Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / “She got 3M views!” talking TikTok viral videos

Transcript

“She got 3M views!” talking TikTok viral videos · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:09
  Oh, hey. Hello. Hello. Welcome to the pod. How's it going? It's going good. I am back in Sydney after a few weeks in Queensland, sunny Queensland. Oh, yeah. It's good to see you back with that pink background. Good internet. Oh, my God. The internet. Story of my life. Technical issues. Lol.
• 0:31
  Talking about frustrations of entrepreneurial life, that's a biggie. Yeah, literally. I'm like, oh, man, it is 20, I was about to say it's 2025. It is 2024. How come the internet just doesn't work in all the places? Like, we are sending rockets to the moon and bringing people back. I don't understand. We can have internet. Actually, not to the moon, but into space. We are, and humans to the moon.
• 0:58
  That's for a long time already. Yeah, but are they currently going to the moon? I feel like at the moment they're not going to the moon. True, they're just going into this kind of stratosphere. Yeah, like I feel like people haven't been back to the moon. Yeah, exactly. Billies. All about billies. All about the billies. Lol.
• 1:20
  How are you? I'm good. I'm excited to jump into this episode today. I feel like it's been a little while since we recorded. It has been a little while. It has been a little while. Yeah, me too. I've missed the pod. Missed the pod.
• 1:35
  I'm excited for this one because I feel like this is something that we've spoken about in a roundabout way for a long time. So our episode on the Instagram algorithm changing organic content in general. And we're finally going to have a bit of a deep dive on short form video content itself.
• 1:54
  I mean, I love short form video content. Let's do it. Let's talk about viral content. Viral videos. So these are kind of, to give a bit of a foundation and background, these are your bite-sized, super engaging videos that you find yourself scrolling through on TikTok and Instagram and suddenly an hour has gone by and you have no idea where all the time's gone.
• 2:18
  And we wanted to get our teeth stuck into this one because you briefly mentioned to me earlier in the week that you had a video of a client of yours go viral. You just mentioned to me now, I think it got three million views, which is... Yes, it got three million views. What the heck? So cool.
• 2:36
  So cool. And I thought it would be great to kind of jump into what happened. How did this come about? And kind of, yeah, what are you recommending at the moment? How did you manage to get this result in this climate? Yes.
• 2:51
  Yes. Oh my God. Let's discuss. Okay. So first of all, I think for context, one of my clients is pre-launch very much in the early stages of getting together, you know, the brand and the packaging and finalizing the products and all that kind of thing.
• 3:07
  But when we started working together, the thing that we kind of thought we needed to really focus on, and because we had a lot of time up our sleeves, was to really build community, really focus on the social aspect so that when launch day comes, we'll be able to do it.
• 3:23
  there's already people there to launch to. So she specifically wanted to invest time instead of money into that community growth side of things. And we talk about this all the time. It's like, when you're launching a brand, you need to really think about what your primary sales channels are going to be. And are you going to be investing time or dollars to get that off the
• 3:47
  a lot of money into ads and you can blow a lot of money in ads until you figure it out and that's going to be your primary sales driver. Or if you don't have that capital to get started and you know either do it yourself or pay a retainer for an agency plus the budget, then you're investing time into your organic channels and that organic growth which
• 4:05
  naturally takes a longer period of time and it's kind of steady and consistency, steadiness and consistency over like a long period of time. And, you know, that's something that we've been doing with Female Startup Club is taking that slow and steady approach. Yeah.
• 4:23
  Slow and steady wins the race. Slow and steady wins the race. And I feel it's also a bit your bread and butter, isn't it? This kind of organic content and figuring these things out organically before chucking money at something. It is so my bread and butter. And I think like for me, actually, I just get so much...
• 4:40
  joy and stimulation from like editorial planning, content planning, ideas, ideation, all this stuff is just so fun for me. So working on different brands who have very different kind of strategies and products and things going on is just so much fun for my brain. It's a dopamine hit all the time. Yeah.
