I had a great talk with Gary Vaynerchuk, founder of VaynerMedia, one of the leading agencies building stories on the Internet.
Here’s the best tip from Gary about creating your stories: go where the attention is. If it’s TikTok, go there. If it’s Instagram Stories, are you there yet?
Sure, these new platforms or features can be trending today and gone tomorrow, but we need to take the opportunity anyway. To quote Gary, “I don’t care if any of them stick around forever. I care about when the attention is on them.”That’s as good a guideline as any for deciding where to take your marketing for the most impact.
Go where opportunities are
Let’s think about TikTok. It’s like Instagram, only for short videos. It reminds me more of Vine.
What I’ve done for the last 12 years is continually beat a drum publicly about the best opportunities for organic reach. For many people right now, that’s new social channels. You post something on TikTok, and 200,000 people watch it. Or you get lucky and hit 400,000 views. That’s what early Twitter did. That’s what early Facebook and YouTube did.
Most of the people right now know that you don’t upload to Youtube, tweet a tweet, or post on Facebook, and all these people magically see it.
In fact, including Instagram, almost nobody sees most content. Lots of things never get any views at all.
Content needs to be seen, so ride the attention
There are always times when you need to ride the opportunity of a platform is getting attention. Your organic reach is going high because of that new attention to the platform.
Content fills that attention. Currently, there are two places where that’s happening: TikTok and LinkedIn.
Obviously, for a lot of people listening and watching, LinkedIn is going to make more sense. TikTok is where most people’s 11-year-old daughters are. They find it funny. It just seems weird to use it for business. But look at Facebook now. Some people still consider it a college social network!
You need to be open to places where there’s an opportunity. And think about other avenues that respond to create their own opportunity. It is like Instagram adding Stories to stop a fast-moving Snapchat which was gaining market share.
Learn about your audience and about great content
When platforms evolve, they become important places of opportunity for sellers and marketers. Anything you want to sell — real estate, sneakers, courses, clothes! — has an audience because these platforms attract attention. They have hundreds of millions of people reacting, getting used to that content type, and sharing it.
So some of the behaviors in this bubble should definitely be added to our repertoire as content creators and communicators. You become a great creator when you’re everywhere where things are happening. Even if they don’t win, you learn things about your audiences and creating great content.