Finding a reason to stay: my experience as a content creator growing a social-first media brand

Before coming over to Aberfield, I was a content creator at ReachPLC’s social-first brand, Curiously. My day-to-day would entail sitting in front of a ring light recording TikTok videos, editing Instagram Reels and filming myself talk about all things pop culture (read: Taylor Swift).

In just over a year, the follower count for TikTok grew from 0 to over 270,000. On Instagram, we were hitting viewing figures of 1M+.

The results are impressive, but there were days where videos that had done everything right landed to the tens and hundreds, instead of thousands. So, how do you build an audience when it feels like nobody’s watching?

What’s the trick for engaging content? And how do you get people to keep watching?

1. Know your audience

It’s important to know from the very beginning exactly who your audience is. Who are you creating content for?

One way to make a social media manager cry is to say you’re creating content for everyone. Spoiler alert: you’re not!

A useful exercise, if you haven’t got a clear answer, is to imagine your dream follower. How old are they? What do they watch on Netflix? How do they engage with trends? What are they interested in?

Once you’ve created your dream follower, you can begin to picture the kind of content that might make them click follow when it comes to your own page.

Understand your dream follower like they’re a real person. Once you’ve got this down, your content calendar writes itself and you can begin building a community that wants to engage with you, because they feel engaged with.

2. Build your brand

When it comes to social video, nothing says building your brand quite like repeatable formats. They ultimately answer the question of – what can your audience expect from you?

I like to see repeatable formats as your brand’s own TV series (without any questionable acting, unless that’s your thing). It might be as official as having a series title and planning episodes over a number of weeks, but it could also be as simple as understanding the reason one of your videos performed well and recreating the style like nobody’s business.

Either way, the more you repeat a video style or share episodes of a series, the more familiar your audience becomes with who you are and what you do.

3. Be open to adapt

Now, you might know your audience like the back of your hand, but that doesn’t always mean they’ll watch your videos or comment on your post.

Being ready to adapt is key to growing your brand and could also be the solution to low engagement.

When I first started filming social videos, I would simply present my script to camera and edit in a few pictures or videos to exemplify my point. I knew I was talking about the right thing on a platform where we knew our audience would be, but they’d continue to scroll past. Disheartening, yes, but also a reminder that followers and fans can be a fickle beast.

Social video is ever evolving, which rather than being scary, means you really can try anything and see what sticks. For some time, presenting a news story would produce much higher engagement if I was doing my make-up at the same time. In fact, one example of me doing this received over 20,000 views. 

While that worked for a bit, it soon didn’t achieve the same results, so what could we do instead?

Social media would be no fun if there was a definitive answer to this, but if I were to take a stab at it, I’d consider looking at what formats are working elsewhere and assess how effectively you’re providing a call to action (AKA, asking the viewer to give their thoughts, follow or share the content).

Earlier this month, co-founder of Luxe Collective Fashion, Ben Gallagher, shared his three-step formula for social media after consistently uploading videos that gathered millions of views on Instagram. He said for the best return, you need to provide a reason to stop, a reason to stay and a reason to act.

This is a great framework to work off, but remember, your reasons today might not be the same next week.

So, while I try something new, why not do the same? Take a look at our top tips below and get yourself in front of a ring light, who knows, maybe this is the one that produces the reach you’re aiming for!

Top tips

• Know your audience
• Create repeatable formats you can build off
• Look at what your competitors are doing – how can you do it differently?
• Write a script to follow in your video – give your audience a reason to stop, stay and act.