Today we're going to be talking about how you all can make better videos for, whether it be for our advertising campaigns, if you're a current client, or if you just want better organic performance on the videos. Pushing out tech talks all the time for your business or whatever it may be.
How do you get them to go viral more often? What is Facebook, Instagram and TikTok? What are these platforms looking for to make you go viral? Look what pleases the algorithm. So what we found that works, and this is a backwards thinking thing. If you've worked with me ever, or we've been on a project together, you know, I work backwards. I'm working backwards in the sense of like, okay, well, how do we know a video performed? Well, let's look at the end result of the performance that's working backwards, right? So then we look at data. We're digging through data and the way that Facebook and Instagram or Meta, now it breaks down the data into three categories for videos, and it is a three second video view, a ten second video view and a full through play. Play is called full through. It's roughly about 90% play. Most people don't know this, but it’s the way when you get a view. Say a video has a hundred million views on a video that you see on Facebook, a view constitutes three seconds of watching that video. That's it. Then someone clicks off, you get the little ping for the number. If they watch the entire thing, same attribution.
You get one view. So when you see something that has a million views, it might only be like, you know, 25% of people have actually watched the entire thing all the way through. Maybe 50% of it was watched, 50% of people watched half. Then the other quarter of people could have only watched four seconds and then left. So that video really only had 250,000 actual full plays, 500,000 people only watched half of it. So if you did, you know, divided that up, it'd be another 250,000 views, and then the other 250,000 people watched four seconds of it, which counts as basically nothing. So it's like, you really only had half of what was actually there, displayed to the public. You only had 50 million versus the a hundred million it showed just because of how attribution works. So knowing these attributions, windows is also important for you all. Now, I just told you that, right? You're like, holy crap. I only have to keep someone interested for four seconds and it counts as a view. Essentially yes, but we want to do more than that because we want them to share it. We want them to watch more of it because that's what pleases the algorithm. We want them to convert as a customer, a client, or whatever it may be. What are the things we need to do? The thing that I look at is that first thing is that three seconds, I call it like the primary hook for the video. So something crazy has to happen. Something exciting has to happen. Some sort of “wow” factor. That's going to get them to stop on a video as they scroll. They finally stop to look at something, and you get a millisecond to try to get somebody's attention. After you've got them, You've got your three seconds. Okay. We had a hook, we got them right now. We've got our second thing that we're going to look at, which is the ten second window. I believe I figured out why Facebook and Instagram do this.
My theory here is that there is the primary hook, and then there is a secondary hook and that is from seconds three to ten. I've a couple thoughts about this, a secondary hook, and so one's going to be how I think the algorithm works based on the hook. The other is going to be what I think you should do to make videos based on the secondary hook. The way I think Facebook looks at the algorithm typically works for pushing out the video is that if the primary hope this first three seconds does really well. Then it will boost you out to a ton of people within the minutes of the post being made, which is what so many of us experience all the time we do it on our client pages. You post something within like 30 minutes, you have like 3000 views and you're like, holy freaking crap. Oh my gosh, it's going, it's going viral. I think we're going to do it right. Afterwards, boom, it stops. Then you're like, what happened?
My theory here is that the primary hook did really well and the secondary hook flopped. So if we can get the secondary hook to do well, we get to get past that. Our vitality is to continue to be pushed to people. You also get a ton of views on that tertiary spot, which has been lacking daily. Understanding the meat and potatoes of the video is important. The meat and potatoes being what you're trying to sell to the person or what you're trying to convey to them. Whatever that is, is the purpose of the video. We've got a primary hook, first, three seconds, secondary hook seconds, four to ten, and then we've got the meat and potatoes, the entire rest of the video. Like I said, my theory there on the secondary hook is that if it doesn't, if you don't do a good job from seconds four to ten of getting people to be like telling them why they should stick around for the whole rest of the video. I think the first primary hook, these first three seconds is how you get them to listen to your secondary hook and then the secondary cause ultimately, your explainer behind the value to the rest of the video. So like the first three seconds doesn't really matter. You just have to have something happen to where they're going to stick around.
So, in regards to blowing something up, or something funny happening. Bringing emotion out of the person is incredibly important! Go on Tik Tok right now, and the second you scroll past something you find interesting in it, go back and ask yourself why did I just do that? And then look at it and think, oh, it's because I didn't care in the first second. If you went to the next one, then look at the ones that you do care about. Thinking, ”I watch this girl every time she creates something. She's so funny.” I bet you more often than not in the first few seconds.
There's always something that gets you interested. I do think that this is something that can carry on for a lifetime. Regardless of how many followers you have, I do think that the people that have built a good brand tend to follow that influencer. I have some influencers I watch religiously the minute that they get the video out on a Sunday morning. I'm trying to watch it at 8:00 AM. You know what I mean? So if it's that level, I don't think that the attribution windows matter as much when the brand awareness is super high or like, the emotional stance behind the customer is very heavy. I don't think it matters as much to them, but for most of us in the commercial world, and the business world, it matters!
We're trying to grow our pages, get new customers that don't care about us yet because they haven't heard about us. This is huge. I think it's a big, big, big deal. I believe it's 20 times better than static text and six times better than a photo. All I have to say is that videos have been huge, especially on TikTok. Instagram is pushing Reels more than anything else right now. If you don't know that Instagram nerfs your post performance, if you have the TikTok logo bouncing around it does, the video could potentially not be fed into the algorithm. If you're making content dedicated to one platform, or the other, typically, you're going to have to film it in your camera app. Then when you go to actually make the Tik Tok, you're gonna have to pull the individual clips, trim them and complete. Then, do it again for Instagram. That's just a little side ramp.
I believe I've kind of given you all everything I know about all of this topic. Like I said, for the three, ten and full through is because of Facebook, right? It's the data we were working backwards. Why is it measuring that stuff? It's because it's trying to get a stop to m for it. That's how the algorithm is working to push it out in terms of vitality. Then we have the second thing now that we know why. How right? How do we make videos that perform this way? So, we've got the goal. Now, anytime we're going to make a video, it's going to be the primary hook. What are we going to do for our first few seconds? It's not like, you know, finite to three seconds, or zero seconds. but you get what I'm saying, the first three seconds. Then we have our secondary hook seconds, four to ten. What's going to happen? How do we explain to people they need to stick around and then how is the content going to perform and do well after that? So again, like I said, if the meat and potatoes suck, it doesn't matter what you do for the hook and everything. You might get views out of the gate, but it's not going to go viral. It's not going to be shared by people, and that's what really it's going to take for it to go viral is for people to care about the content and to push it out there and share it, or it'd be funny, whatever it may be. I don't know what business you own or what page you're running, but, put that into your own context. I think that inspecting others is something really interesting to do. As I was kind of saying, go watch your wife, or your best friend, your husband, whoever it may be, go watch them on Instagram. After when you see them go, they watch something, they scroll, scroll, scroll, watch something, scroll, watch, like, whoa. Why do you watch that one, but not the one before that? Just listening to what they say, they're not going to have an answer, but, that's what we're talking about here is like the psychological effect behind it. They're like, “I don't care about that.” Makes you wonder, why did I watch this one? It's like, because I love cars. Of course, I'm going to watch a supercar video. There were flames coming out of the exhaust, in the first couple of seconds. Exactly. That's exactly what we're looking about.
