"Hate Bait" and the Unexpected Formula for going VIRAL
Girl, use a spoon. It'll save your life. What are you doing to that? Ginger girl, use a spoon before you cut yourself.
Did you know, you can peel ginger with a spoon. If you're juicing it just wash. No need to peel. .
These are the comments i have to thank for 2.3 million views on take talk and a week of going viral let me go back to the beginning so i can tell you exactly what i did and the very unconventional way to get loads and loads of social media views and eyeballs on your business
I didn't share this with my audience. I didn't share this with you, but I have a secret. And that secret is, I chose summer 2023 to be the summer of growth,
my business coach and I actually decided that all summer I would focus on growth and attracting new people into my social media platforms, into my mailing list, into my sphere, and I wasn't gonna focus on selling. I like to work short weeks in the summer. I also had all sorts of stuff happening this summer.
I knew I was going to be really busy. I knew I was going to be traveling. So instead of focusing on sales, I focused on growth. And it was so fun. And it was so freeing. One of the things I teach in my Instagram marketing program, Magic Marketing Machine, is to zoom out on your year and look at it with a bird's eye view and decide when your seasons of growth will be and when your seasons of sales will be.
So like if you have a lot of, you make a lot of sales around like the holidays or the back to school season, And before you get there, make sure that you're growing, make sure that you're nurturing the people who come to you so that they're primed to buy. Uh, I'm gonna get into that later. But it is so freaking cool that after committing to a season of growth, it was like the cherry on top of it was all these viral videos.
And it really just goes to show how much your intention matters. When you focus on sales, you make sales. When you focus on growth, you grow. Let's get into the story. Let me tell you what happened. Let me get into some details. Let me tell you the story. It all started. When I made a video, just a normal tick-tock video, I make Tik TOK videos. Like sometimes I'll do four a day and I'll post the best ones over to Instagram, or I won't, I create a lot of content and sometimes they take off and sometimes they don't. And even the posts that only have a few hundred views, I still honor, and I'm still so happy that people have watched them.
And sometimes the ones that don't get a lot of use are the ones that affect my audience. The most. Most right. So we always have to just keep making that content. You really never know who's watching and who's being impacted by it. And that was actually the topic of this video that I made. Now, when you make a video and it's just say like the top bit of your torso and your head, and you're just talking to the camera, explaining something, we call that a talking head video, and they're great.
They're all over the internet. There's billions of them, but. , one way to get more views on them and to keep your viewer engaged is to make them a little bit more interesting. So you want to add edits in it. You want to change up the background halfway through, uh, change the angle that you're shooting at. As you tell the story, maybe as you're talking, you want to walk a little while you talk.
Just anything you can do to keep the viewers eyes moving, because it makes them watch for longer, which means the algorithm shows your video to more people it's. It's an editing strategy. Right? First and foremost, what's important is the content and what you're saying, but then you can start to add and apply these tactics to help get it more views and set it up for success. And so I made a video talking about honoring all of the people who watch your content. And while I did that in order to make it a little bit more interesting. I peeled ginger. I needed to feel ginger solely because I was about to make juice in my juicer. And, uh, you know, my husband was away. Oh, I got married by the way. He's a husband now. My husband was out of the house for the day. And he hates when I pull out my juicer, because I usually make a massive mess. If you have a juicer, you get it. There's like, you know, fiber and peels and cores and everything everywhere. I make a huge mess. I usually take over the kitchen. He was out of the house for the day.
And so I also try and make content when I have the house to myself, because it makes it just a little bit easier. Not feeling like somebody can hear you talking. So. I peeled ginger while filming a video because I genuinely needed that ginger for my juice.
As it turns out, tee hee hee hee hee hee. There is a right way and a wrong way to peel ginger. And I did it the wrong way. I used a paring knife. Why would I not use a paring knife? That made total sense to me, it turns out you're supposed to use a spoon to peel ginger, just like a teaspoon. And you kind of just scrape the bark off.
And I have since learned that the spiciest part of the ginger root is right underneath the. The top peel. So if you peel it with a peeler or a pairing knife, then you lose a lot of the ginger and you lose a lot of that spicy prime flavor.