• 5:00
  So for her, we're pursuing the pathway of investing time into content. Because we've got this window, the strategy has been, okay, cool. How can we just build up steady, consistent content over time, test lots of different things so that we can start finding success on the platforms? Yeah.
• 5:21
  I think it was like the start of last week, one of her videos went totally viral. You know, thousands of comments, thousands of saves, millions of views. I think it's at 3 million views now. And I'm just like, this is so cool. And I think the problem that we can often kind of get into as...
• 5:41
  early stage business owners is you kind of expect that it's going to happen overnight. And things just don't happen overnight. Sometimes, sure, there's the outlier where something kind of just like takes off immediately and that's the first video you've posted. But now, especially with more people having joined TikTok in the last couple of years, I feel like it's slowed down a
• 6:04
  virality and it's like taken a little bit more time for people to find the content that's resonating with their audience and building that audience and kind of fine-tuning the content I guess and kind of upskilling in content so we've been working on this for a couple of months we've been posting consistently we've been
• 6:26
  you know, every week working on like the new content ideas. And now a few months in, we're starting to just see those early signals of content that works for her. And she's starting to find that audience and it's starting to grow. And it's so exciting. I'm so excited. I just love this stuff. You know, I feel like I missed the question. I've forgotten what I was saying.
• 6:48
  I'm super interested in what the video itself is and also if there was a real strategy behind there in terms of hitting certain goals or reaching certain people. Yeah, what was the video? Give us the tea. I'm not going to tell you what the video exactly was because I feel like for privacy and all that kind of thing, that's not the vibe. But what I will say is we really identified kind of
• 7:17
  researched and identified accounts and inspiration accounts and creators that were already doing things really well. So I think we've spoken about this before on the podcast. I'm such a big fan of the list, top 100, dream 100, you know, making the list of, and it doesn't always have to be 100, but like 10, 10 creators or 10 videos that you're able to be like, what
• 7:42
  is working for that video. Like why did that video go viral? What are the comments saying? Like what can I learn from this, dissect this? So we were trying lots of different angles with content and kind of like slowly fine tuning, slowly watching what was happening. And the thing about TikTok is that if you post a video and it doesn't work,
• 8:01
  you wouldn't post that same style of video the next day because it still wouldn't work. It's basically proven and it's been validated that that isn't going to work for you. So you need to try something new. So you had to kind of like think about, okay, that's not working. Let's try another style and like a totally different look and a totally different feel. So she just really kept at it like every week trying new things, trying new things based on her kind of niche, based on her category and yeah.
• 8:28
  Yeah, from that really like testing and iterating and testing and iterating but being consistent with it and not giving up even though there was no results for a long time, that's when you then start to see that compound effect of trying, testing, iterating and then finally something all coming together and working. So I think like the, you know, if we were to break down like the actual playbook of what we were doing for her to get that result is...
• 8:57
  committing to just figuring it out over the long period of time, developing a list or identifying a list of creators and brands that were in her kind of niche or category or even just complementary kind of niches and categories that we would look at, identify like why is this working, what is the hook, what's cool about it, how can we replicate this but with our own twist and then kind of
• 9:23
  Just if it doesn't work, try again, try something else and keep repeating that cycle every single week. And we also spend a lot of time kind of thinking about what are the hooks on the front of these videos and trying different hooks and different language and things like that. And then the other thing that's just come out recently, and I can't remember if we've spoken about this, but the creator insights tool on TikTok. Have we spoken about this? Oh, no, we haven't.
• 9:50
  So the Creator Insights tool, it's so interesting. Basically, like once you go into it, it'll just tell you all the things that people are searching for that they don't have videos for. So it's like an SEO kind of tool almost where you'll go into it and like for me, it'll tell me like, let's say you're a beauty brand, it'll be like people are searching for glass skin routines in some particular thing and it'll be like really interesting
• 10:19
  niche. Detailed. Yeah. Really detailed. But it's telling you, people are searching for this and there's no answer. So if you post this video, it will perform. And so it's basically now kind of making it a lot easier for creators to be like, oh, I should create that video with that hook and those keywords and then see what happens. It's giving you like almost like a roadmap to try. And so we also started leaning into that. And yeah, it's literally just rinse and repeat. There's
• 10:46
  It's not like some secret strategy, secret sauce stuff. It's consistently testing content ongoing until you finally hit success. Yeah, I love this. How would you recommend someone, you know, who's working with themselves to approach something like this? Would you suggest having like maybe a weekly check-in with yourself where you go over the past content, see how it's performing and...
