A great podcast by the Safety Third guys and Vsauce where they started to discuss the changing landscape of verticle content and how it's percieved and gets distributed [Here's where they get into vertical content](
?t=879)The key notes I got were...
On quality
- Less polished video in vertical formats seem to do better
On 'who' it comes from
- There's also something that makes less 'polished' videos more appealing, like a brand isn't trying to force it down your throat
- It seems as though posts that are 'discovered' e.g. 'I need to know who did this' or 'look what this person did' seem to have more viral potential because it's not forced upon the viewer with a 'look what I did' post. ?t=1281
- It's a discovery that the audience has made
- There's a step removed from the story which makes it interesting (monalisa being stolen multiple times)
- It's a completely different type of content that takes the pressure off of making super polished stuff
No one wants to see something that you did, they want to see something that you found
it's past that gate of is this worth posting yeah it's not being posted by someone who wants me to see it because it's their job just some fan knew that this was worth preserving and sharing
They mention this tweet by David Firth that demonstrates the idea quite nicely:
- He makes out that he doesn't know who made this video (he made it) and it did WAY better
Synthesise the rest of the podcast, this is a great one and I'm up to
?t=1239Personal Experiments with short form content
IG Reels can sometimes be a slow burn
Go go page
I'm starting to branch out and experiment with different ways of creating content. For a few reasons:
- It's fun
- I want to keep it fresh
- I want to see how I can be more efficient with my content
It usually takes quite a bit of time to create my usual educational reels (anywhere from the 1/2-full day) so I wanted to see if there were other ways I could create some content, with fewer hours put it, but potentially the same amount of value in a different format.
So I tried a quick little content experiment where I was just doing a face-to-camera, talking over a time-lapse
It was quick and easy and the timelapse was already done, I spoke over it talking through my thoughts and all in all it took about 15 minutes.
So I posted it on December 4...
And... there were crickets in comparison to my other Reels.
I'd usually get them up to > 50k views within a day or so.
But the last time I checked was maybe a week ago? I think it was at 20k - 40k views, and that would have been 3-4 days after posting.
I felt it was a flop in comparison, and kind of forgot about it, but then I looked back today (about a week later) and to my surprise, it's on track to outperform the reel before it in views.
It's been nearly 2 weeks since it was posted (it's Dec 16th today and was posted on Dec 4th). Sometimes I guess content on IG can be a slow burn 🤷♂️
Now, there's one variable that may have affected the results, and that's the fact that I didn't post it to my timeline grid.
Not entirely sure if that matters, but might be a variable worth experimenting with.
