What I've learned from social media grifters

What I’ve Learned from Social Media Grifters

I don't much go in for Creator on Creator beef. I hopped off that train waaaay back when aspiring comics started trolling big names on Twitter to gain a following. But I got sucked in to this one video about horrible History TikTok.

It featured this interesting deconstruction of this woman who created an entire TikTok persona claiming that Rome never existed - it’s a lie dreamed up by the Spanish Inquisition! Ohhhh kay. She seems to have no specific end goal here, she’s actually a professional Content Marketer and this is just a sort of exercise for her, or just for the LOLZ, who knows

So of course, now I'm awash in Suggested Videos about plagiarizing content farms, outright scams, and deep dives on various algorithms and monetization policies.

And I’ve actually learned a thing or two! So I thought I'd share….

If you want to really master the algorithm, you basically need to be a soulless sociopath

Content farms will always outperform real channels. That’s because they don’t care about the content or the viewer, they just steal ideas or outright copy entire videos from other channels and fine tune the text, tags and thumbnail for maximum engagement.

So, unless your goal is to become a professional content marketer, rather than a comedian, don’t get trapped way down in the weeds of these things. Yes, check your analytics to try and improve your algorithmic ranking, but don’t despair that a dog pretending to drive is doing 10x the numbers you are.

That said, the following are a few sane and reasonable things to keep in mind.

Jesus Christ, Clitoris Healer

Betcha wanna know where that’s going, right?

Use your thumbnails/cover images to reel in viewers

And you can cut down your clip time by putting some or all of the setup in the thumbnail.

You can also experiment with formatting your video like a flashback. Especially if you’re doing a crowdwork vid (I am absolutely not encouraging you to do more crowdwork vids). Start with the weird/funny/big reveal and then show us how you ended up there.

PS The crazy lady I talked about in the opening also claims that Jesus was a woman whose name translates to Clitoris Healer. See, we just went on a journey there!

Give em something to talk about

Stand up clips are uniquely positioned to grab this kind of engagement, because all good jokes are based on observations and opinions. I know we all hate people who don’t get it’s a joke and make dumb actual comments (see Matt Pavich’s circumcision joke), but that’s engagement, baby! Let them duke it out among themselves and keep pushing your numbers up.

And you don’t have to be controversial! One of my favorite bits from Robby Slowik is about plastic bags under the sink. It’s so relatable, you can see everyone in his comments chiming in with what they do with their plastic bags.

Be Consistent

You don’t need to slavishly follow “common wisdom” to post 3x a week or every day at 1 am or whatever, but set a schedule you can keep to, even if it’s only once a week!

And make the robots do some work for you! No I don't mean get ChatGPT to write your videos. Or even a meta sketch about ChatGPT writing your video (that's already overdone hack). But a tool like Buffer or Later can help you plan, schedule and cross post much more quickly than by hand.

Now, let’s talk about actual stand-up!

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And yes, I am making a Birbiglia reference 😁