• 11:13
  you know, look at the new stuff and have this refresh kind of with yourself every week? Is that something that's worth putting in the diary? Or would you suggest doing it more often than that? What could be like a good strategy for someone who's really kind of in the sticks on their own, but wanting to make this work on TikTok?
• 11:30
  Yeah. So I think the thing is, is that all this stuff is just action, right? Like you just need to take action. And so some people work better where they batch create on a Sunday or a Monday, and some people work better being like, no, I'm going to create it every day. And so finding, like, obviously understanding who you are as a person and the kind of way that you like to create. But for example, for me, when I'm in a good flow with TikTok, I'm much more of a day-to-day person. I don't like doing things in advance because I do things based on mood or based on trends.
• 12:00
  So for me, it's about being like, okay, cool. I'm going to set this time every day or, you know, if I'm going to post three times a week, I'm going to schedule in that time into my diary and no matter what, I'm going to post the video so that I am actively like posting the consistent videos that I've committed to for myself every week. Because it's really easy to just like get lost in a million different ideas. You kind of just need to be like, nope, I've got one hour. I've got to post one thing. What is it going to be like?
• 12:28
  here's my kind of idea, here's my hook, let's go. Or like here's what the creator tool, the creator insights tool is suggesting. Let's just make that one video and like take it off the list. And then if you're more of a batch creator, you know, on the day that you're creating, it's like, okay, cool. I've got three videos to make, like what are they going to be? And just like get it out. And I wouldn't focus too much on like, you know, especially in the beginning if you don't have an audience yet and you haven't found kind of the like, like,
• 12:58
  not product market fit, but like the fit for you on the platform. I wouldn't waste time kind of like, you know, thinking too much about other things and looking back. I just feel like just get content out there. Like it needs to be, you just need to post content to start getting anywhere because if you don't post, then you're not going to get anywhere. So yeah,
• 13:18
  It's just about being like, okay, I'm identifying that I want to post three videos a week, or I'm identifying that I want to post a video every day. This is when I'm going to record them. My, you know, my steps might be like, okay, I sit down, I take five minutes and five minutes only to put down three ideas. I come up with a really catchy hook. I ask myself, would I actually want to watch this? Is it interesting? Because if it's boring and it's boring to you,
• 13:45
  then no one else is going to find it interesting. Like you've got to be also a little bit realistic about finding the good stuff and like adding some element of intrigue and tapping into people's emotions and all of that kind of side of things. And then just creating the video and it doesn't need to be polished. It doesn't need to be perfect. It's better to just like...
• 14:04
  Have an idea, have a strong hook, and then get it out there. Because also one of the big challenges is like actually just building the habit of posting. Because if you just post once and then you give up, of course, you're not going to get anywhere. You need to just get really good at being like, okay, you know what, even if it isn't the best, let me just build up the reps. Because as you get, you know, 20 videos in, 50 videos in, you know, you're going to get
• 14:30
  you're getting more familiar with your voice. You're getting more familiar with your face. You're getting more familiar with styles of lighting and shooting that actually work for you and you're constantly improving. So maybe you're not seeing viral videos and maybe you're not seeing views, but you're sharpening your skill set and you're upskilling as a content marketer. And
• 14:50
  That is all so valuable, even though it's not kind of giving you what you want in those videos, it's still leading to something. And so it's about getting those reps in and just being consistent, building the habit, no matter what, locking yourself into your goal and just going for it.
• 15:07
  Yeah, there's so much to learn with literally every video that you create and post, even the ones that get one view, zero views. You're still taking away so many learnings from that. Totally. And also I think like we get stuck in this kind of like, you know, thinking of, oh, my God, it needs to get 10,000 views or, oh, my God, it needs to get 3 million views, whatever it is.
