One Million Followers: Brendan Kane Gives Powerful Advice to Content Creators

So, again, Brendan, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Do you want to quickly introduce yourself? Yeah, my name is Brendan Kane. I would say most people know me from my first book, One Million Followers, how we built a massive social audience in 30 days. And I published another book called Hook Point, how to stand out in a three second world. And basically, I've been in the social media space since 2005. And really our teams and my core specialty is reverse engineering virality. And what that means is how do you how do you stand out in a world that now has four billion people on social media pushing 200 billion messages into the world every day? The landscape of how you create content, communicate effectively to stand out and grab audiences attention, customers attention has has fundamentally shifted because of that dramatic increase in the number of people that literally can pull out a phone, click a button and post something to the world. I love that. And I was kind of curious, just leading up to you writing your first book, what was the backstory to it in terms of the traction that you initially got and what kind of inspired you to share that information with others that way they can replicate that success? Yeah. So as I mentioned, I started in social media in 2005. I started building digital divisions for movie studios, created the first ever influencer campaign on YouTube for a movie, built the first influencer technology platform on top of MySpace, then quickly got into paid advertising where we were optimizing campaigns for Fortune 100 companies. We were managing about one hundred million dollars a year in spend. And I saw a lot of the inefficiencies in that where we had clients coming to us with a piece of content that they invested six and sometimes seven figures in. And then they wanted us to invest seven figures in promoting that piece of content. And it always sparked the question in my head to the client is how do you know that this piece of content is going to work to invest that type of money? And they really never had a clear answer. So I left and started building a lot of methodologies for understanding what content resonates on social media, gleaming insights, doing research on what makes content work, what makes content not work. And then I started applying those principles to journalists, athletes and celebrities and some brands to see the effectiveness of that for the objectives that they had. And the objectives that they had were all across the board. Some wanted traffic, some wanted leads, some wanted sales, others wanted followers. So I really got good at understanding how to effectively construct content that would achieve those objectives. And the interesting one was how you generate followers. And I did that for about three and a half years. And I had wanted to do a book for some time, but I knew I needed a strong hook point to really stand out, to grab attention, because I just didn't want to publish a book. I wanted to impact a lot of people's lives around the world with that information. And I knew I needed a strong hook in order to do it. So with all those tests that I did, I had a firm understanding that I could do something like generating a million followers in 30 days. And I called a top literary agent and just said, hey, I'm thinking about doing this experiment and turning it into a book. If I did it, would you sign me and get me a publishing deal? And he said yes. And then I didn't stop there. I started testing that concept with people I knew in the marketing and business space to see if it would be interesting to them. And everybody had a positive reaction to it. So that's really what sparked me actually doing the experiment. It was not really a matter of if I could do it, it was a matter of why I should do it. And that was the core motivation for the first book. I love that. I'm just kind of curious around the topic of content, because I think that's one of the things is that a lot of people misunderstand, first of all, the benefit of having a following, but also a more laser targeted following. I'm kind of curious about what your thoughts are in terms of creating laser targeted content versus some people out there are always kind of putting out the idea of just post content. If you post 10 times a day, you'll get traction. So what are your thoughts on that versus, I guess, if it were a battle, firing a dozen guns into a battlefield versus the one sniper shot that wins the battle? Yeah, so there's a few layers to that question, and I'm going to answer it specifically from an organic perspective, organic social media content. So we're a huge proponent of quality over quantity. Frequency doesn't really yield the results when we're talking about virality and reaching massive growth with audience and content on the same side, being super hyper targeted with your content, meaning you're creating a piece of content for a specific audience that doesn't work for organic either. The reason is the algorithms control reach and distribution of your content. They control whether a thousand people see your content or a million people see your content. And they only care about one thing, and that's user retention, meaning the more time people spend on these platforms, the more ads they can serve, the more profit they generate. And because they have billions and billions of content to choose from, they are going to choose content that they can see the widest possible audience and hold that attention for as long as possible. The algorithms are not there to suppress your reach on purpose so that you can boost your post and pay for for for reach, because if that was the case, nobody would ever go viral. Nobody would ever build an audience without using paid ads. With that said, and this is one of the core principles that we see people making mistakes with and one of the core principles that has really shifted with so many content creators on the planet is we call it the generalist principle, is how can you make your subject matter, your message, your business interesting to somebody that may have never heard of you or may not have any