TikTok and YouTube get all the love these days, but cultural sociologist Ashley Mears smartly inserted herself into the world of Facebook “paid creators”, many of them being magicians.  Ashley lived with them, created videos with them, and felt the thrill of viral success:  164 million viewers (and counting) for one video.

I read this article so that you don’t have to (although you may decide to after reading this summary).

https://www.economist.com/1843/2022/07/28/hocus-focus-how-magicians-made-a-fortune-on-facebook

I noted the formula to getting people to watch you on social media.

I made this list of 22 things to do in order to make millions on Facebook.

Enjoy, and good luck.

#1:  Know right away if your video “bangs”.

“Within two minutes of posting one, he could tell if it was going to take off; if it wasn’t, he’d delete it and try something else. He’d do this for hours until his laptop ran out of battery, then go home, charge it and return.”

#2:  Collect data.  Lots of data.

“He started to develop a sense of what kind of things worked, tracking when people stopped watching and which sorts of set-up performed better with viewers.”

#3:  Act on your data. Right away.

“After a while his research showed he’d be better off getting out of Starbucks and recording at home. The move paid off: his kitchen-counter videos were wildly popular (“bangers”, as the creators say).”

#4:  Appeal to people’s curiosity.

“Houdin… liked to exploit popular curiosity about ether, an anaesthetic that was just starting to be used in medicine, and pretended to give his son the substance before performing a levitation illusion on him. Lax pulled off something similar with Red Bull, frying eggs in it, pulling them out of the pan and then appearing to stretch them like rubber bands (in fact he had switched the real eggs for toy ones).”

#5:  Be authentic.

“He noticed that videos did better if scenes were raw.”

#6:  Awkwardness helps.

“He noticed that videos did better if scenes… looked as though they captured real people in a moment of awkwardness.”

#7:  Buy other people’s videos and edit them.

“To increase his output, he started buying existing videos from (other sites). He might pay $500 for a video of a marriage proposal gone awry and tinker with it until it fit the format of a viral clip.”

#8:  Ramp up your own production.  Like crazy.

“Something about the visuals or timing (of other people’s videos) usually remained stubbornly outside the parameters of what he knew worked. So Lax and Brown started to stage scenes themselves…  The videos would regularly get 100m views across different platforms (Facebook counts anything watched for more than a few seconds as a view). Lax realised that appetite for these videos was insatiable: the only obstacle to earning more money was how many clips he could make in a day.”

#9:  Hire your friends.  Like crazy.

“Lax and Brown invited friends who worked in the entertainment industry to help them make videos…  Lax brought 20 more people into the network, then another 20 and another 20. By late 2021, Lax’s creators were generating a total of about $5m a month across Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube.”

#10:  Don’t let them look away.

“Videos such as Lax’s represent the rawest form of the social-media campaign for our attention: they don’t need to inform, or inspire, they simply have to make it hard for us to look away.”

#11:  Exploit people’s natural weaknesses.

“Their videos… (are) informed by the art of magic. “Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people’s perception,” wrote a former Google employee (and amateur magician) in an essay published on Medium in 2017, “How technology hijacks your mind”. Social-media companies, wrote the author, “influence what people do without them even realising it”, just as magicians do: “Once you know how to push people’s buttons you can play them like a piano.””

#12:  Make the authentic appear amateurish.

“Lax’s team… (gives) videos the authentically amateurish feel that Facebook’s algorithms favour (the professional lighting rigs are just out of shot). Boundaries between personal and creative space are almost non-existent.”

#13:  Use the tried and true formats.  Over and over again.

“The one that performed best online was a cheater drama, a tried and tested genre in the viral-video world (a “bucket”, as creators call it).”

#14:  Use cliff-hangers and suspense.

“The suspense of waiting for a cuckolded spouse to find out keeps viewers gripped enough to sit through the ad.”

#15:  Stop the scroll.

“The first thing creators have to get right is “stopping the scroll”, so the viewer doesn’t reflexively move down to the next post in their feed. That means the opening has to titillate or intrigue, ideally both, in the first three seconds (I saw one begin with a hotdog being lowered into a woman’s mouth). If a viewer stays for those initial moments there’s a good chance they’ll commit until the ad plays.”

#16:  Make sure they watch the ad.

“The ad is the holy grail on Facebook: making money on the platform is all about getting someone to watch it.”

#17:  Keep it simple.

“Just as a good casino never lets a gambler’s cocktail glass sit empty, viral creators don’t give you any reason to leave: no bad lighting, no stagnant action. Viewers from Manhattan to Mumbai should be able to understand every second, when watching on a phone screen without sound.”

#18:  Build tension.  Constantly.

“As the video continues, the action (known as the “beats”) must build tension while also creating the feeling that the pay-off – the cheater getting busted, the prank revealed – could happen at any moment. Even if someone doesn’t watch all the way to the ad, Facebook’s algorithms will promote a video more aggressively if it has a high “watch time” from users.”

#19:  Add triggers.

“At some point, Lax’s creators typically treat the viewer to a surreal twist, which they call “triggering”. Triggers exploit the psychology of curiosity: people pay closer attention when they are trying to fill in missing information or making sense of a weird detail... Sometimes the trigger is an object that’s out of place…  Triggers don’t just keep you watching, they also often elicit comments, which can be a factor in helping videos get promoted on Facebook.”

#20:  Experiment, experiment, experiment.

“(The team) went back and recorded slightly different versions of the same video. Using Facebook’s data on how videos perform, you can run tests to help predict which version of a video, thumbnail picture or title has the greatest appeal. Some creators I met had made their own spreadsheets to better analyse the resulting data.”

#21:  Imitation is the greatest flattery.

“There are no prizes for originality. Lax and his rivals shamelessly rip off and refine each other’s “buckets”.”

#22:  Enjoy the ride.

“As I spent more time with Lax’s creators I realised it wasn’t just the monetary rewards that were driving them on, but the same dopamine rush they were exploiting in us. If you’re looking at the data, you can actually see your earnings go up as people watch your work: making viral videos can be just as addictive as watching them.”