Hey, welcome back to TGL.
G here. Today I’m answering some of the questions you sent in, just as I promised last week.
Let’s get into it. I hope you find this helpful.
How many shots do you give a viral format before you move on?
In theory, what we do is split between five and ten creators per project initially, to get enough volume for significance on most tests we run. Each creator posts two videos on two platforms — so four videos a day per creator.
With ten creators, that’s forty videos a day, and across a week we can test around 280 videos.
I usually like to run two to four formats a week. So roughly, we run about forty videos for a specific format before we discard it. But these are formats we have high conviction on, and we give them sufficient testing volume so the answer actually means something.
If any of those videos is an outlier above the median, we log it, then iterate on it the week after — or in the next days — by trying to improve it and running another batch of tests on the improved version. Because if a format produces outliers above the median, there’s a high probability it’s a format that can go viral, especially if there are a couple of outliers. Then we test to confirm or disprove that assumption again.
Sometimes, if you have really high conviction, you run more than that. And sometimes, if you have low conviction but still want to test something, you run less. Obviously it’s not mathematically, statistically significant — but it gets you closer to it.
Is it okay to mix and match creators, accounts, and formats?
Or should we keep them separate?
Yes, it’s okay to mix and match. It depends on the number of creators and the amount of testing you can do, but it works. Often we have some creators doing talking videos and other creators doing other formats. So you can have different creators on different formats, and you can also have a single creator doing different formats and different hooks.
There’s no rule here. Obviously, if you find a format that works, ride it. If a creator has that special something for a particular format, use that creator for it. That’s really what we’re after. But mixing and matching is fine, we see it a lot, and it works really well.
Is it better to start with micro influencers to find working formats or only with ambassadors from the start?
Better to do ambassadors from scratch, because you’ll simply have far more posts per day.
Micro influencers are a struggle: they can post maybe once a week on their main account, and their main account often has about as much reach as a new account anyway — so it doesn’t make sense.
And if you take a bigger influencer, the results are biased by their size, so it won’t tell you what will work for ambassadors. There’s literally zero point doing micro influencers — go straight to ambassadors.
What’s better: start posting on a brand new account with no-CTA videos for a week and then usual hook-demo?
Or hook-demo from the very first?
Do hook-demo from the beginning — there’s no point in leaving out the CTA. There’s no real “warming up” effect where an account gains from previous posts, or at least the drip is very, very small.
The exception is if a video does millions of views, then the next ones
get pushed a little. But there’s no meaningful video-to-video drip. So go straight to the format you want and start crunching from day one.
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See you next week,
G.
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