• 15:27
  But actually, even if you do the math on like, okay, let's say you're a really new account or you haven't been posting for a while. So it's only getting 200 views here and 200 views there. But still, if you post 30 videos in a month and they're all getting 200 views, like that's still a lot of views by the end of the month that people have been exposed to your brand. And so maybe you haven't found the actual kind of like...
• 15:51
  sticky stuff that people are like, oh, yeah, that's the viral video. But you're still getting views and eyeballs. Imagine being in a room with 200 people. Like, that's huge. Or imagine people, like, even if it's a few comments, that's still amazing. And you're sharpening your skill set and getting better and better and better at creating content as you go. So it's all valid and like, all valuable and all...
• 16:15
  you know, in the bigger picture of community building and building your kind of social media presence, like this stuff just takes time and that's just how it works. And like, that's okay.
• 16:27
  I love that. Especially, yeah, imagine 200 people walking past your storefront or past you in the street selling something. That's a very different feeling than seeing this little number on social media. But it's essentially the same thing. You're exposing people to your brand. I love that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really cool. 200 people is a lot. It's a lot. And then imagine the 3 million. It's still a possibility, right? I mean, it's still out there. And I think this
• 16:55
  this example just shows how with the hard work and the determination and just taking it seriously for a while, that's still very much within your reach, which is such a cool thing. Totally, totally. I wanted to leave listeners with a bit of a kind of actionable thing that they can do straight away. I think when we
• 17:18
  listen to content on short form video or when we think about how to get started, the hurdle is often, but what do I actually create, right? Like what are actually the things that I can just like put together quickly? What are people actually going to care about? And I thought just kind of breaking down three really simple trends that people can whip out their phone straight after listening to this and literally create in like five, 10 minutes. Yeah.
• 17:44
  that that could be a valuable one. And that's essentially your homework for this week, if you're looking to get into short form content. Oh, I love that. Homework for this week. Let's do homework for this week. I love that. Let's do homework together. Oh my gosh. Okay. Let me think. So the first thing I would say is, if you're listening to this, and it's like the morning, then you could do it this afternoon. If you're listening to this, and it's nighttime, maybe you could do it tomorrow. But like,
• 18:10
  schedule in an hour tomorrow and give yourself just the goal of one video. And I would do two things. First of all, I would look at the creator insights in TikTok and see what it is telling you to post. And I would start there. So whatever it's telling you to post, use that exact like, you know,
• 18:29
  keyword SEO optimized title and maybe tweak it a little bit into a hook or a question that's really exciting or exposing something or the reality of all those kind of words that
• 18:42
  generate emotion and intrigue and make you be like, ooh, what's that? So I would schedule my time. I would look at the creator insights tool about the video and I would literally just like set the timer and make the video and give myself literally an hour tops to like do it, edit it, post it. But I'd try and do it a bit quicker if I could, but you know, you know, that's just the thing I would say is like actually just post a video. Like
• 19:12
  That's the main action that we need to be taking, posting the content. Oh, the other thing I was gonna say was,
• 19:18
  start putting together your B-roll folder on your phone. So I would like start going through and just making a folder of like videos that you've taken of yourself or your business or photos, whatever it is, because if you can get into the habit of also creating kind of stitched together montage videos, they're so great for, you know, a day that you're not feeling it or a day that you're really busy and you just want to quickly whip something up. When you have that folder...
• 19:47
  already there on your phone, and this is something that we do a lot of, it just makes it so easy to tap into a trend and stitch something together. So I would do that. And if you don't have B-roll stuff yet, it means that instead you need to be focusing on filming yourself, doing everything. So you start building up a library of content that you can pull from really easily.
• 20:08
  Exactly. And the way that we do this, we have a shared photo folder within our app and we just chuck any kind of video that you've recently recorded or anything in this one particular album. And then when a trend comes up or something comes up that we could use that B-roll for, I have this huge album there and we can just stitch that together super easily. Yeah.
