Welcome to Social Studies.

Today….

• Brought to you by…

• How we grew by 450K followers in 2024

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There are some social management platforms that cost 6 figures (yes for real) that theoretically have every feature that’s not blocked by the platform APIs. As a result, the UI/UX sucks (pardon my language).

Then there are other platforms that are cheap, but have virtually no features that you actually need.

Both are incredibly problematic.

I personally use Vista because I think it’s the best in terms of Features / Dollar.

Vista does everything I need it to (and more tbh) at an incredibly reasonable price.

Shots on goal…

When we grew YouVersion’s Instagram by 2 million followers in 2 years, we did it with a single tactic.

We grew Benzinga’s social following by over 450K in 2024 with the same tactic.

I also used it to:

• Grow my personal brand to 40K followers on LinkedIn

• Grow a TikTok account from 0 to 300K in 6 months

So…

What’s the tactic?

Shots. On. Goal.

I’ve told this story before, but in case you haven’t heard it…

When I started at YouVersion, we were posting once per day. Then, we had this crazy idea to try posting twice per day on every platform. We thought it was a crazy big risk.

The reach got higher, the follower growth went up, and the engagement rate… stayed the same.

Not what we expected. We’d anticipated a huge drop off in engagement. If we bombarded the platform with more content, surely each individual content piece of content would get less engagement, right?

The following month, we posted 3 times per day. Then 4 times. Then 5 times. We eventually scaled to 8 posts per day.

That meant that every 3 hours, a post was going out on every single platform.

Our Instagram account got to the point where we were netting 3,000 new followers per day.

I tell you that story so that I can tell you this story:

The NEW playbook

One frustration during 2024 was my inability to “figure out” TikTok.

We were primed for success. The team, the content, the niche. All of it was good.

Occasionally a video would go viral, but the followers and community would barely budge.

I talked to so many people and tried to get advice. As I’m sure you’ve experienced, everyone has their own anecdotes and philosophy, but at the end of the day, you end up exactly where you started… confused and pissed (pardon my language).

In a bout of frustration, my colleagues and I decided to “start ripping posts” like our life depended on. Forget 1-3 posts per day. Let’s do 6-10.

What if that means we have to lower production value? Great! Lower production value.

What if that means people unfollow us? Great! Don’t let the door hit ya.

What happened?

Well… it worked.

This is the new follower graph over the last 365 days.

Guess where we “started ripping”

Now there’s an entire camp of people who will vehemently disagree with me.

They’ll shout “quality over quantity” from the rooftops until they’re blue in the face.

Now I’m good friends with many in this camp. I don’t disagree with them in principle, but at least for me and my experience, quality comes through quantity.

Fortune favors those who take more shots on goal

When I was in high school I was on scholar bowl.

Basically it’s where a bunch of nerds compete to see which school has the nerdiest nerds that know the highest number of useless facts.

I was just nerdy enough to be on the team, but not nerdy enough to impact our team’s performance.

There was this one guy though named Bradley.

Bradley was wicked smaht.

He answered more questions correctly than anyone else on team. By FAR.

But he also answered the most questions incorrectly than anyone else on the team. By FAR.

In short, he put the most shots on goal than anyone else on the team.

I got curious and started looking up who has taken the most shots, missed the most shots, and made the most shots in the NBA and NHL.

Spoiler alert… the lists look very similar.

More shots means more data points. More shots means more learning. More shots mean a quicker path to proficiency and success.

But like any good playbook, there are rules to the game:

Rules of the game

If you have to choose between quality and quantity, then of course choose quality.

But in what god-forsaken universe is someone making you choose between the two???

If by “quality” you mean filmed on a $60K RED camera and edited by an Oscar award-winning director then yeah quality has a certain barrier around it.

But quality literally just means that the viewer likes it. The found it funny or entertaining or educational or inspiring or any combination thereof.

If it’s filmed on an original iPhone in 14 seconds, but it has a 100% retention rate… it’s quality.

So of course Rule No. 1 is the content has to be quality. But the content doesn’t need to be expensive or time-consuming.

Rule No. 2 is that if the content was quality the first time, it’ll probably be quality the second time.

There has been a ton of talk lately on repurposing content (from people much smarter than me) so I won’t belabor the point.

One super quick note on this:

Creating episodic content makes ramping this up much easier. At Benzinga, we’ve recently been doing a series where we share what stocks people in congress are buying. Every video ends with “let us know who you want to see next!”

Some videos get 0 comments, but some get 200. That’s 200 ideas for future posts that nobody has to think about.

As a bonus, these videos are literally just filming my laptop screen and are highlighting a direct feature of our product.

This isn’t just specific to TikTok though. I’ve seen the same pattern with my personal LinkedIn. When I first started posting, I posted every single day for a couple years (missed a few here and there). I’m certainly not a LinkedIn superstar but I was able to go from knowing nothing about LinkedIn to 42K followers.

But then I let the voices get to me.

I heard all these folks saying “quality over quantity” so I pulled way back. Coincidentally, my reach pulled way back too.

So, I switched to two posts per day.

So far, so good.

There’s a ton of talk on Twitter/X about being the “reply guy” and commenting on other posts like a madman.

This is the exact same principle, just with a different flair which is why Rule No. 3 is every platform is different… but not really.

And Rule No. 4… The output isn’t the goal. The input is the goal.

When your goal is, “go viral” it’s virtually guaranteed that you won’t go viral.

When your goal is to commit to X number of posts per platform per day… it’s a lot easier to nail…. and then the results tend to take care of themselves.

As always, I sincerely hope that was helpful.

Please reply with your thoughts and critiques. I’m obviously super passionate about this topic and love hearing different opinions, backgrounds and experiences.

Also.. I’m writing this at 11:11 p.m. the night before sending so please forgive any typos. 🙃