Escaping the Drift with John Gafford - Transforming Content into Conversions with Logan Forsyth

Starting point is 00:00:00 Well, I love that. I love what you just said because I was going to ask you. And this sea of DM'd gurus can help you, whatever. If I'm somebody that I don't know anything about this, but I want to get better, how do I discern, how do I figure out who's full of shit? Who's for real? And now, escaping the drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford and I have a knack for getting extraordinary. to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness.

Starting point is 00:00:34 So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now. Back again, back again for another episode of like it says in the opening, man, the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And today, people, if where you want to be is massive on the old interwebs, man. You want people to see and know who you are through your social media. This is a guy that can help you get there. This is a dude that is the founder and co-CEO of media scaling. They're the number one social media growth firm in the United States,

Starting point is 00:01:06 known for helping creators and brands explode their organic reach across all platforms. They have worked with giants of the industry, including Uncle Grant. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program. This is Logan Forsyth. Logan, how are you, man? Amazing. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, dude, where are you beaming in from today?

Starting point is 00:01:26 Beeman in from L.A., originally from Texas, but I've been out in Southern California for about five years now. Okay, right on. So what got you into, obviously you're somebody that's helped a lot of people build huge followings online. What got you into the biz? Yeah, I grew up in an era to where when I was still 17 years old, I started seeing people on social media talking about how to make money online and started getting served a lot of ads and started investing, you know, through courses on the credit card, started going to business events and just followed the process of how to make money online courses. They actually work many times if you put it into action.

Starting point is 00:02:08 And I'm a product of that. So it's cool to come full circle because a big part of the mission of what we do is working with the top thought leaders and people who are very, very good in whatever industry they're in and getting their content in front of as many people as possible because I know the value of it. I'm a product of it myself. And that's what got me into the space is make money online ads, talking about digital marketing skills and went down the rabbit hole and never turned back. So over the years, you know, the growing Instagram accounts, growing social media accounts has evolved so quickly that quite frankly, it's kind of hard to know who's full of it and who's not.

Starting point is 00:02:49 You know, I can tell you that years and years and years ago, I went down a road with somebody that was, referred to me by some very high-level entrepreneurs that I like. They said, no, no, no, here's what we're going to do. We're going to get you verified. And back then when you couldn't just pay $9 to get verified, it was a process, right? Because that blue check mark meant something. But we went through a very expensive, lengthy process to get that done. And I found that at that time, they just kind of flooded my account with fake followers. That at the end of that, I spent years trying to clean those people out. So my question is, you know, what have you seen as far as the evolution of what works in

Starting point is 00:03:29 social from what was what was big five years ago? Why did that fail? And what's a go where we, where are we headed now? Yeah. Yeah. Sorry that happened. It's unfortunate, but that was a very common occurrence from about 2017 to 2020. A lot of people were, you know, paying and selling for massive.

Starting point is 00:03:49 shoutouts or fake followers came on to the scene and a lot of people bought it looking at it as social proof not knowing it's going to take their account. And so unfortunately it's very common and it's easy to spot that happens nowadays. In terms of what's changed from five years ago to today on socials, I would say the biggest marker above all else is short form content, right? The TikTokification of social media. It's five years back. Short form content, reels on Instagram, shorts on YouTube did not exist. That all came into the scene late 2019, early 2020. And that's completely changed the playing field. And since short form content has come out, every platform has become much more of a for you page

Starting point is 00:04:30 rather than a following feed, where now we're constantly served content based on our interests and demographics rather than just who we follow. And short form content gets the most favor on the platforms for that non-f follower reach. On any platform, when you post short form vertical video and you look at the insights, majority of the reach 50% plus typically goes to non-followers that are targeted based on interest and demographics. And that's made it almost easier in some ways to grow organically than it used to be back five years ago. Well, let me ask you this, because you do see this a lot, especially on TikTok, right? Like you'll see a video.

Starting point is 00:05:09 It seems like when you first started the social media game, there was a lot more following. It was easier to get followers because you put something good out that kind of hit. people followed you because they wanted to see more. I think people are a lot less likely to hit that follow button because you see some, you see some people, especially on TikTok, that have millions of views on one video, but they don't have hardly any followers. So where's the disconnect and how do you fix that? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:05:35 There's a lot of variables that go into that. I would say the biggest thing is making sure that you're speaking to the right people. A lot of people are chasing views as the number one metric, and that's not always the metric that you want to chase. It's not something that should be ignored, but you need to take into account who you're speaking to in your content and pay attention to what circles is it going into. Are you getting DMs from the right people? Are you seeing people follow your account who you want to follow you? And if you're not seeing those markers and you're just creating broad content to go broad and trying to get as many views as possible, then there's not going to be as much congruency

Starting point is 00:06:11 and you're not going to get as many followers from the views that you're gaining. I think that's the most common piece that you see out of this. Yeah. Let's say you have an account, you did one of those deals where you got a bunch of fake followers like I did back in the day, right? Is it easier for, because there's people listening to this that bought those same followers and did this and I mean, because it got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper as time went on.