interest in you at all while still subtextually playing to your core audience? So to give you an example, there is a YouTuber named Graham Stephan, and he teaches finance to millennials. Now, typically, finance is not an interesting subject matter, especially to millennials. So his most viewed video is how I bought a Tesla for seventy eight dollars. So right away, that hook could be interested to anybody. And in that video, he is breaking down finance, but he's breaking it down in the context of this story of how he got this Tesla for seventy eight dollars. So he's still playing to his core principles. He's still playing to his core message. He's not diluting it, but he understands that the algorithms want content that he can see to as many people as possible and connect with that audience. So that video has like seven or eight million views. Now, if he would have said, I'm going to teach you the principles of how to get the most out of your car financing, that video would probably get a thousand views. So if you look at it from the perspective of seven to eight million views and let's just say maybe only 10 percent is his core target or even 1 percent compared to reaching a thousand people, you significantly beat out your competition. To give you another example, there's a real estate agent named Ryan Serhant that sells luxury properties between 10 to 250 million dollars in Manhattan. So his core audience of who buys and works with them from a property standpoint is very small. But he's using these principles by doing things like let me take you on a tour of a seven million dollar closet. Let me take you on a tour of a 250 million dollar ranch. And again, what he's doing is he is playing to that general audience where he's generating millions and millions of views and he knows he only needs less than 1 percent to be his core target and he's going to win. And he's going to win in a much bigger way than any other luxury real estate agent out there, because the number of potential leads seeing his videos is much higher. But he's also building a massive brand for himself. So that's kind of how we look at it. You know, just to recap, it is quality over quantity, but it's not of, you know, a sniper message to a sniper audience because the other ones aren't going to do that much work for you. Now, I'm not saying that doesn't still work for paid advertising because you have the ability to target. But even in that, you need to be able to really grab and hold attention effectively. And I just see that oftentimes when you're going to niche with your message and your content, it can be a little bit heady for social media platforms because the reality is you're competing against every piece of content out there. Like it or not, you're competing against Netflix. You're competing against LeBron James, ESPN, Kim Kardashian. And your content has to effectively be able to stop, grab that attention and hold that attention long enough to get the point across. Yeah, that makes total sense. I think just piggybacking on that, too, because I think there's a lot of people who maybe misunderstand the point of why I have a following, because in some ways it might be a vanity thing that, hey, I got a lot of followers, but it's a chance to really leverage that audience. And just to kind of set that up, I got a friend of mine who built five million followers on Instagram through doing contests, and he was really proud of himself for doing that. But when it came to actually presenting a way to convert those followers into customers, nobody wanted to buy it because nobody was invested in him. They just were following him for the sake of getting free stuff. So I'm kind of curious for you what your thoughts are on the benefit of having a following. Obviously, it creates an audience that you can connect with and hopefully that leads to consulting, things like that, versus let's just say people saying, well, as an example, I'll just go and buy followers because that way I'll get my massive amount of following that doesn't actually resonate or do anything for me if anything is more damaging than anything. Yeah, well, let's start with that example. I think the primary issue that your friend ran into, because out of five million people, there's definitely going to be people in there that can buy his products or services. The issue that he probably ran into is his content wasn't dialed in, because when you grow an audience that way, and I'm not diluting growing your audience in that way, we've tested those principles, they can be used for certain things to drive value. But if you don't know how to create content that, again, plays to what the algorithms are looking for, you could have five million people and reach 30,000 of them. So you're not maximizing the value versus when you have your content dialed in, if you can reach 500,000 to a million of those people, I'm sure your friend probably would have had more success with that. We have those contacts. We know those people that do contests, giveaways and things like that. I typically never recommend that until you have your content dialed in because of that reason. But by the time you have your content dialed in, then you don't really need that that element. But to the true intent of your question, sure, it can drive benefit from having validation credibility around getting speaking engagements, podcasts, press, or even potential customers that you're seeing on paid ads or customers hearing you on a podcast or something, checking out your profile and seeing a big number next to your name. I don't believe in being buying fake followers, you know, that that's just just, you know, misleading. You want to have real people associated with your account. But the number next to your name is all about how you leverage it. And again, the number next to your name doesn't really mean a lot if you're not an effective content creator, an effective communicator on these platforms. Yeah, that makes total sense. And thanks for elaborating. You talk a lot about the concept of a discomfortable idea, and I was kind of curious if you could give a bit of advice on how to get a winning idea and more importantly, how to execute on that as well. It comes to