K atie c ouric

Three Phases to the Process
The foundation of my methodology for gaining one million followers
consists of these three steps:
1.
HYPOTHESIZE.
Quickly identify a hypothesis of a format, story,
or theme that engages audiences around a specific message.
2.
TEST.
Produce a low-cost proof of the concept or message that can
be tested and validated and learn everything you can about what
does and doesn’t work from the results.
3.
PIVOT.
If the hypothesis is proved correct, invest in it further. If it’s
disproved, quickly repeat the process again with a new format, story,
or theme.
Hypothesize, test, and pivot is your new mantra. The model is simple—
the hard part is figuring out what to test and when to pivot. You need to test
many different variations that have a strong hook to catch and hold people’s
attention. Then, based on those tests, you figure out which variations yield
the best results and keep investing in the ones that do. Or, if none of them
are working, you need to pivot—go back, set a new hypothesis, and start
the process over again.
When I was building a million followers, my core focus was on
becoming recognized for thought leadership, since my true passion is
speaking and teaching other people. As a digital and business strategist, I’m
always testing as much content as possible to get an understanding of what
does and doesn’t work for clients, but when building my following I
focused my brand around the themes of thought leadership, teaching, and
inspirational posts.
One of my most interesting and successful experiments involved
podcasts. I 
hypothesized
that podcasting would be a great outlet for me as
an individual because I’d learned a lot about them in my work with Katie

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Couric, which I’ll speak about in the chapters to come. Suffice it to say, I’d
seen that you could essentially “reverse engineer” podcasts for Facebook
and scale audience and engagement quickly. We did this by cutting short
audio clips from podcast interviews I had created with a few partners and
celebrities and then turned them into a video by playing the audio over a
still image or a slide show, or cutting it against stock video that represented
what was being discussed. Running these videos through various tests, I
found that I could reach millions of people in 
days
—most of the top
podcasts in the world don’t even reach that in a month. The trick is, you
don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Look around and borrow ideas from other
people’s successes.
The podcast content I 
tested
consisted of interviews with Justin Baldoni,
lead actor in the TV show 
Jane the Virgin
; Jeff King, an expert in the
Process Communication Model (featured in chapter three); and Dr. Drew. I
cut the interview audio into three styles of video posts: (1) videos showing a
single image with the audio played over it, (2) videos showing multiple
images with the audio played over it, and (3) videos with stock footage or
clips I found online that matched the audio playing over it. Then I tested all
those clips against each other to see which generated the most shareability
and earned lift. For each interview, I cut anywhere between three and ten
audio clips and created unique videos for each one. From there I generated
anywhere between ten and a hundred variations of each clip (more later on
how to scale variations of content quickly).
The best-performing content by far was one of the variations of the
Justin Baldoni interview. It’s an inspirational video in which he encourages
people to live their best and most desired life. He also talks about how to
make choices that will make your life happier and more fulfilling. I 
learned
that the message of the content (that is expressed through the headline) was
incredibly important, and that choosing the right one is an influential factor
in getting people to click and share. I want to point out that I am against
clickbait—the headline/hook point should always match the content. I also
learned that the visuals were really important. A video with stock footage
that represented the audio or actual video from the interview performed
better than a single image. Moreover, using someone with a large following
that you can target and tap into also helps garner attention—but not
necessarily 
engagement
if the content is not solid.

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Additionally, I shared and tested a variety of inspirational quotes—I’d
seen other people like Gary Vaynerchuk (an entrepreneur with two and a
half million followers) have a lot of success with these types of posts. Some
of the quotes I tested came from people I admire like Steven Spielberg and
Oprah, who share similar view-points to me. After seeing positive initial
results, I switched my focus to creating my own personal quotes, which
make up a good percentage of the posts I publish to my page today. I
learned that quotes on images work extremely well because people like to
interact visually and mentally with positive and inspirational content. An
advantage of images over videos here is that it’s much easier to create a
high-quality image than a video. There are so many variables that go into
making a great video: tone, pacing, the first three seconds, captions, title
cards, length, and so forth. With a photo, on the other hand, you just have to
choose the right photo with the right quote—fewer variables have to come
together to make it successful.
The short-term strategy is to look at the tests and learn what works in
real time. Those results inform you and dictate the content you’ll produce
on a weekly basis. Then, when you start seeing the macrotrends of what
works, it informs your long-term content strategy, which you also need to
check against your brand’s overall message. For example, as an experiment
I tested viral videos of pranks and of kittens and dogs doing funny things.
Although they all performed really well, I decided to 
pivot
because they
didn’t align with my brand’s theme of thought leadership. Note that the type
of content that resonates with your audience can change over time. Look at
both your short-term and long-term content strategies, discover how they
play into each other, and move toward what works.