Eg: Duo Lingo). None of them follow aesthetics). So the only 3 kinds of content that works on social:
Educate: either about your sector, category or some myths and polarising things they challenge their beliefs. (What you didn't know about Whey Protein? What do ALL mutual funds have in common?)
Entertain: One of the easiest and best ways to build distribution is via entertainment. Use humour, music, storytelling etc to surprise your users everytime. (Stuff like: How much is this outfit worth? Vox Pop Videos. How do you know your partner’s secret?etc). Everything that’s hooky and very entertaining. Miles away from your features.
Inspire: I’d place this as 3rd because it’s tough to get inspiration right, especially as a brand. You need a certain level of consistency for inspiration to work. So for brands, this might not really be an ideal one unless you can really crack it well.
Want to know hacks to crack content? Read Point 4.
3. Social channels in the short term; owned channels in the long term (owned channels give you the ability to build communities)
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok: all great to build distribution for your brand (if you can crack it well though) but you would constantly be at the mercy of algorithms to alter your content & strategies.
Today they want you to focus on stories, tomorrow broadcasts, day after something new.
Truth is that you are trying to outbeat the algorithm at some level.
So how do you beat it? By owning your own channel: newsletters, to some extent Youtube, website, offline experiences, interest based communities, really strong membership programs (that goes beyond the useless points), to name a few.
All of these are channels where your audience is there to intentionally listen to you for more than 3 seconds. It’s absolutely okay to have 1000 people who want to do that as opposed to 1L that you may have on Instagram. This is where you focus on quality over quantity and power pack every experience or content with value.
I’ve been conceptualising Youtube Strategies for consumer brands that have never ventured into consumer and trust me, they are all finding it tough to digest some of these truths.
4. Do you understand what Candy + Medicine is?
I borrow this from Duolingo as a brand and their social strategy. They’re an educational platform for kids, but their social game is nothing like that. They basically give all sorts of content to their audiences that they want to consume. Nothing about the brand, its features, discounts, etc.
It’s like candy. You attract the kid to your channels by showing them what they like.
And their link in bios, hidden discount offers in comments are the places where they hide the real brand level stuff. Like medicine.
You always disguise medicine for your kid, with candy. That’s what works.
5. Do you promote your posts on Instagram?
Everyone’s obsessed with views. I’ve seen agencies & brand owners get sleepless nights over views. There’s no scientific way to make a post go viral. Sure, there are hacks and tricks, but you still can never guarantee that it will go viral.
So instead, as a brand, you must obsess over engagement: comments, shares, saves.
Here’s the ideal path for customer love:
Relatable content → people share / save → someone new discovers it → goes through your library of content → relates to it → follows you for the next drop of similar content
This is the path to getting quality followers. Focus on this and stop obsessing over views from every post.
Even if one of your posts goes viral, chances are that the customer who’s followed you for one post, will almost always unfollow you for a different style of content.
6. Long Form: YT is the holy grail. WHY?
Youtube is for long-form content. It’s intentional and it’s very different from Instagram, Facebook or TikTok. When you create content on Youtube, no on’es expecting those hooks, that fast music and stuff that constantly gives you a high.
It’s meant to be more impactful, immersive and detailed. So if you can crack YT, as a brand, that’s the true test of your community.
I’ll soon write about what works best on YT.
7. Traditional brand managers will not be able to scale on social
I’m going to be fired for this, but I’ll go out on a limb and say. Traditional brand managers will never crack social. Because this isn't about your brand’s positioning. It’s about the anatomy of content creation. And this changes every single month.
So IMO, find creators who can help you scale social, build distribution and let the brand managers and your brand guidelines govern everything else about your brand.
That’s it for now. Share this with someone who you think can benefit from this.
Until then,
Gratitude,
Sak