How I got 250 million views in 4 years

All of this was unexpected.?

When I launched my animated video series in 2016, Social Good Now (short animated videos explaining social issues), I thought that if I made educational videos that were super interesting and entertaining, people would go “Hey! I learned something new! I’m going to hit that share button, because I found so much value in this video.”?

I was wrong.

Unfortunately for me, this is not how human psychology works, and it’s not the reason people share online content. Analyzing who was ACTUALLY sharing my videos made me realize the true reason we share online content, and it flipped my entire content strategy upside down. Once I realized the formula, my videos started getting millions of views, and then tens of millions. It’s a formula I’m currently adapting to one of my passion projects, where I travel around the world with my ukulele, telling stories, and raising money for UNICEF (It’s called Trippy the Traveling Ukulele, if you’ll excuse the shameless plug).?

But before we get to the strategy, you have to be in a position to actually use it. So let me tell you how I got over the early struggle of getting ANY views at the very beginning.?

BE SO GOOD, THEY CAN’T IGNORE YOU

An aspiring comedian once asked Steve Martin what advice he had for up-and-coming comedians, he said “Be so good, they can’t ignore you.” The online marketing personality Gary Vaynerchuck had similar insight when he said “The bottom line is: if you’re putting out good shit, people are going to notice.” In other words, if you want to stand out online, QUALITY cuts through the noise like nothing else.?

I took this idea to heart, and hunkered down attempting to put out the best possible content I could. The quality of my content would do my publicity for me, I hoped. I obsessed over the quality of the videos, the narrative, the scripts, the sound, the research, the visuals and even the color contrasts (especially in those crucial first 3-10 seconds when you MUST retain the viewers attention), and lastly I never stopped learning, testing, and improving.?

HOW I SUPERCHARGED MY GROWTH BY REACHING OUT TO INFLUENCERS

Only after I felt I’d improved the quality of the videos enough for them to be valuable and interesting, I started reaching out to Facebook pages that could share my content (this was back in 2016-2017 when Facebook was wanting to compete with Youtube on video). As a calculated gamble, I had decided to go all-in on Facebook, instead of Youtube.?

My goal was to average 100k views per video in 5 years. After 6 months, purely on the strength of the quality and with no publicity or spending ANY money, I was averaging 150k views per video. I was ecstatic!?

Too many people (marketing clients I’ve had, for example), think that the trick to going “viral” is a good publicity campaign. It is not. A good campaign helps, but you MUST have a good product to back it up, otherwise no amount of promotion is going to work. To put it crudely, you can’t polish a turd.

THE IMPORTANCE OF STRATEGIC RELATIONSHIPS

I cold-messaged tons of Facebook pages, some big and some small, asking if they would be interested in sharing some of my videos to their audience. Most didn’t respond at all. But the few that did, roughly 1 out of 10, were impressed by the quality of the videos and a common question was “Who’s on your team? How many people are working with you on this?” I would simply point at myself and say “This…this is the whole team.”?

That’s when I learned that it’s VERY unusual for 1 person to do every aspect of animation production. My ignorance had been a blessing, because most people doing the same kinds of videos had at least 3 people working on it: one for production/script writing, another for illustration and/or animation, and another for voice overs.?

I had accidentally become a one-man animation studio, and people had noticed I was doing a good job.?

I struck a friendship with a handful of people who ran very big Facebook pages in the social/political niche (some with millions and tens of millions of followers), and not only were they happy to share my latest videos, they introduced me to other people who opened even more doors for me. One of those Facebook pages belonged to the amazing organization act.tv, which is a team of media activists doing incredible work in the political activism and media space.?

After a couple of years of doing the animated series on my own, act.tv offered me a full-time position to continue doing exactly what I was doing. I said, “So, nothing changes for me… and I get paid? Where do I sign??” A personal perk of this arrangement was that they were 100% remote, so I could continue doing the “Digital Nomad” thing, and travel around the world while working, in the same way I had been doing for several years prior.?

Needless to say that my success would have been impossible without the help of these strategic partners.?

BREAKING THROUGH TO THE NEXT LEVEL

Near the beginning, I noticed that I had reached a plateau in terms of views that I couldn’t get past. I started averaging 200-300k views per video, but nothing would ever get above 400-500k, and I dove into the analytics to figure out why.

I spent hours and hours looking through comments that people made as they shared my videos, and I started to notice a pattern. A lot of the best performing shares on Facebook had some version of the following comment:

“Hey guys, this is the thing I was trying to explain. Watch it, it’s only 3 minutes.”?

BINGO. That’s the value I was providing. It turns out my audience was NOT the person who is uneducated about a particular social or political topic. My most valuable audience was THE EXPERT in the field. When I looked at the profiles of the people sharing, they were either professors, activists, or people who in some way or another were very knowledgeable about the topic at hand. I was not educating them, I was helping them to educate THEIR friends. The value I was providing was that I was making a complex topic easy-to-understand for their network of contacts.

This changed everything.?

‘REVERSE ENGINEERING’ MY WAY TO 250 MILLION VIEWS

Mentally, I repositioned myself as “support for front-line activists.” The heart of this new strategy was: “If I can help the experts/front-line activists explain complex topics to their friends, they’ll enthusiastically share my content. So… let’s find out what these experts are having trouble explaining!”

And off I went, perusing online videos and watching professors dive into 2-hour long lectures about topics that I could condense into a narrative-packed, animated 3-4 minutes. I did this with political figures, activists, and big organizations. I took topics they seemed to be having trouble explaining, and took a shot at turning it into a fun animated narrative and simplifying the topic for a layman audience.

My most popular video, “Systemic Racism Explained,” got 75 million views across all platforms (mostly on Facebook and Instagram), and was shared by A-list celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Snoop Dogg, Kristen Bell, Green Day, Kevin Bacon, and many, many others. My second most popular video “Why Japan has no Mass Shootings” (50+ million views) was spotted by one of the video directors for The New York Times, which led to a contract to make a series of videos for them.?

In another article, I’ll explain EXACTLY how the Systemic Racism video went viral, but for now I’ll just state that the creation process was very simple: I went online and looked at videos explaining Systemic Racism, and realized there was nothing short available. Because it’s a fairly complex topic, everything online about it was also pretty dense and long (articles and videos).?

I saw an opportunity to provide value, and I took it.

HOW YOU CAN STEAL MY CONTENT STRATEGY

There are only 3 parts to this strategy:

1. “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” Get your content to be the best it can possibly be. Get a focus group if you need to. Get objective feedback and don’t take anything personally. Content that is just “ok” will often do as poorly as “bad” content.?
2. Network with strategic partners that can amplify your content. Let the quality of your work open doors for you. No amount of pestering will overcome a bad portfolio of past work.?
3. Provide deep value to your most enthusiastic audience members, which may NOT be who you think they are (like in my case). What would be valuable to them? What are they having trouble doing that you can help with??

I’m currently adapting this content strategy for several other projects, and documenting my successes and failures.

If you’d like to learn from my trials and errors, just follow me here on Linkedin!?

Onward and upward :-)