• 20:32
  And you realize the value of this so quickly. I think it also came up on the episode with Contour Cube, Sarah Foray, who's brilliant at this. And if you need any inspiration, I would absolutely suggest jumping onto the Contour Cube Instagram. She's so great at just putting together these montage videos and jumping on trends. So you could have a trend, for example, of a particular audio that's doing really well and going around on the platform.
• 20:59
  And you can click in the bottom left corner of that video, click on the audio itself, and you'll get an entire bank of people using that audio in different ways. And you can get inspiration from that, see what's performing well, and get inspiration for the different ways that you could use that audio to stitch a video together. Then at the top, you click use audio. And then...
• 21:20
  That's your stage for just clicking those different content pieces from the album, clicking it together and creating it into your video. This is such a simple example of something that can take like five minutes. And it really leans into both kind of getting your face out there and your story because it links directly to you.
• 21:39
  Pictures and images of you, pictures and images of your brand, and getting a way to kind of trick the algorithm into getting a lot of views because you're using something that's already trending, a trending audio. I love that example. It's a great one. And I also think...
• 21:55
  It's the kind of thing you can do, you know, at nighttime if you're like sitting on the couch watching TV. Yeah. We're all kind of doing the dual device thing, watching TV, being on our phones. And so it's like... Second screen. The second screen, exactly. So if you're just able to like have the B-roll folder or, you know, just you're filming content throughout the day and then at the nighttime you are sitting on the couch...
• 22:17
  stitching together a video with a trending audio. It's just so, it's quick. Or if you don't want to use a trending audio, you could just do a quick voiceover telling a story. And that stuff is powerful. Yeah, you could even use a song that's doing well and post text over the video. So what we'll sometimes do is we'll take a piece of advice from the show or we'll have a strong hook of something like, this multi-million dollar founder told me this one piece of advice, X, Y, Z, have the advice piece on there.
• 22:47
  and post a video like this. Girls That Invest also does a really good job, if you look on their feed, of these kind of B-roll videos in the background with text over the top with a value piece of advice. And you can very easily kind of put that into your niche. And it's such an easy post, and it's something that's doing really, really well at the moment, these large text reels and videos. And that's something that can also be posted across both platforms, both Instagram and TikTok. So yeah.
• 23:16
  Yes, love. I actually just thought of one final tip and it's like not related to, well, I mean, it's 100% related, but it's not the actionable tip of like doing something in the TikTok app. Yeah, it's not the homework, but it is kind of homework, I guess, now that I think about it. But anyway, Gary Vee just put out his new book. I think it's called Day Trading Attention. And...
• 23:37
  I was listening to it in the car yesterday on the way back from Brisbane and it's really, really good. There's just so many insights in there that I think like when you hear that same thing repeated like three times over and over and over again, it finally starts to lodge into your brain and he's, you know, he's actually reading it out. So it's,
• 23:56
  It's just really good. And I think there's lots of points in there that are just so relevant to our audience. So I would definitely jump on and start listening to the audio book or if you're more of a Kindle or physical book reader, get into it. Linking that in the show notes. It's a lot of like the stuff that we talk about on the show about, you know, if you're able to create that human connection and drive emotion that essentially gets attention, you are then going to be able
• 24:24
  you know, driving sales. And in today's world, brand owners need to be essentially media companies. You need to be able to create media that is compelling and interesting and driving eyeballs to what you're doing. And then that trickles into sales. Yeah.
• 24:44
  Is that available on Spotify? I know they have these free audiobooks. I think every Spotify member gets 20 hours of free audiobook listens a month, which has been a total game changer. It's amazing. I'm really telling everyone and their dog because it's such an amazing feature and they haven't shouted about it so much. Oh, my God, I love that. I don't know. I was listening to it on Audible, but if it's on there, let's link it in the show notes.
• 25:11
  Yeah, absolutely. Cool. We'll do. Love this. Nice. Good stuff. Well, that's the pod. That's the pod. See you next week. See you next week.
• 25:27
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 25:51
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 26:14
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.