Starting point is 00:06:32 If you've got account with this full of fake followers, is it better to start a new account, scrap that and start completely over? Because I've seen, especially on TikTok, it just seems like you can come out of the box and get big numbers very quickly. it's like almost like newer accounts have an advantage over existing accounts now. Is that accurate or not? It's not accurate. It really depends on content quality above all else, right?

Starting point is 00:06:55 If you create a new account, but you're not creating content quality that people love and highly engage with, then it's still going to go nowhere. And I've also seen examples of people who had the fake following account and they've been able to grow out of it organically by just putting all their focus on creating the best content they possibly can't. What is quality content is very subjective, right? Data is what tells the truth above all else. And volume is what can help you get there. But you need to just really be on top of what is working today, experimenting constantly with different content types. AI is a massive tool that we use now for content research.

Starting point is 00:07:36 I can dive into that and a lot of different ways of being able to understand what's working today. But emphasis on content quality is always what's going to produce the most growth above all else. Following size doesn't matter as much as it used to. You can grow quickly on a new account, but also a lot of people create new accounts. And it goes nowhere because they're trying to get away from that fake following, but they still haven't put the emphasis on content that they need to. Well, you've got enough data now with as many accounts as you've run and as much many people as you have helped. There's got to be, for example, you know, you turn on the radio, you listen

Starting point is 00:08:12 to a song. Nobody turns on the radio anymore. It's my, go to Spotify. whatever you listen to a song and it's verse chorus verse solo verse chorus end right there's there's a there's a flow to what makes people absorb music a certain way so what is that flow that you see in short form content that's successful yeah um there's so many types of short form content that work and so there's no right answer and with social media in general there's no hard rules right Like people are successful doing so many different things and you have to experiment and really decide what resonates with you and matches your brand as well. What I will say is we've used AI to analyze thousands of viral videos at this point, viral being defined as getting one million

Starting point is 00:08:59 plus views with a common pattern of these videos being for businesses and brands and not just creators or people doing comedy stuff to give views for view sick. And one of the biggest patterns that we picked up on is with the hooks and the framework of the video, majority, more often than not, there's a number in the hook. And then the video is following a step-by-step format or a list format. And you're saying, three, whatever, five, whatever, right? But you're saying, so if you're in real estate, it's like these are the five biggest common mistakes that I've seen buyers make in the last 10 years that's lost people millions of dollars. And then you go one by one by one through the list of five. We see that consistently work across so many,

Starting point is 00:09:42 we've tested this across dozens and dozens of industries. It's a very, very consistent pattern. Our brains are wired to just want to follow that format, the step-by-step process. It holds retention better. So that would be the biggest common tip above all else. Well, you know, it's funny, that's not new. I mean, if you look back at copywriters that were writing headlines for people magazine 25 years ago or cosmopolitan you know the seven ways to keep your man happy it was always it's it's the same idea right and people are just taking that into more of a digital place now let's say that you obviously your business or your brand you you have something on the end you want to want to sell you know gary v famously came out with the

Starting point is 00:10:28 jab jab punch what frequency with your give me the frequency if i'm somebody that I have something to sell as far as, obviously you might not want to CTA every single video. You might want to just give value. What's the best most successful frequency you can give as far as how that goes? Yeah, it depends on the type of CTA. We've tested everything under the sun. And what we see works the best for driving leads and conversions from organic content is DM automations. So for Instagram and Facebook, mini chat is the top tool. And I see plenty of accounts that consistently go viral. They crush it with views. Their growth is pretty enormous compared to other accounts. And they have CTAs in

Starting point is 00:11:15 literally every video. And it's using mini chat. And the CTA is comment this word and I'll send you this free valuable resource that goes along with the video. And if you're doing it in a value-based way and it doesn't come across as like a hard pitch or a hard CTA or you're trying to drive people straight to buying a product from you in the content, then you can get away with it a lot more. If you're trying to drive people to something where they need to purchase right away on the front end, that typically only works if you're selling anything low product, I would say, or low price, let's say like $100 or less. You're better off typically driving people to something that's free, whether it's a newsletter. VS are still one of the top

Starting point is 00:11:56 converting funnels right now on socials. Webinars are right up there with VSLs. They've really come back heavy in the last two or three years live webinars specifically not automated webinars and a lot of our clients we're seeing that they have better results when they're doing one maybe two live webinars per month instead of a high frequency of three to one webinars per week because it creates more exclusivity urgency the attendance rate is higher they can put more ad spend to have a lot more people attend to each webinar event as well so those all work for for driving people to conversions and then lead magnets in general you have sheets you have resources AI prompts are working really well but whatever it is this can grew it to the content um and if you're again

Starting point is 00:12:40 doing it in a value-based way you can almost do as many as you want in every post it's so funny you mention Vs for two reasons number one whenever i have somebody on this show i want to make sure they're legit right so we do a little bit of research to see who they are and when i saw my buddy Nick Daniel follows you on Instagram. Nick's the best VSL guy. I mean, the own Vichred. He's probably one of the best VSL guys on Earth. And I was like, okay, if Nick's following this dude, then I'm okay with this. So let's say you have a product to sell and you want to start with social. What is your best recommendations as far as how that funnel should look for best practice? Yeah, I like VSL funnels above all else if you're selling high ticket. I'm also a huge proponent of high ticket.

