Digital content guru Brendan Kane is the founder of Hook Point, a viral consulting agency. He shares his expertise on how to hook people instantly, how Steven Spielberg’s filmmaking style can make your social media content go viral, and how A.I. will impact content creation in the future.  

Just for our listeners and viewers: Go to hookpoint.com/denominator to get Brendan’s newest book “The Guide To Going Viral” for FREE!

Most important key to going viral:

“If you want to go viral, you need to hold people’s attention longer than other content that’s getting posted on the platform. It’s as simple as that. It’s not about the hashtags that you use or the amount of content that you produce. It’s simply about are you a good enough storyteller that you can hold the tension longer than the other content that your competitors or other content creators are posting.”

Nailing the beginning of the video is critical:

“You don’t need an hour or a few hours to tell a story. You can literally tell a story in 10, 20, or 30 seconds. But what’s critically important is, what happens in those first few seconds that sets a clear expectation of what you’re going to deliver going forward.”

What people get wrong:

“One of the biggest mistakes people make in terms of those first few seconds is they overwhelm the person, and they don’t have a clear visual hierarchy, meaning a lot of content creators will have a meme card or a title card with text on the top, they’ll be talking, they’ll have captions, and maybe some people will be moving at the same time. The challenge with that is the minute the subconscious doesn’t know where to focus in terms of that visual hierarchy it’s going to feel like it’s getting left behind and thus will scroll to the next videos.”

How to fix it:

“The first aspect is having a clear visual hierarchy on what you want that person to focus on in the first few seconds, and making sure it’s clear and differentiated. If it’s not clear and they can’t make sense of it in the first few seconds, they’re going to move on. If it’s not differentiated, meaning it’s not something unique, they’re not going to waste their time on it because they know there’s another piece of content.”

Treat your videos like a Spielberg movie:

“Think about one of the best storytellers of our time, Steven Spielberg. When he’s making a movie, he’s using this three-act structure. And he’s not deviating and blowing it up each time and creating something completely original. What he’s doing is, over the decades he’s been making films he’s been mastering the nuances of expressing his message and his story through that structure.”

Being scripted vs unscripted in your videos:

“A lot of content creators would be best served by using scripts. But there are certain personality types, there are certain types of people that just don’t want to use a script, they want to kind of flow with it. But they need to at least have a structure and an understanding of the structure. So that they can follow the blueprint of what actually works.”

AI is nice, but thoughtful and original content creation is still more important:

“Our ability from an AI perspective, or how to look at AI, is it’s only as good as the prompts that you put into it and the data set that you have to fuel the direction that you’re making it, and your ability to analyze the output and its effectiveness to understand whether the output is going to perform or not.”