The Joy of Burner Accounts

This is 'Grow 1%', the short weekly newsletter with tips to improve your social media strategy by 1%. Subscribe so it gets delivered to your inbox!

And please subscribe to my newest newsletter, 'The Creator Rep', covering the craft of digital talent representation.

'Tis the season for everyone to grab a cup of hot cocoa and warm themselves in the warmth of burner accounts.

Burner accounts are social media profiles you start to remaining anonymous.

Or for social media professionals to test content in an environment that can't hurt your brand.

If you've been in the creator economy for a while, I'm sure you've heard: "Make 100 posts that suck then they'll start getting good."

That's great for noobs, but what about creators or publishers with a defined brand that don't want new experiments to hurt their momentum?

You don't want anything in your feed to suck at that point.

So give yourself a place to play.

I've been doing this for 18 years and I've set up dozens of accounts on every platform, and I've had many of them banned, given strikes, go viral, and go unnoticed.

It's all valuable data.

This is hot on my mind, as now that I'm ramping up to create more videos for LinkedIn, I wanted to gather some feedback.

So I started a new TikTok to post this video:

What was I trying to accomplish?

1. See if the format got traction and likes with random people. Sometimes I'll even put some paid boosting behind burner videos to ensure I get the data I need.
2. Have a way to easily send links to other people I trust to solicit feedback.
3. See how the algorithm likes the video. Although this is on TikTok, not LinkedIn (creating a LinkedIn burner account is a bit trickier...), I know on a new account I could drive 1,500 organic views, which isn't too bad.
4. Get some high-level analytics. Was the retention time decent? Engagement rate? Comments?

Thankfully, the data came back positive on this one.

So will I post this video on LinkedIn?

Heck no!

There's a lot of feedback I wiill use to make this better!

For example, my drop-off rate started accelerating when I was on my second of three points.

I was going to slow and rambling too much.

I used CapCut for captions, and this particular font (the one with emojis) moved too fast and felt like there was too much garbage on the screen at times.

Speaking of which, I was speaking too fast.

I also could have landed the plane better. I can tell because this didn't lead to many new followers or people watching the loop.

One more hot tip: don't just call your new profile 'test194832'. Set this up like a real profile so you can accomplish two things:

1. Viewers will believe it's a real brand and treat it as such.
2. If you do get a super mega viral, you have the option to continue building that brand.

My mission for you: set up a burner account on your favorite platform.

Name it what you want your brand to be someday, not what your brand is now. For example, if you make 'outfit of the day' videos but want to be a fashion designer, name it something like 'DesignerInLA'.

If you have the inclination/time, try an experimental piece of content and see what you learn.

That took 2 minutes. You have 8 minutes left. Feel the burn and grow 1% right now!

Don't miss my virtual panel on December 13 at noon PST!

Creators: ready to build out your team but don't want to mess it up?

I'm bringing together some of the best builders in the creator economy to teach you how to build your content company the right way.

This is essential information for creators, publishers, or creatives looking to build a career on social platforms.

And this is brought to you by the Creators Guild of America , an advocacy organization built for content creators. Make sure to check them out!

Please RSVP for the event here: https://creatorsguildofamerica.org/rsvp

About the Author

Phil Ranta, is the COO of Fixated, a content and gaming studio building IP around creators, a LinkedIn Top Voice in Innovation & Tech, and has been creating content for the internet and building internet businesses professionally for nearly 20 years, starting on MySpace and riding trends to the present. He was the Head of Gaming Creators, North America at Facebook, the first network lead at Fullscreen, the COO at Studio71, and spent 10 years as a working comedian (including 2 years on cruise ships). He's a husband, a dad of two littles, and an insufferable digital media wonk.

LinkedIn

Twitter

Instagram

TikTok