Starting point is 00:13:23 I think it's the way to go. We've connected with countless business. is anywhere from six figures, seven figures, some of our clients are eight, nine, and even 10 figures. And I've never seen a business get to eight figures and beyond without high ticket being the core focus of the business, right? Low ticket usually can take people to one, three million per year, but they hit a ceiling a lot of the time. High ticket being the fine is selling anything that's 5,000 plus. Yeah. So are you seeing this? Because like for so long within, you know, sales funnels, we're taught value ladder, right? Like get a moment. on a lower ticket item and once they purchase for you, then you go to the higher ticket.

Starting point is 00:13:59 Are you seeing people right now go like straight to the top? Yeah, you can do that with VSELs. If you know what you're doing with the VSL funnel, there's a lot of best practices to follow. VS were generally seeing best results, having it be 20 minutes or less. And it just follows the typical format of problem agitate solution. A lot of the time you're answering questions and handling addressing objections that would otherwise come up in the sales process. You want to stack proof on the page below. Once they go to the application form, book a call, you want to have a lot of FAQ videos on the thank you

Starting point is 00:14:36 page, clear steps to outline the process. Having three to six emails per day going out from when they book the call to when they have the call really helps with show rate as long as the emails are value dense and is answering questions and just showcasing case studies and value. You don't want the automated responders that everyone uses that's very lazy and just annoys people. And then you can also have advertising campaigns where you're retargeting people with value-based content from when they book the call to when they show up. That helps with show rate. That helps with close rate.

Starting point is 00:15:10 That helps with higher amounts of cash collected on calls. And so, you know, if you don't do those things, then you're going to have less success just going straight to high ticket. But if you follow those best practices, you can go straight to high ticket, especially if you are creating great organic content because people build trust through watching your organic content. And that's the difference of going to a cold audience versus having organic leads. The organic leads have a lot more trust when they come in versus a cold audience has a lot more skepticism. Sure. You know, Russell dominated this space so long with click funnels and now

Starting point is 00:15:43 there's other, there's other players in the space that are doing incredibly well. What's your go-to for VSL funnels. What is it? In terms of like the hosting platform, what platform? Yeah, I mean, most people out there these days are using go high level. And they kind of just ate the launch of ClickFunnels because they stack. My gosh, didn't they though? Yeah. Dude, everything we have is in high level. It's just I don't know a better program for that stuff than that. It's great. Right. Yeah. Let me ask you this. When you come in and you sit down with the brand and you talk about obviously their goals how many of those people are thinking like what is the broad scope that you're trying to get them to is it just followers is it just awareness is it just

Starting point is 00:16:27 clicks are you trying to like move them off socials into the newsletter avenue all of those things like what do you when you walk in to sit down with the brand what's the overall full scoping pitch you're giving those guys yeah and no i'm not trying to turn us into an infomercial i'm genuinely interested yeah yeah so we only work with brands and businesses. And when you're working with that type of person, a very common thing I hear is I don't care about vanity metrics, which is true. You shouldn't, right? People don't care about just the views, likes, and comments. They care about that driving actual, tangible results to their business. And so you have to measure it all. I think it's also very, very

Starting point is 00:17:06 important to understand the value of brand and what that creates and that you should not only measure the value from posting organic content to the link clicks that you get or to the direct attributed cells from each platform like Instagram that you get because it's building your brand. And that leads to a lot more open doors that otherwise would have been closed. That leads to more word of mouth. That leads to people talking about you at business dinners that you're not even a part of. And then they come into your website separately. That leads to more search traffic.

Starting point is 00:17:37 That leads to chat, GBT recommending you to people when they're asking who's the expert in this field. at least to so many other areas. And so you should not just measure the benefit of socials from what comes through that direct platform. However, that's still going to. Well, hang on a second, because I think that's the biggest challenge that most high-level business guys like me.

Starting point is 00:17:58 Everything for me is, I always say the truth is in the math, right? It's got to be in the math. And just about every single social media person I've talked to for the last six years always says the same thing, which is this. Well, you can't really quantify. the impact. It's very difficult to quantify the impact that this will have on your brand. And to business people, we're like, wait a second, dude, because I can quantify every dollar I spend everywhere else. I need a way to quantify this. Are times changing a little bit where

Starting point is 00:18:30 you can quantify some of this stuff? Yes. So that was the second half that I was going to lead to. I think it's just really, sorry. I mean to cut you off. Yeah, yeah. It's really important to preface that there is a bigger picture of benefit that's provided from this. But when it comes to the direct attribution, link clicks are an obvious one. DM Automations is what converts the best. And so you can track the amount of mini-chat runs you're getting. TikTok has a native tool to set up DM automations within the TikTok business manager. We're also seeing good results right now, including text CTAs to people.

