Hey Square Readers,
We hope you’ve started to dive into reading Day Trading Attention by Gary Vaynerchuk! Last week @DinaLRosenberg kicked things off with a baseline discussion on your own experiences with social media in your business.
Today we’re starting with the basics of the book, covering the Introduction and Chapter 1, which break down why consumer attention matters, the importance of working to get it, and how to think about creating content that can gain that attention.
While the book leans heavily on social media, it’s not just about that; it teaches the framework of looking for new, unique, and underpriced places where people spend their attention, and the strategies to gain those views.
“Just as a day trader constantly studies financial markets to keep a pulse on what’s happening, you must constantly study what people are paying attention to, the cost associated with capturing that attention, and how it shifts by the day. This is how you’ll find the best marketing and sales strategies for your business or brand. Think of it this way: If you know what people are paying attention to and where they’re paying attention, then you actually have a shot at selling them something… Underpriced attention isn’t just about what advertising medium is the cheapest; it’s about whether you can get a low cost relative to the amount of actual attention you’d get.”
He observes that people tend to stick to what’s worked in the past or what might work, rather than focusing on what is actually working right now. He describes the value of promoting your brand on social media in today’s landscape:
“Today, mass consumer attention sits across a handful of social media platforms, which happen to have literally zero cost for organic reach (the number of people who will see your content if you just post it, without running it as an ad). That’s why social media can be one of the best places to capture underpriced attention. For example, Facebook has an estimated 3 billion monthly active users at the time of writing. Instagram and YouTube each have roughly over 2 billion, and LinkedIn has 930 million members.”
It is, however, not as easy as simply posting absolutely anything and expecting massive positive results. You have to work to understand the platforms, what people are consuming, and what they care enough about to actually buy. Without that, you can be wasting your time and effort. What you make needs to be relevant and meaningful to your target audience.
“Often people subconsciously buy things because the brand or business means something to them. In other words, they decide that a certain product or service is more relevant to their needs or to who they are. That is the power of “brand” at work … content alone is not enough; content that scales brand relevance is the goal. Relevance is defined as “a close connection with the subject you are discussing or the situation you are in.” We need to tell stories that help people feel closely connected to our businesses and brands.”
The author put together a list of the many factors to consider when creating and posting content in order to be as relevant as possible. He breaks these down later in the book.
“The more relevant your content is to an audience, the more your content will be distributed by the platform itself… For content to be relevant and drive business results, it needs to be more strategic and thoughtful than ever before. You need to consider variables like:
-- What time are you posting?
-- What title do you have as a text overlay on your video?
-- Who are you making your piece of content for? Why should they be interested in consuming it?
-- If you post a video on TikTok, how are you tweaking it before you post on, say, YouTube Shorts? Is your post caption (aka copy) optimized?
-- What creative units are you using? (Creative units are different content creation features on platforms, like stories, carousels, Reels on Instagram, or status updates on Facebook.)
-- What creative styles are you using? (Meaning, ways of displaying content within creative units, such as a skit on Instagram Reel.)
-- How are you deciding what piece of content to run as a paid ad?
-- Are your profiles on each platform optimized correctly so people know what you do, and how to contact you?
-- How can you use insights from social media content to inform larger advertising strategies, such as trade shows, TV commercials, or higher-production videos?”
Further, he describes what he calls “the Tiktokification of Social Media,” in that almost every other social media platform has begun to adopt the way that the social media app TikTok elevates posts to its users.
“TikTok has been the largest champion of the interest graph model, and its execution of the “For You” page … The content that TikTok surfaces there is based on the unique preferences of each user. TikTok considers videos you like or share, how long you watch videos, comments you post, and even the types of content you create … all these factors are processed by TikTok’s recommendation engine and weighted… The algorithm learns each user’s consumption patterns and adjusts their feed’s content based on how those consumption patterns change over time. In other words, their content feed is led by the interest graph (what you’re interested in), rather than the social graph (who you follow).”
This has tremendous potential and benefit for you as a business owner trying to grab the attention of potential customers.
“Platforms are incentivized to distribute content that’s relevant and valuable to the end consumer. This means that if you make content and advertising that people actually want to watch, you’ll be rewarded with more views and engagement. The opportunity for organic reach is virtually unlimited. The more relevant your content is, the more reach you’ll get… Now businesses, creators, and brands don’t need to have a follower base before they can start getting views and engagement. You could create an account on any social platform in this book today, post some content over the course of this week, and you actually have a shot at getting thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of views. It just depends on whether your content is good enough or not. Learn to make compelling, relevant content at scale and the platform will distribute your content to people who are interested in consuming it.”
But now that you have this unlimited potential, how do you actually know and find out what is appealing and attention grabbing?
“Fortunately, you don’t have to guess. With interest-graph-driven algorithms, you can find out the truth for yourself for zero additional cost (beyond what it takes to make the creative itself). Make a piece of content based on who you want to reach and what you think they might be interested in seeing, post it on one or more platforms of your choice, and look at your post analytics and comments to see what happens. Did it do better than your account’s average performance? Did it do worse? Who did the platform end up serving it to, based on your analytics (in other words, who was actually interested in consuming it versus who you thought would be interested in consuming it)? Any interesting observations in the comments? You can use all these observations to make your next piece of content even better.”
We’d love to hear your answer in the comments:
- What underpriced attention & marketing platforms (social media or otherwise) have you used in your business? How successful has it been?
- What initial ideas do you have to take advantage of the interest based system for promoting your business?
Feel free to share any other thoughts you have about this book. We can’t wait to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
Don’t forget to:
- View and Subscribe to all threads about this book
- RSVP to our Live Discussion – Tactic Talk: Social Media
Happy reading,
Pesso
