Lessons Learned Posting 1500 Videos to Social Media in 2 Months
At Zero Slant we post a lot of videos. Our AI build videos automatically from trends in social media and then posts the content back into the conversation on social platforms. We post to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Since our content creation and posting is automatic — our team is able to spend a lot of time looking for trends and getting perspective on what works and doesn’t on the various platforms.
Bots
Bots are a huge problem when it comes to accurately analyzing your viewership on social media. Instagram and Twitter users are the worst offenders. On both platforms there are automated scripts searching for hashtags and keywords in posts and then automatically liking/favoriting/retweeting content. The good news for video creators is that the “view” is pretty free from these nuisances. Often we’ll get more comments on an Instagram post than we’ll get views. Whenever this happens — the comments are fake.
Another way to spot an Instagram bot = really vague and general commentary. Like this:
If a user posts a comment like “beautiful” or a bunch of random emojis — it’s almost always fake.
Topics Searched
Each platform has topics that do best on them. For us we’ve found that while concert videos perform well on Instagram, they don’t see the same performance on Facebook. And our biggest “success” and surprise has come from the sheer amount of middle-aged men searching for sport videos on Facebook. Right now baseball videos are by far our most successful type of content.
Analytics
Without the ability to analyze the success of our videos, we don’t know which direction to point our AI in its mission to create boundless content.
YouTube and Facebook offer the best analytics. Nothing else compares. And while YouTube has the longest running and arguably most robust system, our team finds Facebook to be the most useful. Their graphs are simple to maneuver and offer obvious data.
The simple presentation of reach and completion rate on Facebook Insights allows you to see what % of your views are from users who have liked your page or users that have searched a query that resulted in your content being shown to them.
At Zero Slant our following on all platforms is small, so our focus is on automatically using the proper hashtags and keywords to rank up within searches. Because of this the reach/views/completion rate metric given by Facebook gives us great perspective on how our system is doing at its job. For now, the smaller the reach but the higher the viewership — the happier we are with the performance. The completion rate gives us a great metric for the quality of the video. This is important because given the fact that our content is robotically created, we don’t actually watch every video.
Haters Gonna Hate
We’ve only had one video get 10k+ views. The moment it did — the haters came out in droves. The video was an event recap from a college football game. Since our videos are automatically made, the quality jumps up and down. Needless to say — this wasn’t one of our best, yet it somehow got a bunch of viewership. And the haters wanted us to know that the video sucked.
There’s a lot to be learned here. First off — our videos should be better (we’re working on it :) ). Secondly, when looking at the completion rate it was still sitting around 69%. That’s pretty high! We had a bunch of engagement, a high completion rate, and because of this Facebook continued to push us up the search results for this specific game. So even though the video was bad, we kept getting more and more viewership. The thought that jumps to my mind is — maybe all press is good press?
Facebook Publisher Tiers
It seems clear that there are tiers of publishers on Facebook. If you’re making content, Facebook is analyzing not only what types of content you put out but whether or not you get solid viewership and engagement from topic to topic. It’s very clear to our team that Zero Slant was labeled as a solid source of information for baseball about 3 weeks ago. Since then, every baseball story we post has seen a massive spike in viewership. We’re still on the path to discovering the secret formula to get such a ranking in other topics.
Currently our best theory is that it’s a numbers game. There are tons of baseball games during the regular season. Since our system captures and creates videos on nearly all of them — we’ve simply made more baseball videos and therefore been ranked up as a source for baseball news.
Twitter Is Hard
Without a following Twitter is very hard to get viewership on. It seems that users ONLY search for news on Twitter. While a news video our system creates can often garner 1k+ views — anything else can often die to the sound of crickets, getting ZERO viewership. Even our worst performing videos on Instagram and Facebook will receive a few eyeballs.
The Long Tail
Since Zero Slant posts tons of videos — many are niche. There simply aren’t 1500 pieces of content in a short period of time that have mass market appeal. Given the fact that our system is automated, we don’t care if some videos only get 3–5 views. Our goal is not to make sure that each piece of content gets millions of views, but rather that over time we get millions of pieces of content.
We’re already seeing the benefit of this type of scale when it comes to content. Each week we’re seeing 3000–5000 views on older content. Considering the fact that our development trajectory points us towards the creation of thousands of videos per day, this type of viewership on older content will start to pay dividends. While it’s awesome to have tons of viewers on each piece of content, there’s a lot to be said for being omnipresent. You never know when someone will search for just the right set of keywords.
Just The Beginning
At Zero Slant we’re just starting. We will soon be making tens of thousands of videos in the same two month stretch and I’m sure I’ll be back with more findings. I’ll be very disappointed if those findings don’t disprove much of what has been written in this blog post :).
As always you can reach me at ryan@zeroslant.com