Starting point is 00:19:06 So you can say text the word scale to 310, blah, blah, blah. and you can set up automated text that go out using go high level or using other CRMs as well. Wait, that doesn't, their algos don't see that as taking them offline and hurt those videos for doing that? Yeah, good question. We only do that on YouTube and LinkedIn. We're not, TikTok will flag that content and restrict it. And then minichat works much better on Instagram and Facebook. But YouTube and LinkedIn, we do see content crush and drive results when you're using a text CTA in the content. you can also ensure it's very low-hanging fruit to be retargeting all the reach that you create across all of your accounts with ads right and that's another attributable source there and those are

Starting point is 00:19:49 the main metrics and then also you can see if you have a video really hit or you get into socials you're putting a lot of effort into it it's new for you look at your search traffic and look at direct website visits and if you see an uptrend or if you see some level of correlations that's another measurement for you. But it's taken into a bigger picture in general. And then also just keep your ears out for people coming on calls, have yourselves team ask, like, where did you hear about us? You're going to have a lot of people tell you, oh, I saw you on this podcast or I saw a post come up on Instagram or whatever else the case. You know, it's funny. I think one of the biggest problems people have on socials is they're not intentional with what they're doing.

Starting point is 00:20:31 they just do whatever they kind of want and it turns to this hodgepodge and i have a buddy of mine who is a branding expert not necessarily in exact year space but you took a look at my stuff and was like okay what are you trying to do and right now the answer is sell books that's all i'm trying to do is sell books sell books sell books because i'm going to hit the new york times best seller less than november if i'm going to die trying one of the two things that's it so he was like well everything's got to be consistent about this like you can't you can't talk a little bit of real estate. You can't talk a little bit of that. Everything's got to be consistent with what's in your book. And I've definitely noticed that since I've done that, you know, I probably had a little bit

Starting point is 00:21:10 of a lull at first in kind of engagement, but now that engagement is starting to come back up. And I think, you know, how do you talk to people about when you get focused about what you're doing? You may lose some engagement because you lose some engagement, but how do you get them to stay the course? Because that's what I'm struggling. That's what I struggled with a little bit. I'm like, man, is this, is this the right thing to be doing? What should I be doing here? So what's that kind of, like, what does that timeline look like for people? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:21:37 It depends. If you're, if you're doing a complete shift on your socials than what you've done in past years, then yeah, there's going to be a dip in a low period because the people who followed you for that thing in the past, they're no longer getting that same value, right? And so it is kind of a reset. I'd say that's a rare instance. And many times not always recommended. there's also ways that you can merge both together.

Starting point is 00:22:02 And you should not assume that all of your followers see every single post. It couldn't be further from Ruth as well. Right. And so you still can mix in a cadence. Like let's say you're doing real estate stuff. You can have a portion of your content still speak on real estate. The platforms are now smart enough. They're going to serve your content to your followers who like the real estate stuff.

Starting point is 00:22:21 And then the people who follow you for other aspects that you're talking about in your book that don't relate to real estate. they're going to get served your content when you're talking about those topics, right? And so you still can merge both to a degree. And if the book is the main focus, I wouldn't say completely get away from real estate in the example of you if this is even applicable, but maybe dial it down to 20% in your content. That way you're still serving that audience that's coming in the past. Yep, go ahead. Keep going, keep going. Keep going.

Starting point is 00:22:52 Keep going. The biggest part with socials is you just need to get clear on who you're, creating content for and why. If you get clear on that and you have a very clear avatar and persona of who you're speaking to in your content, that's going to be the guiding light. And then it becomes very easy to come up with what you're going to talk about and the hooks. And you can start to build out content pillars of different types of content to experiment with and different topics to talk about that I'll still speak to the same person and is relatable to the same person. Well, let's talk, let's talk about that, the pillars of things, because I think I've found

Starting point is 00:23:29 now that if you look at social media, like carousels are very big right now as far as generating stuff. And when I do my content generation, I'll try to do like a reel of me talking about something and then the next day will be a carousel of kind of that same thought. And it just kind it goes back to back to back to back and then in the stories is where i'm just kind of me right the stories is where i torture my daughter uh you know to play play jokes on her and you know just just generally more of this is kind of who i am as a dude kind of deal in the stories yeah i mean is that a good mix you tell me i don't know yeah on instagram specifically if you look at the insights on your post they push pictures and carousel posts much heavier to your existing following

Starting point is 00:24:16 and they push reels much heavier to non-followers. And so I like doing a blend of both. I look at carousels and pictures as more so audience nurturing, and I look at Reels as more so new audience growth. And that's why there's a time and place for each. Not to say that carousels don't get new reach, they do. And Instagram has, over this year, release more updates to where they're showing carousel posts and more discovery placements.