So what happened was my video started getting loads of comments of people correcting how I peel ginger. And.
What is the number one factor that is going to get all of the posts you put online. Dear listener. What's the number one factor. That's going to get more eyeballs on those posts. It's engagement. And these comments, although they weren't optimal at first, they weren't, um, about the content I was talking about, which wasn't great, but this post started getting so many comments and all the algorithm sees is comments, comments, comments, conversation, people are talking, let's show this video to more people and see if more people join the conversation under it. These platforms, every social media platform I'm talking about ticktock right now, but we're going to go over to Instagram in a second. All these social media platforms want is more people on their platform for longer. So if people watch your video all the way through, if they comment on it, if they return to it, This is going to make the algorithm be on your side and in your corner and show your content to more people. Now, one of the downsides of going viral, I didn't experience this, but a lot of my clients have. And it might actually make an entire podcast episode about this. Cause going viral can be a pretty stressful experience. I was lucky for me, it wasn't, but going viral can be nasty because sometimes people go viral for something that has nothing to do with their business. And then you attract all the wrong people or you attract people, but they don't stick around because they're not your ideal client.
So that sucks. In this case, we wrote a very thin line where a lot of the comments were talking about the ginger thing. A lot of the comments were actually answering a rhetorical question that I posed at the beginning, that wasn't actually in the main point of the video, but people were not watching the video all the way through when they were answering this rhetorical question, which led to the comments. But because all of those ginger peeler, haters and rhetorical question answerers commented, my video was then shown to literally millions of people. And many of them did listen to the content, did care about the content and were presumably my ideal customer.
Knock knock. Who's there? It's me, Erin O'Lilla, host of the Talk Copy To Me podcast. Jenna, my sincere apologies for interrupting your show. I have been loving the first few episodes. If you're like me and you love hearing all of this marketing content, I invite you to come visit me over on the Talk Copy To Me podcast, but only after you finish listening to this episode.
Okay, Jenna, I'm going to stop interrupting. Thanks for having me on the show quickly.
It's a pretty crazy experience. Sometimes old content can have this resurgence and suddenly start taking off. But in this case, I knew this video was a hit immediately because it got thousands of views within like an hour. And this happened to me last summer as well. When I had a video get to, I don't know when it got to maybe half a million views and it happened pretty much overnight. I woke up with hundreds of thousands of views, and I knew that night that it was taking off because it just hits so quickly, thousands and thousands of views pouring in every time I refreshed my phone. That video was solely about business and it ended up attracting some high paying clients into my business as a whole. So I've got my retainer side of my business, where we manage social media for you. And then I also have magic marketing machine, which is a program where small business owners who aren't quite ready to outsource their social media can learn how to get clients from Instagram and run your account in 15 minutes a day on your own.
And that viral video I had last summer. I attracted people to both sides of my business and got me clients on both sides. People still tell me to this day that that's where they discovered me when that took off. So this is still fresh, these millions of views and the story doesn't end there. It gets even crazier. So stay with me, but , it's safe to assume that this will bring in new people to my business.
And new friends and new followers and new people to connect with and, and to get to know. All right. So when you have a video takeoff, even if it's what your version of taking off is even if getting three comments on a video for you right now is like more than you're used to getting, you have to have to have to ask yourself, what did I do differently? What did people like about this and how can I replicate it every week in the magic marketing machine group calls, we meet on zoom and I make the members tell me a win from the week.
And then I ask them, how can you replicate that success? What. What did you do differently to get that win? Let's do it again. Let's wash, rinse. Repeat.
And in this case, because I am a bit of a brat. I decided to wash, rinse. Repeat what worked with being a little bit facetious. It's in my nature. What am I supposed to do? I am who I am. So I decided to make another video except instead of peeling ginger with a paring knife.
I peeled an apple with a butcher's knife. And that one got about 8,500 views on TikTok. And I use the same formula inside my video, because I thought that had contributed to the success as well. So I started with a rhetorical question and then I got into a lesson and it got about 8,500 views. Okay, sure. That's still good. But the fun thing is on Instagram, I had completely different results.
