Ryan Holiday 10X'd His Views

And other Tuesday musings:

Author

Jacob Shipley
January 22, 2025

Welcome to Social Studies.

Today:

  • Brought to you by…

  • Ryan Holiday 10X'd His Views

The Social Media Strategies Summit is happening virtually February 26-27th.

More than 20 speakers from National Geographic, Hershey, Kendra Scott, First Advantage, Talkdesk, Nestle, and more.

I’ve personally spoken at this summit multiple times and 100% vouch for it.  

Topics include social strategy, case studies, paid social, content creation, brand collaborations and AI.

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(I’m personally incredibly excited to hear from:

Jordan Tennenbaum [Head of Social @ Talkdesk]

Bria Bell [Senior Marketing Strategist at J.P. Morgan]

and my good friend Jon-Stephen Stansel!)

Hook and hold baby…

If you’re even a little bit interested in stoicism, you’ve heard of Ryan Holiday.

He’s managed to completely own that category. (This could be a post in and of itself.)

But with as big as he is (NYT Bestselling author, millions of followers across channels, etc.) his TikTok videos often struggle to break out of the 1-10K view range.

But with this new format? Over 186K views.

(Fear not… this format doesn’t just work for TikTok. It’s applicable to any and all short form video platforms. Which apparently includes X now??)

I mean 186K views isn’t setting any world records, but it’s 20X his channel average.

Of course there are outliers like when Ryan posted a video of Matthew McConaughey’s tuna salad recipe that got 9 million views lol.

Ok back to Ryan’s new format.

Honestly this format kind of pisses me off.

It hooks me and forces me to watch even if I don’t care about the subject.

It’s like Ryan hijacks my attention.

Here’s the video:

@ryan_holiday

This is maybe the greatest book ever written on the creative process. If you haven’t read it, you must.

He hooks them by showing them the spine of the book and keeps slowly dishing out details until you can’t wait for him to flip it to the cover.

If I was Ryan, I’d 10X this content format.

He’s done it a few times here and there, but why not film 500 of these?

Like, literally. Why not film 500 of these?

He office is inside a bookstore that he owns!

Nothing is stopping him from cranking out loads of variations of these.

Now…

Unless you own a bookstore, you probably can’t do this exact type of video.

But…

You can use this principle and tactic.

Your boss will love it because it features the product.

The product is literally the entire focal point of the video!

For my day job at Benzinga, maybe I’d do a video that starts with “This site right here let’s me see exactly what stocks members of congress are trading. I can see when Nancy Pelosi invested in Nvidia and I can see this relatively unknown member of congress who profited 200% off of $ABC.”

If I was selling creatine gummies, I could do a video that starts with “If I could only take one supplement, it would be this one. It does X, Y, and Z, and it insert product benefits here… here it is:”

I’m always a big advocate of foregoing product promos in favor of content that garners engagement, but this is one of those rare categories where you can do both at the same time.

Hope this helps!

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