Starting point is 00:24:43 even in reels, sometimes you'll see Carousel posts similar to TikTok now. But overall, they go much heavier to your existing audience. I'd say that's the big thing of both and why you should be doing both. In terms of other types of content that work, I mean, I think it's really valuable for you to have someone on your team or someone who you work with to go out and constantly just scroll feeds and make a sheet of borrow content for you that's not completely. completely out there that's still content that you could see yourself potentially doing. And then you as the creator can go through that and just watch and see what's working and

Starting point is 00:25:23 then see what resonates with you. Be like, oh, I actually like this style of content. Let's run an experiment with this for this month and let's do 10 of these posts and see where it goes. And if you see that there's higher traction or higher average view per post, lean into it more. If you see that it doesn't really go anywhere, then try a next experiment and never stop that process because what works yesterday doesn't work tomorrow. tomorrow, right? So, yeah, it's a big piece of it. Well, not, if you look at it like,

Starting point is 00:25:50 that's any business, right? Like when I teach business planning, it's like, okay, you know, you set your financial goals of what you want to do, and then you're going to have three strategies of what you're trying to do to get there. One and two should be tried and true. You know, they're working, and then three has got to be a flyer. And if you always go like that, sometimes the flyers hit, sometimes they don't, but it will always keep when one of your tried and true starts to fade away, you'll hopefully be able to replace it with something that's working a little better. You brought up something interesting,

Starting point is 00:26:15 which was find viral videos that are working from other people and try to replicate what other people are doing. Now, is it, you know, I hear that, but then you see like Mr. B says, what's made him him is his purple cow, which is he's trying to do stuff that nobody's ever seen. Now, obviously, that's very difficult with as much content that's out there and the reach that he has.

Starting point is 00:26:39 So which philosophy is better? Both. It's model and innovate, not copy and paste, right? Look at what's working for other people and then innovate on it and make it your own. A lot of, like, Mr. B still takes inspiration from what's working out there. He uses a lot of tools. He talks about it. And then he comes up with his entirely new creative process to make it much better. And you can do that as a business owner as well. I'm more talking about, look at like core types of content that's working. I'll give some examples. Right now, something that's working really well is green screen content. and that's where you see it like there's a cutout of you and then the rest the the video is other elements that are showing on screen and holding a mic that's just like very native content that's just working right now and over the last two years we saw a big pendulum swing from two years ago the top production 4K content was way outperforming now we're seeing it swing back to a lot of raw style phone selfie video content is performing really well and I would recommend testing

Starting point is 00:27:43 out a cadence of that to where you can just pull out your phone, talk into it. You don't even need captions. Like we're seeing a lot of content crust that just has a headline on there without even having captions on the post. A lot of people are crushing with posts right now to where they do the two personas talking to each other, right, of like a skit. It's like you're one person who's playing dumb or asking beginner question. And then you like have a different outfit. You do another. See, you hate it. I hate it so much. I hate it so much. That's not something that you should do. Oh, God, I hate it. I hate it. And they resonate with it and it crushes, right? It's just like,

Starting point is 00:28:17 you know, the thing, the only I hate more than that, the only thing I hate more than that is the let me play the viral video while I'm down here in the corner going. Right. Yeah, yeah. I hate it. Yeah. I hate it. Like, to me, that it's just so lazy and so ridiculous. So people do that. But I guess, dude, they do it because it works, man. Right. They're getting something out of it and again great example like your team can put together the sheets you're going to watch stuff you're going to be like i hate this therefore you can not do it but you're going to see other things that really resonate with you and you're like you know what let's try that let's like let's make it a post type that we experiment with and see where it goes let's talk about social media

Starting point is 00:28:58 teams let's talk about the different levels to the game right like what's the first hire you should make what's the second hire what's the third hire yeah when you graduate from doing this for yourself to be like I need some like what I like you see you know I just got back from I spoke at uh inman luxury connect which is a big luxury real estate uh convention this weekend and so many people were rolling around with their own videographers and to me that's just not something I want to do or just yeah I shoot my own shit like dude I'd rather shoot my own shit right it just but what do you think is the right move levels to the game go yeah first hire absolutely is editor slash poster at least editing takes a lot of time and it's very low cost to outsource you can get

Starting point is 00:29:46 incredible talent for it it's not hard to find the talent pool of editors has never been greater i mean over the last five years the amount of people who have gotten into editing content is massive there's a lot of killer 19 20 21 year olds who you can hire at a great price different countries fluent in english and they can also post the content for you because that's another job that takes a lot of time. Does that hurt you if it's posted from another country, though? I've heard, I've heard that. It can. So you want to set up a static residential proxy. We use OxyLabs or self if you have someone who's overseas posting for you. Don't use a standard VPN like Nord VPN. We have a software engineer on our team go through this whole process. So I don't

Starting point is 00:30:29 know all the details on it. But there's a lot of, there's multiple types of VPNs, multiple types of proxies. Well, they look like they're sitting in your office. They look like they're sitting. in your office to the internet uh to your office or just in the same city right yeah also i will sit so instagram finally about a month ago released the functionality where you can add users to your account which is massive it took them eight years to do it but they finally did um and so that doesn't skew the demographics that they know that your account and you as the owner are based in this location um and so that helps with instagram specifically tic-tok is the worst to where even if you are traveling and you fly over to Europe and you post yourself, it's immediately