identifying patterns and be able to break those patterns. Any subject matter can go viral. Insurance goes viral. Finance goes viral. Real estate, medical is not about the content. It's about the context. And what I mean by context is how are you positioning your story? How are you telling your story? And that plays into the generalist principle. So with Graham Stephan, how I bought a Tesla for seventy eight dollars, that is completely different than anybody in the finance space talking about finance. And it's very successful because it's breaking the pattern. Nobody really logs into YouTube that says, I want to watch finance videos, but I would be interested to see how somebody bought a Tesla for seventy eight dollars. So it's it's really understanding that your subject matter has probably been talked about thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of times. And if you come off like you are going to say the same thing that they've already heard, even though you may have a different perspective, the minute somebody sees a video with a headline, a thumbnail, a meme card, a caption, and they think they know what the video is going to be about, nine times out of ten, they're going to skip it. So it's your job to figure out how to really stand out against. All of the content that they've consumed on that subject matter, but as we talked about earlier, it's even more important, how can you stand out with people that may have no interest in your subject matter or have never really heard of you, heard of your product, heard of your business? Yeah, that's great. And do you think that creating curiosity is a strong trigger versus as you pointed out, like looking at a video, it kind of summarizes what the video is about too much where you kind of get the gist and you can move away from it? Or what do you think are some of the strongest triggers to get people to whether it is click or convert or follow through with what you're putting out there? Well, you do want to set a clear expectation of what somebody can expect in watching that video. But as I mentioned, the context of how you do that, do that dictates whether somebody's going to click and watch it, because again, how I bought a Tesla for seventy eight dollars, he's still delivering on his expertise, his message and service, but he's doing it in a way he's setting an expectation that this is going to be a fun video. This is going to be interesting and it's gonna be something you probably never heard or seen before. So he's setting that expectation up front versus, you know, I'm going to show you how I maximize the most out of car financing to get the best deal. Like, I'm not saying nobody's going to watch that, but most people may say, I'm not interested in that. I don't have the time or energy. I'm on social media because I want an escape. Or they're going to be like, oh, I already know these these principles and move on. That makes absolute sense. I'm curious, too, and I apologize if this is a bit too broad, but can you give us some examples of what would be shareable content versus what typically everyone else tends to post out there? Well, from a shareability standpoint, we have like 50 different performance indicators we look at from virality, and it's again, it's all context and what context means is things like pacing, editing, first three seconds, captions, title cards. It's not really the content. It's the context of how you're sharing that. And, you know, one of the big things that we talk about is effect on viewer is what is the effect that you're having on the viewer and them watching the content? And I think that that so many people fail to kind of think about that when they're creating a piece of content and sitting back and, you know, saying and thinking, what is the effect that I want somebody to have when they view this content? Do I want them to be fascinated? Do I want them to be happy? Do I want them to be sad? Do I want them to be laughing? Those key emotions and that effect that it has on them significantly increases the potential of somebody sharing that content. Content doesn't get shared if there's no effect on the viewer. Like you're not going to talk about a piece of content or any piece of media that you watch if it doesn't have some type of effect on you. Yeah, that makes sense. And again, that's why fear and anger seem to be the ones that people respond to the most. I would say it doesn't have to be fear and anger. I mean, we see so many positive like there's there's a clinical psychologist, Dr. Julie Smith, that's super viral on TikTok. There is a lawyer, Erica Kohlberg, that breaks down like a legal fine print around like airplane tickets. And, you know, what happens when your AirPods break and things like that? There's the Dodo that's all about inspirational stories around pets. I would say Grant Stephan is positive. Jay Shetty is amazing. Prince EA. So people often say and I'm not saying fear and negative content doesn't work on social media. I think people oftentimes use that as a default and don't kind of really look at the larger landscape of what's happening. Look at Mr. Beast, you know, he's the biggest influencer on the planet. And that's all positive based content. So and we typically never recommend with our clients to use fear or anger because it just doesn't really yield the results that you're looking for. I can't really think of sitting down and thinking how to make people panic and run around, you know, either angry or in fear. It's not really a positive, healthy thing to put out there. But I guess like what would you find is some common traits that most people have that have built a successful brand? Well, the first one is the generalist principle is making their content, their message digestible for the widest possible audience. A big challenge that people face where others succeed is really the pacing of it. I think oftentimes, especially in the first few seconds, they overwhelm the viewer. They have a meme card, they're talking, they have captions, they're moving. And there's really, you know, from a subconscious level, we need to have a visual hierarchy of like what we need to focus on and what priority. So I think, you know, setting a clear