5: What I Learned Watching My Husband Scroll

You've heard "know your audience"—but most people stop at demographics. Knowing how your audience actually behaves when they're scrolling is a different thing entirely, and it's the layer most content creators never get to.

In this episode, I share what I've learned from watching real people scroll through their phones—and how a practice I picked up from my days doing usability testing has made me a better content strategist.

In this episode:

• Why watching someone scroll gives you more honest feedback than asking them how they use social media
• The difference between a focus group and a usability test—and why it matters for content
• What my husband and my nephew taught me about hooks, visuals, and attention
• How to run your own informal scroll study this week—and what to look for

https://www.instagram.com/p/DZIQ0pWxnOS/

https://www.instagram.com/p/DYfAI2BOYvV/ 

https://www.instagram.com/p/DZU91aQRAsP/ 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Tapped In the Craft Beer Marketing Podcast Brewery Teams Who Want to Turn their Instagram followers into regulars. I'm your host, Stephanie Grant, and I could not wait to talk to you about today's topic. I'm recording this on Monday, and yesterday I was laying in bed with my husband and watching him scroll through Instagram. And I do this sometimes. I like to observe people, which is a product of just one I'm a very curious person, have always been, will always be curious. And I also used to do usability testing or user testing. And this was something that I fell in love with when I was in grad school. I believe I talked about it a little bit in last week's episode. And I was so in love with this. I ended up convincing my job at the time to let me do user testing for their publication that we would put out every year. And I was one of the people who would work on the publication, and we wanted to make some changes to things. And so we decided to run a usability test to see how people were currently engaging with our product and then also test whether the new changes that we were thinking about implementing would be of interest to them. I want to first point out that usability testing, user testing is not the same as a focus group. A focus group is when you get a group of people in the room and you ask them what their opinions are about things, right? But with usability testing, that is when you see how people interact with things. That is when you just set back, you observe, and you ask questions about the way they're engaging with things. And the reason why this is great is because when you are used to a product or even something as simple as walking into a space and knowing where to go to place your order, you are used to those things. You have formed habits around them, you are familiar with them, and it can be very hard to step outside of what you're familiar with and think about what someone who is unfamiliar with is going to experience. So we did usability testing on this guide, and we were able to get good feedback from our audience to determine how we would change it. And so I kind of just do this now. I just do it randomly. I like watching how people interact with things, and I am an introvert who loves sitting on the wall and kind of watching people and how they interact with each other. But I was laying in bed watching my husband scroll on his phone, which I've done plenty of times, and sometimes I just get into the content, but this time I just decided to sit back and observe. It was amazing to see how quickly he went through content. So he was on his Rails tab to give you an idea of what was going on, and he was really taking seconds. So when I say seconds, you have seconds to get someone's attention. Seconds. And if you perform this experiment yourself, you'll see how quickly people are scrolling through content. It is fast. At least my husband is pretty quick when it comes to scrolling. He is a fast reader, so there's that. But it is really seconds that you have to capture someone's attention. And there was a piece of content that he scrolled past, but then came back to it. And I asked him, Why did you come back to it? And I noticed that Atlanta was in the on-screen text. So it said something like, Where to eat in Atlanta if you want to eat like a local? And he was like, Oh, I went back because I wanted to see if this woman knew what she was talking about when it comes to eating like a local in Atlanta. That's why he went back. If you've heard me talk about hooks before, then you know that I am telling you to add things in like that. Add in your city, add in those familiar things that get people's attention because it does. I also did this with my nephew. My nephew was visiting for the summer and he was deep in his phone one morning, and I went over to lay down on the couch next to him and watch what he was doing. And he was watching some video that was telling a story, and it was a story that was going on for a little bit because I was able to walk across the room, lay on the couch, and he was still watching the story. But when I saw what was happening on his screen, because I was expecting certain visuals, and when I saw what was happening on his screen, I was shocked because the visuals had nothing to do with what was being said, and if anything, the visuals were so disconnected from what was being said that they were just like randomly cycling through the visuals. And so one of the takeaways I want you to get from this is that sometimes your visuals don't really matter. And I know there are a lot of you out there who love those very crispy, like camera almost as if you're filming a movie. You want your content to look so crisp, clean, and professional. And I totally understand as I'm sitting here in my office looking across the room at this big dome light that I have that I got to create that beautiful, rich content. Back when I was filming cooking videos. But here's the thing your story matters way more than what you're showing people. That's what I took from that. It's the story that captivated him. I think I asked him, I was like, so the visuals don't matter, or something like that. Something to the fact you want to keep your questions as open as possible, and that's not really an open question. He said no, he didn't care what the visuals were, he was there for the story, and so there is so much to be gained from watching how people use social media because at the end of the day, you can ask people how they use social media, but actually watching them scroll through their phone will get you the most honest feedback possible. No shade to focus groups. But this is why I think that usability testing is much more superior when it comes to really understanding how people interact with something. So when I talk about know your audience, this is one of the ways in which you can tap into where they are, what they're thinking, how they're viewing content, how they're interacting with content, how they're interacting with the app. It is such a great way. You can get a spouse, you can also get a friend, and it doesn't have to be a long thing, it could be impromptu, minds always have been. I want you to pay attention to how are they interacting with the content? Are they liking, sharing, saving? Look at all of those things. When did they swipe away? How long does it take for them to swipe away? How long did they stay on the video before they swiped away? What makes them stay watching the video? Ask them why did you decide to watch that video? When do they go to the comments to see what people have said about the video? I want you to observe all of that and really think about how they are engaging with it. So then you can take that information that will help you create content better. One of the reasons why I encourage people to put on-screen text on their video is because the fact that Atlanta was in that video was the reason why my husband stopped. Include your city when it makes sense because people connect to that, they find it familiar. So sometime this week, I want you to find someone to watch scroll through their phone, ask questions, and get to understand what people are experiencing as they're scrolling through your content, and it will help inform how you create content in the future. Okay, now we're gonna get into some examples. So the first post I have for you is from Mountree's Brewing. They talk about their tribute beer, they have a beer that sits up on their wall, and they tell the story about why they do it. And it's a great story. It's talking about honoring the heroes that have given their lives in service, and I think it's a beautiful way to highlight something that's in your tap room that people are probably already asking about and bringing that to social. And it says a lot about who this brewery is and what they value. I also love this video from the seventh tap, and it starts out when you get mad in the brewery and you want to break something, and they're just going around trying to break stuff, and there is there's a funny element to it, which is why I'm smiling. You hear my smile, I'm about to laugh, but it's showing you how much each piece of equipment is, how much the tank is, how much the lumber is, all of these things that go into brewing and giving you not only a behind-the-scenes look at what makes up the brewery, but also gives you this funny like humor. I love this video from St. Arnold Brewing. They have their founder saying a bunch of things that he will not do. And I don't know how long ago that was, but they're cutting between him back in the day and him sitting at this table doing all of the things that he said he wouldn't do back then. And so I think this is great because it's fun, it's real. If you've been in the beer industry for any amount of time, you've probably heard some founders say they wouldn't do this, they wouldn't do that. I remember there were a lot of people who said that they were not gonna make a hard seltzer, and we went through a big hard seltzer phase as an industry. So it's it's funny when we say we're not gonna do these things, but then we go ahead and do them. They could have just dropped this beer as a collab with Parish Brewing, but no. This to me, the way they approached it made the content even more compelling and made the beer something that was way more interesting than just a typical collab. So that is all for me this week. I hope that you go forth and start usability testing. I would love to hear if you have any breakthroughs when it comes to your own content creation after doing this. And I will see you next week.