Starting point is 00:31:13 that same day you're going to start serving your content to people in Europe versus the U.S. And so you need to have a static residential proxy set up for whoever's managing your socials that they're not in the States. Worst case as well, this is not the recommendation, but it's better than not posting is you can use third party scheduling tools to schedule things out in advance. Again, if you have the team and the bandwidth to manually post and natively, in each platform. We see better results doing that overall. Biggest reason above all else is because you can use all the platform features. All third-party scheduling tools are missing features from multiple of the platforms, especially new ones. You're always going to lag behind if you rely

Starting point is 00:31:53 on just scheduling outposts. But again, better than nothing. Yeah, let's talk about that then. So we're going to come back to who else you hire next, but you said about features. I want to hit this. So when you post stuff, what are the mistakes people make when they're posting native? So like example, I've heard that if you use the captions feature within the apps, you get better than if you use like the captions app to generate your own. In terms of just captions specifically or features? No, but in general. So I've heard if like if you edit stuff within the native editing software within the

Starting point is 00:32:27 apps, it does better. Yeah. TikTok and Instagram have both released articles that state that directly. And so you have to believe it. But it's not a requirement, right? There's just endless amounts of content that goes viral that was not. What have you guys seen? You find that to be true or no?

Starting point is 00:32:44 You find that to be true? Just because they say it doesn't necessarily mean it's true. Yeah. If I'm trying to get to use my editing tools, I'm telling you that if you use them, I'm going to give you preferential treatment, whether I do or not. Right. Just because they say it doesn't mean it's true. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:32:57 I'll say this. It's not a rule. It's not a requirement to have top performing content. And I would say majority of count CC out there are using. and editing their content outside of the app and then posting it and they crush. So is their requirement? No, not at all.

Starting point is 00:33:13 Okay, so who's the next hire you make? You got your poster and your editor. What's the next hire you make? The next hire you make, you know, it depends on your content strategy and also your filming setup. If you're someone who wants to do more vlog style content or on the move content,

Starting point is 00:33:30 you need someone to capture a lot of B-roll for you. Maybe you just hire someone as a contractor to film with you in person occasionally. Also, I highly recommend if you're gonna take this serious that you should get your studio set up. And so hire someone one time who knows what they're doing with production to come out and set up a studio for you, make sure that everything's working properly,

Starting point is 00:33:52 show you how to use it. That way it's easy for you just come in, turn the camera on to where you don't always need a videographer if you don't have someone on your team. But I'd say strategy is a huge one because it's still gonna take a lot of time and a lot of work from yourself as the person. If you don't have someone on your team

Starting point is 00:34:11 who's gonna help you go out and look at a lot of content that's working, come up with the ideation of what you're gonna speak about, content styles that you're gonna test. Short form content, it helps if you script it out versus not scripting it out. AI is a big tool for that now. You should not just fully script content with AI

Starting point is 00:34:30 and not review and revise it yourself, but it can make it so much faster than it used to be even two years ago. So that's a recommendation. And so I'd say we see a lot of benefit of next step, bring someone on the team who is a higher level manager and strategist and can go out there and send content recommendations to you, help you script out and prep. So you don't have to spend so much time in prep and you can more so just sit in front of the camera and go. And then also help manage your editor. And if you have anyone else posting for you, have them review all the content before it goes out.

Starting point is 00:35:04 so you don't have to review every single post before it goes out. That would be the next step. Okay. If speaking of AI, if you had to off the top of your head, right, one prompt to help you generate content, what would that prompt be? One prompt alone? Yep. Give me the prompt. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:35:26 We use a lot. I would say one prompt alone is always just telling it its role, right? So you could just tell it like you are the world's. top social media strategists with experience generating billions of views on social media with short form content or long form content or whatever you're uh using this for um feed it as much information as possible about your business so i'd say this is before prompt this is just with ai in general feed it documents feed it sales call transcripts feed it offer material feed it your marketing material uh your sales videos like everything so it knows your business just as well if not better than you know your

Starting point is 00:36:03 business. So it has all that context to give much better recommendations to you. That's step one. And then you can use the prompt of your world's top social media strategists with experience generating billions of views. Step one, put together my content strategy for the next 30 days that's going to speak to this ideal avatar, who you should have already fed into chat, and then break it down into video hooks for every single video. One thing that we do, we haven't spoke on is split testing hooks is massive right now. I like to split test at least three hooks per video. So in the prompt, tell it to give you three hooks per video that are going to captivate, stop the scroll and hook people into watching. And then tell it to give you the full

Starting point is 00:36:46 video script while also matching the way that you talk. That way it fits your voice and doesn't sound overly AI. And it's going to give you a full content plan from there. Then you can just game plan and go back and forth with it to tweak it to where you wanted to go. You know, you bring up an interesting thing because now Instagram has added testing to their apps. You say you're testing hooks, trial runs. When you say you're testing hooks, is that where you're testing them? So trial reels is the new feature that came out on Instagram earlier this year. It allows you to post a reel that only goes to non-followers, none of your existing followers, and it doesn't show up to your profile feed. So yes, for Instagram, that's where we overall like to split test