expectation those first three seconds from a generalist principle, but also not overwhelming the person, because if they overwhelm them subconsciously, you feel like you're being left behind and thus you're going to scroll to the next piece of content. I would say that's another big one is that the pacing, the pacing of it. That's really cool. And with the type of work you do, like what type of services do you and your team typically provide for people of different scales, whether it is someone just starting out or whether it is a high profile client that you you work with? Yeah, so everything in our process, our team's done 60 billion views, 100 million followers and a billion in revenue. And the reason we have success is everything is deeply rooted in research and insights. So we are not making recommendations, developing strategies, helping clients with their social media based upon creative intuition or gut instinct or experience. We are constantly analyzing what is performing, what is going viral and what is not going viral within the confines of like a specific format or specific genre. Because the biggest issue people look at is they'll look at a successful content creator, they'll look at the successful trend, but they'll just look at the successes. They don't look at the failures. And you need to analyze the content. If we say like a specific format, we need to look at the high performers, but also analyze it against the low performers to, again, understand what are the contextual elements that are different between the two to give us a really solid blueprint of what is causing this to work and how we can apply it to the client. So there's there's two ways that we work with clients as we develop a custom social media strategy for them based upon these research and insights. We train them and them as an individual or their organization in the way that we look at social media, create social media content, do the research and insights. But then we also have a private mastermind where every week we're delivering new research and insights and they can participate in a live call and ask questions. But they also get the actual research sheet that we develop and a 10 to 20 page document that breaks down those insights in detail and how they can apply it to their content. That's great. Yeah, I'm sure I'll make sure to link to everything in the show notes, too, so people can follow up and start to look into that if it aligns with them. But I think it's really awesome. And I'm curious, too, as one example from your book, I was wondering if you could tell the story of how you first got involved with Taylor Swift. Yeah, so I I built a technology platform that I partnered with MTV on and it was a platform that essentially could dynamically write code for you so we could build enterprise websites and communities and you literally could do it yourself. And when I was doing that deal with MTV, they asked, do you want to go and meet this girl Taylor Swift? And at the time there was not she wasn't a superstar, but she was on that inflection point. And so essentially I went through a series of progressive meetings of of closing that deal. I had to meet with the the manager first, then the father, then the mother, then the the whole agent team and then finally Taylor. But it really started with the partnership that I had with with MTV that that led to that. That's cool. And what type of content were you typically putting together for her? So we were really focused on, you know, she was she was at that inflection point and there's there is two core issues that she was facing. One, she had an official website and a fan experience that was was was really not working for her. Average time spent on site was like less than 40 seconds. So it was really not cultivating the experience that she wanted. And she couldn't update it herself. And it was taking two days to update things. So we had rebuilt that on our platform where she, if she wanted to, could dynamically change every element of it in a few minutes. And then we layered in community elements because what was happening is Taylor is a huge proponent of one to one interaction with fans. But once you hit a certain level, you can't interact with every fan individually. So with a few other partners, we built a community where fans could communicate with each other and connect with each other. And over the course of two years, we brought the time spent on that site from 40 seconds to like 21 minutes that massively cultivated that that relationship that she had. That's really cool. And I'm curious to from a more of an objection perspective might think, OK, well, that would work for someone else who wouldn't work for me or I can't create content, you know, whatever internal or external objections people are putting in front of them as to why not to to go and start creating content and try to build an audience. Do you have any case studies of people who, let's say, have gone from having no audience and, you know, obviously you mentioned a few people in very specific niches that have still managed to resonate. What are some more in the creative space that perhaps had no audience but were able to successfully build a massive following? Yeah, I mean, just to show you how niche it goes, we have a client that produces leather wallets and is a leather expert, which is very niche. And he started with zero followers on TikTok. He just passed 500000 and he just passed 25 million views and he did that in a few months. And that's because he had his content dialed in, his format dialed in. So and I also want to point out people like Graham Stephan, like he was shooting his own videos. He was editing his own videos like he may have people helping him now, but when he was starting out, like it was individual, I'm pretty sure Dr. Julie Smith does most of her content her own. Erica Colbert does her on her own. But yeah, I mean, we have a lot of case studies of people like this leather expert that were starting from scratch, starting from zero, that grew, grew really quick because they were able to get their content format dialed in and really understand the nuances and the context of what's going to make their expertise really stand