K atie c ouric

Never Stop Testing
Prince Ea says that you continue to test and learn even after you’ve created
two billion views. The process never stops because you’re constantly
pushing yourself to try new things.
The most important thing is to actually learn from the results. What I
notice is that people often get lazy. They’ll test five or ten variations, and
unfortunately, 95 percent of the time, those variations aren’t going to yield
optimum results. They won’t resonate with the largest-possible audience.
People get frustrated, but they need to keep testing. Most people won’t hit it
out of the park right away. At first, your cost per follower probably won’t
come in super low and your content won’t go viral—it could, but if it does,
it will probably only happen to less than one percent of the people reading
this book. Even I rarely do that. I’m constantly testing, learning, and
pushing the boundaries of the platform. Besides, the more intelligence you
glean from the tests, the better you’ll be at producing good content. Take

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time to learn how to dramatically drop the cost per share or whatever your
essential key performance indicator is.
Chris Williams, the founder and CEO of pocket.watch, an entertainment
company for kids, and former chief audience officer of Maker Studios, who
also launched Disney Online Originals (a division of The Walt Disney
Company dedicated to the creation of Disney-branded short-form content),
advises that you should look at content the way engineers look at software.
Put it up, see what happens, iterate, see what happens, iterate, and see what
happens again. The beauty of digital platforms is that you can create content
and iterate very quickly, unlike TV or magazine features where that process
takes much longer. The beauty of social media is you can immediately see
who’s doing well and get inspired from what’s already working out there.
Go out, test content, measure the response, and iterate quickly.