Starting point is 00:37:29 hooks. You can record, we like to do three hooks per video, post them all as trial rules on your main account, wait 24 to 48 hours. Same time or no. Same time or different times? Same time, doesn't matter. I mean, we've done it same time. We've done it spread out through the day. We haven't really seen it change results, right? But you want to measure the performance of each one of those videos. After 24 to 48 hours, see which one performs the best. And then you can choose to publish any of those videos to your main feed. So publish the highest performer to your main feed. on other platforms the way that you split test hooks is using sub accounts right you can't just post the video back to back to back i mean you can but it's not best practice on one account but you can

Starting point is 00:38:09 do that as a best practice it give multiple accounts per platform so instead of just having you know logan foresight it could be logan forsyth logan forsyth scale Logan foresight reals marketing we post uh the three split tested hooks across those three accounts and we see what performs the best. And that also gives you 3x, if not more, leverage for every video you create instead of one video, it's now three. And then you post those three videos across every platform, at least five platforms on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn. Then you're going to have now three videos times five, 15 posts a day from one video. The highest one. Yeah. What's the best proving ground? Is TikTok or Instagram the best proven ground for videos? I personally,

Starting point is 00:38:59 use Instagram more and most of our clients focus more on Instagram we see it overall drive better results in like a stronger relationship with your following on Instagram versus TikTok so Instagram is the preference for me especially with trial reels now TikTok can work as well

Starting point is 00:39:19 I will say that going back to the raw style content TikTok gives it more preference than any other platform and there's a lot of creators on there who crush it and all they do is selfie style videos with even no captions on the content. And we see that crush on TikTok much more often than Instagram. So if that's your style of content, then TikTok would be a better testing ground. Otherwise, I like Instagram and trial rules. Yeah. Dude, my daughter comes to me like 30 days ago and says, I want to be an influencer. And I'm like, okay, honey, whatever you say. Sure. Yeah, it's great. She's 15. She's like, no, I'm going to do

Starting point is 00:39:55 some research. I'm going to fear exactly what I got to do and this and that. I'm like, oh, it's great, honey, whatever you want to do. Her third video got two million views. No way. That's, yeah. Yeah. Dude, I'm like, I mean, I think, yeah, dude, I've, look, I've never been able to crack TikTok. I don't, Instagram, no problem, but TikTok, dude, I'm like, okay, whatever boomer is I guess the response that I get on TikTok dude. It just, I've never been able to crack that. Is there, I mean, How come, why do some people resonate like myself on Instagram and then fall completely flat on the old TikTok? Do you ever use TikTok?

Starting point is 00:40:33 No. That's why, right? You just never use it at all. And so you're posting, like Instagram is the platform that you know and that you focus on and optimize content for. And then you just repost it on TikTok. It works for some people, some types of content. We see it work really well for podcasts specifically.

Starting point is 00:40:51 What's the difference? What's the difference? the difference between optimizing Instagram versus how how do I not optimize a video for you for Instagram and how do I optimize it for for TikTok? TikTok is over again there's no hard rule but take talk is overall a much more raw platform and so we see people just selfie style video talking to the camera a lot of phone content versus higher 4K footage content again not a hard rule but overall uh using uh training audio those. TikTok is, I'd say, the top trending platform above all else. And so so many people are

Starting point is 00:41:29 creating content based on trends that work as well. And then it's just the more you use it, the more people just understand the mindset. TikTok is, everyone's still on it, but TikTok is much more of a doom scroll. Like, let me just not think type of platform. And so that's also generally, if you create content that's a little bit more geared towards that, we see people do better versus like very informative, strategic, high level, like put your, put your glasses on. Let's get to work type of thing, you know. Yeah, got it. No, got it. Okay. You know, I get hit up every day now. The new thing I get hit up with every single day, it seems like, in the DMs, which first of all, dude, okay. This is my little public service announcement to

Starting point is 00:42:18 all of you guys out there that are trying to get clients through social media if you're going to pitch just pitch don't like hey what are you working on now like like dude no i don't know you i'm not going to answer that question i'm not going to interact with you in my dms that's if you're so over some crazy nonsensical question because i already know you're going to pitch right don't ask me if you can pitch just pitch and if i need what you're selling then i'll respond that's my little two cents but I get hit up every day now constantly with clipping clipping clipping clipping clipping clipping clipping clipping clipping clipping oh we want to clip for you do I got an army of clippers clippers clippers clippers explain this to what is what is clipping and is this a good idea

Starting point is 00:43:01 doesn't work where are you with clipping um clipping is great I mean it's largely how we built our company an easy way to state it is what we have done and a big a big model for us with media scaling is implementing the and you tate strategy for brands. And that's where subaccounts come into play. It only works, by the way, if your content is already performing really well. Our metric for it is if your average video is getting tens of thousands of views or more per video, then repurposing that content that's already crushing and doing a lot more of it is going to work really well. If your content is not already getting tens of thousands of views per video or more, then just repurposing that same content that's already not like at the top level