out. That's great. And I guess one other thing is you've written, I think the quote was that one must take risks, introduce chaos and jot down ideas that don't completely make sense. I was kind of curious for you, how much do you believe in chaos being part of your creative process? What it does is it helps what we talked about earlier, breaking the pattern. I think chaos can be very helpful in the ideation process and the creative process. It doesn't mean you insert chaos into your business. I think it's more inserting chaos into how you think about expressing your message, your business, because otherwise you fall into this rut where you come off like you're saying the same thing to this, you know, as everybody else. And then you fall into the pattern and you never truly stand out. Yeah, that makes sense. In your opinion, what are the leading digital platforms that every creator should be able to leverage and put their content on? And I'm also curious if one should distribute the content to all of them or be more selective with where they put their content. I look at it from what are the resources you have to create content? What is the time that you have to create content? Because, for example, you know, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, short form content, you know, it's it's a little bit easier to pull off versus YouTube and I'll dive into shorts in a little bit. But YouTube is primarily long form. Which takes longer. And there's pros and cons to that, you know, with with the shorter form content, it's easier to produce, easier to get more content produced. However, your the time spent with the viewer is limited versus YouTube, higher amount of time to produce that content. But also people are spending a lot more time with your content and your brand. So it can typically yield to a higher connection. But, you know, what we're seeing in typically is like you really want to dial in and focus on one platform at a time and get good at it because there's nuances to each platform, even like TikTok and Reels on the surface looks very similar. But there's nuances in terms of how people consume that content that doesn't say that you can't distribute that content on other platforms. Just don't expect the same type of performance. So if you're in this short form content space, I would I would suggest designing for TikTok first, distributing that on Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts and Facebook as well to maximize that the value of that content. Just don't have the same expectations if you're designing the content for one platform for it to perform the same on other platforms. And you mentioned before about YouTube Shorts as well. Yeah, so YouTube Shorts is is growing in popularity. YouTube is is really focusing on that platform. It's presenting a unique opportunity for people that want to reach that audience but haven't been able to produce long form. But what we're what we're saying and even Mr. Beast was talking about this is that that short form should lead to the long form is don't just just do short form content on that platform. You also produce that long form so you can really maximize the benefit because, again, people go to YouTube with the mindset that I'm going to watch an 8, a 10, 20 minute video or longer. And that's distinctly unique versus the other platforms. They're they don't even know, like TikTok, you can upload a 10 minute video. People are on most occasions aren't going to sit there and watch a 10 minute video. So to fully maximize the value of of shorts in the YouTube platform, you want to play the two off of each other. Yeah, that makes complete sense. And I guess my last question would be just around your second book, Hook Point. Do you want to elaborate a little bit on that versus I feel like the title of your first book is very self-explanatory. And I think it's it's a great title for that because it resonates so much. Can you talk a little bit about Hook Point and what the book's about? Yeah, so it's an extension of the first book, and again, it's really focused on what we talked about of the fact that there's four billion content creators on the planet. How do you break that pattern? How do you stand out? A hook point is three core pillars grabbing attention, because if you can't grab that attention, you get lost in the noise. But we're not talking about clickbait or anything like that. You have to hold that attention. And that's where your ability to tell an effective story comes in. And the third part is how are you monetizing that attention? Because all the attention in the world doesn't mean anything if it's not playing to your overall business objectives and goals. And I'm not suggesting by any means that every piece of content should be selling something. But some people look at virality or growing an audience and they will do whatever piece of content works. So they may be doing a prank video or a cat video or something like that that has no correlative to their business. And thus, yes, they may be getting eyeballs. They may be growing, but it's not going to translate into the fundamental business goals and objectives that they have. So my first book, One Million Followers, that's a hook point. You know, it grabs your attention. There's substance in the book. We spent a lot of time doing it. It holds your attention. And then we monetize that attention with with our services and helping people in the space. So that would be an example of a of a hook point. That's great. Again, I'm really grateful for your time. I'll make sure to link to everything in the show notes. But where can people go to find out more about you? If they want to work directly with us, they can go to hookpoint.com to schedule a call with our team and find out more information. If they're just starting out and they don't have big budgets, I recommend checking out our private mastermind. It's just a low monthly fee and they can go to go viral dot hookpoint dot com. That's excellent. Brandon, thank you so much for taking the time to chat. I really appreciate it. And yeah, this has been amazing. So thank you. Yeah, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to connect with you and everybody tuned into this.