So when I read, posted this content to Instagram, the apple peeling one is the one that went viral and it is still growing. Every time I open my phone, I have a hundred notifications. Uh it's right now sitting at just shy of half a million views where I also say, just so you know, the reason that I'm doing this apple peeling thing is because of this ginger peeling incident. Okay. But it didn't stop there because if I know anything from my experience in comedy and being on stage it's, you have to just keep pushing the envelope and keep repeating the thing and upping the stakes. So upping the stakes essentially means make it matter more and go bigger and push and push until the audience stops laughing and then push and push and push until they start laughing again. It's kind of like a comedy strategy. So then I decided to go ahead and peel a carrot with a ax. My husband has this like really big acts, like a full like tree acts. And it's super sharp because it's brand new. And again, when he was out of the house, Probably not the best decision I've ever made to do something dangerous while I was home alone in the woods. Uh, but I feel the carrot with an ax and that one got. About 3000 views on Instagram. And let me just look at what it did on Tik TOK. So yeah, about 4,000 views on Tik TOK. So neither of those ones went super viral, but I think the ax video is actually my favorite because so many people that know me and of my regular followers, who comment on my content all the time and my friends and my family and my clients saw it and couldn't stop laughing.
Like everyone knew what I was doing at that point. And it was such a fun moment. It was no stress. It was so silly people. We're commenting on it in my real life. When I go out and run into people. They were just, you know, so it was really, really fun. For me, the first one will get me clients. The second one probably will get me clients as well, but only on Instagram. And then the third one was just super fun and helped. Like bring my community together and gave us all a laugh.
I want to go into just a little more detail on why I don't expect this viral content to immediately bring me clients, but I do expect it to eventually bring me clients.
Essentially your growth content, your funny content, your reels, your content that is easy to consume. And relatively short, that content is growth content. It's designed to cast a wide net. You want to shout hello world and try and attract people over to you who might have some interest in you, but it's unlikely that someone buys from you after. Only seeing a seven second reel of your face. They need time to get to know you, time to trust you. You need time to nurture them. They need time to really believe that you have the answer to their problems and understand that they even could work with you with that all takes time. So your growth content cast a wide net and attracts all of these ideal customers and then your nurture content will warm those people up and bring them down the path toward working with you and then your sales content converts them. That is the same formula that I teach in the free training. That's linked in the show notes called how to get clients from Instagram without wasting hours glued to your phone. That is the same formula we use for all our retainer clients. That is the same formula that everyone uses inside magic marketing machine, it's growth, content nurture content sales content.
So this viral stuff that was growth content. And now over time, I will nurture my followers. I will get to know you. We will become friends. You will trust me more. You'll use some of my tips and apply them. Maybe get a download that I give away for free. Maybe you'll listen to the podcast, et cetera. And then eventually when the followers are ready, they will become clients. That's the other thing. People aren't necessarily ready to work with you when they discover you. And that's why it's important to have a social media presence, to have an email list, to stay in front of them, to stay top of mind.
So they're thinking of you. So when they're ready, you are there to 📍 support them.
Apparently this whole doing something in order to get hate comments is called hate bait. I wasn't aware of that or maybe I was subconsciously, but I just want to let the record show. That I thought that was how you appeal ginger. I didn't know I was doing it wrong, but hate baite is a thing and it's a way to generate comments. And if you want to play with that concept in your videos, go for it because there are no rules. You can do that. If you want.
Did you know that you peeled ginger with the spoon? You're not supposed to use a knife. If you take one thing away from this episode, let it be. Peel ginger with a spoon and go make content, go make content and do something with your hands and, um, see if that increases views for you. Why not? Let's experiment. Let's have fun. Thank you so much to everyone who has reviewed and rated this show. Oh my gosh. The reviews and the ratings are making my damn day.
I'm so thankful for all of you for doing that. If you do have a chance to review or rate this show, it really helps the show get heard by more small business owners, just like you and me. And that's all, I'll see you in the next one.
