Soundbites and Headlines
What is the biggest platform available to content producers right now? If you’re thinking Facebook, Snapchat and viral news sites like Buzzfeed or Huffington Post, you’d be right! Marketers and content makers would do well to take a page from their playbooks, because the one thing these platforms have in common is major shareability.
Trending right now as this blog is typed are gems like these:
Everyone knows that content is a critical component of any digital marketing strategy. Here at Rogue ,we also publish a fair amount of content. In fact, we were recently discussing a content-rich piece that Rogue produced following the launch of Pokémon Go. The main feedback was “It’s great! But it’s too long!” No matter how solid the content, it means nothing if it doesn’t meet the needs of your audience’s time constraints and desire to quickly find and share content.
At a recent conference, one speaker stood out head and shoulders above the rest because nearly everything he said was succinct and quotable – hundreds of tiny nuggets of information prepackaged and shareable to outside audiences. You are already spending precious time and dollars ensuring you have great content. To get seen, it needs to be content that is both easily consumable and meaningful to your audience.
A new study out of Columbia University actually finds that 59% of links shared on social channels have never actually been clicked… meaning people are not reading the content first. They’re looking at the headline and sound bite and making the decision from that to forward it on. One only has to look back at the US presidential election season to know how true this is. One candidate rose in popularity/notoriety completely on the basis of being tweetable.
But how do you go to the next level?
Lucky for you, there is a group of people that have unlocked the formula: our favorite late night TV hosts. Kimmel, Fallon, and Corden have become game changers – game creators really – in their industry. You’ve probably heard of the popular “Celebrities Reading Mean Tweets”, “Carpool Karaoke”, and Fallon’s “Hashtags” bit. Their goal isn’t really to get people to watch their hour-long program… their game is to capture a whole new audience via social sharing platforms.
Consider this: The Jimmy Kimmel Live show averages 2.9 million TV viewers each show.
Now check this out. Kimmel has:
- 9 Million YouTube Subscribers
- 3.4 Million Facebook Likes
- 1.4 Million Followers on Google+
- 9 Million Followers on Twitter
That means 2 SOCIAL CHANNELS completely blow the TV viewership out of the water, while the other two platforms combine to equal nearly double the viewers of the show. Kimmel’s main audience is no longer tuning in at 11:35 PM. Why not? Sound bites and headlines. They’ve mastered the art of packaging content and gearing their original work to be sound bite-friendly. It’s then easily created, easily shared and infinitely available online… and they’re raking in millions and millions of views as a result!
The most successful content makers are proving themselves to be the best at creating eye-catching pre-packaged material. People form opinions based on your sound bite and headline… so make it good.
Hey, you can tweet that.