K atie c ouric

Quick Tips and Recap
• Define your hook point by knowing what makes you unique.
• Choose a great headline by making it specific and relevant.
• Adapt your content to what your audience is already interested in.
• A/B test your headlines against each other to discover which is the
most relevant and useful.
• Use psychology and human behavior to communicate your message
clearly to different types of audiences. Speaking in a way your
audience can understand is key. Remember, according to the PCM,
focusing on 
LOGIC, HUMOR, AND EMOTIONS
will resonate
with the majority of the North American population.
• Find messages that make your audience ask themselves questions
they’re already thinking about but don’t know the answers to.
• Determine whether inspirational, political, comedic, entertainment,
pet-based, and social currency can be leveraged to attract attention
to your content.
• Create content and messages that move people emotionally.
• Know which topics are trending on Facebook and online.
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1
 Cory Doctorow, “HOWTO use Google AdWords to Prototype and Test a Book Title,” 
Boing Boing
,
October 25, 2010, 
https://boingboing.net/2010/10/25/howto-use-google-adw.html
.

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W
CHAPTER 4
FINE-TUNE THROUGH SOCIAL
TESTING
e’ve already discussed and driven home the importance of testing in relation
to my system. This chapter is a continuation of its importance and the
strategies and philosophies that some of the top digital minds use to
approach testing. To discover what will work for your audience you must
allow yourself space to test, play, and discover. If your content doesn’t
resonate, keep testing and tweaking until you find the content that does. As
Katie Couric says, “One of the most important things I learned from
Brendan is to be nimble.” If something doesn’t work, it’s fine; you just need
to learn from it and pivot on the spot.
I want you to develop the habit of constantly testing—observing your
audience’s responses and knowing how they engage with your content in
real time. Analyzing the results helps you understand the effectiveness of
your content strategies. That way you generate immediate feedback loops.
It’s one thing to get the analytics and data, and it’s quite another to actually
learn from them. You need to look clearly and be honest with yourself. If
something doesn’t work, don’t get overwhelmed and frustrated. Look at it
and ask yourself, “OK, why didn’t this work? Why did this piece of content
over here get shared a thousand times while this piece of content only got
shared once?” Analyze both spectrums of what did and didn’t work. Then
you can start making hypotheses about your short- and long-term content
strategies. Observe which content encourages someone to engage, to follow
your page, to share your content, to buy your product, and the like. Use the

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Facebook ad platform (that also powers Instagram, WhatsApp, and
Facebook Messenger) as a market research tool as we discussed in 
chapter
one
 to really understand what it takes to get someone to perform a specific
action.