Starting point is 00:43:46 performance is not going to magically get it to work. That's the big line of whether or not just clipping from a repurposing route alone is going to really work for you or not. If you are getting that higher performance, it's the best thing you can do for your brand because it's how you can take your posting volume from hundreds of posts per month to thousands of post per month, and you can just take over. I mean, we've generated lots of brands, tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of views per month for one brand by rolling out all these sub accounts and having a full team behind them,

Starting point is 00:44:22 posting thousands of times a month. If you are not consistently seeing high view counts, then focus on content quality, and you can still amplify your content through hook split testing is the best leverage way, I would say, of doing so, have multiple hooks per video that you're posting out, and that allows you to still create unique content across sub accounts. Most people who are in DM saying I'll clip for you are either just editors, and they're using the term clipping now, or WOP is a platform that released

Starting point is 00:44:54 content rewards is what they call it. And they have a big program on there of teaching other people how to be an agency owner for content rewards for WAP. And so almost everyone are brandy business owners. Most of them are 18, 19, 20 years old. They haven't really done this for people before. And that is the pitch they were told to go out there in the marketplace and start just DMing people. And they have no experience. So if you work with them, it's probably not to be the best results. But if you work with someone who has done it and has a lot of experience with it, has a guarantee to back it up like we do, then it crushes again if your content is already doing well. Well, I love that. I love what you just said, because I was going to ask you in

Starting point is 00:45:35 This sea of DM'd gurus can help you, whatever. If I'm somebody that I don't know anything about this, but I want to get better, how do I discern, how do I figure out who's full of shit? Who's for real? It's just like vetting any business, you know? Look at their results, their case studies. Do they have a guarantee?

Starting point is 00:45:59 Like, how much should they de-risk the offer for you? See if you can do some level of a trial period with them before doing a longer-term commitment it's like interviewing an employee you know just you have to learn how to vet people properly to choose properly do your research and homework um out of that's no that's fair yeah but but you know again back in the world of socials you know what i found is it's easy to kind of look through the fog right because you see people that have you know millions of followers and this and that but you look at all their comments and it's like this is fire He did this today.

Starting point is 00:46:36 You're like, this is all this is all nonsense, right? So, but I think you do need to dig a little deeper into what people actually do when you're doing this. Last question, which is for those of, you know, we all want to build our brands. You want to build engagement. And of course, every platform makes it very easy for you to give them some money and they'll help you do that. Talk to me about boosting posts.

Starting point is 00:46:59 Good idea, bad idea, how should you do it? When should you do it? Tell me. Yeah. Yeah. Overall, I am not someone who really recommends it as a strategy. If you're going to run ads, then have an amazing media buyer who knows what they're doing and run ads to drive conversions, not just to boost and get you more views, right? Yeah, that's really, that's all I need to say about all that.

Starting point is 00:47:24 I always find, you know, with anything, the path of least resistance, especially when comes to spending money is probably not the best path. Yeah. And man, they just try to make it so, hey, just boost it, just boost it. And I think you see people wanting to do that, it's like, that's probably not the best move. Right. I also, to speak on the last note you made before that question of basically fake followers, fake

Starting point is 00:47:50 engagement, fake views, there's some easy ways to spot it overall. Socialblade.com is a free website. And you can put anyone's Instagram or YouTube channel in there. They have other platforms. They're not as good. Instagram gives us the best data. And if they have a fake following, you'll see just like, boom, a huge spike overnight on one wall. Also, look at their, go to their Reels tab and look at the views per post.

Starting point is 00:48:16 And if a lot of the Reels are right around the same view count, like $250,000, $260,000, $240,000, a lot of the time, that's a giveaway. And then look at the comments. And if the comments are very meaningless and there's not substance to them, And then it's a pretty good giveaway as well. It's just a lot of boosted and engaged. They're called engagement groups that people join to just get all this massive boost to their accounts that's fake. And the platforms see it as well.

Starting point is 00:48:46 It doesn't help. It's just all of a side, basically. Yep. Well, there you go. All right. Well, if they want to find you more about you, Logan, where do they find you? Yeah, Logan Forsyth on socials. And then the company ismediascaling.com.

Starting point is 00:48:59 We have some awesome free resources. there as well just going over hundreds of viral hook frameworks and templates and content strategies that are working really well today that's at media scaling.com ford slash secrets and we're across all platforms awesome well dude thank you so much brother i appreciate you being on anytime you're in Vegas you're welcome to come through all right is it yeah pleasure being here well guys if you listen to that today if you're trying to build a brand online there are so many pitfalls out there that you can run into just try to pick the best path that makes sense for you. But at the end of the day, just make good content. If you just make

Starting point is 00:49:36 good stuff that people want to watch, they'll find it. We'll see you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escaping thedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor. If you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review. Give us a share. do something man we're here for you hopefully you'll be here for us but anyway in the meantime we will see you at the next episode

Escaping the Drift with John Gafford - Transforming Content into Conversions with Logan Forsyth

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