Some fun updates from my side:

1) I launched my first YouTube video yesterday! It has 3 views so far. Wooo!!!! I’ll share a shortened note about creator interviews in the email and a link to the full video interview moving forward. If you’re a creator and interested in getting interviewed please respond to this email!

2) Someone took @Social4TheWin on Instagram! I guess that’s a good thing? Like I’m making a worthwhile enough community that someone wants to sell it back to me? So I snagged @_Social4TheWin and will get that going with the shorts of all our interview clips and maybe even some interviews with you all at our next event!

3) Any creators interested in talking with the Wall Street Journal? I’m friendly with a reporter there, and they are looking to do a story or research on creators developing AI bots of themselves to engage with and educate their following. If you’re interested please let me know your experience with that and I can introduce you to my friend.

1) 🎙️🎙️Who’s That Creator? 🎙️🎙️: Interviews with creators from our community highlighting their background and sharing their insights as a creator.

2) 🔥🔥Brand Hot Take🔥🔥: A breakdown of a brand’s social media or TikTok presence and how I think they can do better. Taking a step inside Jacob’s mind. You won’t get his take in your daily New York Times.

It’s Dave Ng → aka Dave Disci!

If you’ve come to an event of mine before you’ve probably either seen or had the pleasure of meeting Dave. We grabbed lunch a few weeks back and I wish I had taken a photo - because this would’ve been the perfect place to include it.

What makes Dave’s journey as a creator special is that he’s not only succeeded as a creator in one niche - but in two. Dave developed a channel dedicated to sharing updates and insights into the K-Pop world while also sharing evergreen news videos.

Dave mentioned that he worked for a camera company and wanted to work with their influencer department. However, the company didn't let him take on that role because they felt he didn't have enough experience. This pushed Dave to build his own YouTube channel to prove his capability in growing an audience and creating content. Despite growing his channel to 50,000 subscribers within a year, the company still chose to hire someone else, leading Dave to eventually quit and go full-time as a creator.

This resonated with me since I experienced many examples of this during my time in the corporate world.

MAKE FRIENDS WHO ARE BLUNT AF:

If you know me, you know that I love bluntness and transparency. If you're at an event of mine and meeting someone new or even just hanging out with another creator, I’d recommend you analyze each other's content. Run through your videos, share insights, and provide honest feedback. Even with a few million followers, there's always room to improve. If you have the time on a Sunday do a “study session” with a friend to research and discuss ways to elevate your content together, DO IT!

LEVERAGE ANXIETY FOR GROWTH:

Dave knows that being a creator might not last forever. While you might have a great audience today, it doesn’t mean that everything will stay the same in in 5 or 10 years. He leveraged this thought to diversify his monetization strategy, which I love. CREATORS - PUT YOUR MONEY IN THE STOCK MARKET!!!

EVERGREEN - TIMELESS RELEVANCE:

Evergreen content is what I talk about in my consultancy. How do you develop content that isn’t a flash in the pan and relevant for a microsecond? Find topics that are always somewhat relevant and relatable. People will always need to eat, sleep, and use Excel 😉! Trends, in my opinion, are a mediocre strategy.

BEING A CREATOR AS A CASE STUDY:

We’re seeing more and more creators going in-house to companies to work in social media or create content. I think it’s a worthwhile endeavor - but let me be clear about one thing. If you are a creator and a brand wants you to work for them and integrate your content into their channel - they should be paying you like a creator, not like an employee.

CONSISTENCY BUILDS COMMUNITY:

So we hear consistency a lot. I also say this a lot. But the way that Dave described it to me was incredibly interesting. You don’t know when someone is seeing your content. Similar to how you might associate songs, smells, tastes, etc. with different people or places, I think the same can be said about creators and content. I made the example of when I meet someone random out I don’t care who they are, the same thing as my feed. But if I have a vetted source like a friend introduce me or I recognize someone I’ll be a lot more interested in that person.

CNN has roughly 100 Million followers across the 3 (4) main platforms. X (62M), Instagram (20M), YouTube (16.5M), TikTok (3M). This doesn’t even include all the other CNN-associated channels. On X alone they have 8 other separate channels (Breaking News, International, Politics, en Espanol, Arabic, Business, Weather Center, and Travel) which together have 122 Million followers.

So I mentioned distribution and repurposing content, right? What’s interesting to see though is that there’s almost no differentiation between the content across short-form platforms daily. What stands out with CNN is just how much content they can pump out. On the major CNN channel, they have over 422,000 posts since they started. I would be hard-pressed to say any other channel outside of maybe another news outlet has that sheer scale of content on hand.

Their YouTube also does incredibly well - given their clipped interviews, insights reporting, and just election coverage in general. Having the presidential debate and ongoing coverage of prolific trials makes their channel clearly different from the rest.

Now when you look at the individual anchors who just work for CNN they collectively have significant reach. I don’t have the exact number since there are a lot of anchors but I would say collectively across social channels they probably have at least 30-40 Million followers - excluding their golden boy (Anderson Cooper) who has roughly 15-20 Million just himself.

I was looking at the CNN website - “faces of CNN” and when you go to each anchor you can see their social media profiles. X and Instagram are there (reporters are extremely active on X), but I didn’t see YouTube or TikTok on almost any of the team’s profiles.

The only two I could find on TikTok were Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) and Max Foster (@maxfostercnn), and I would highly recommend you look at both channels. There is a stark difference in their content style and the engagement clearly showcases what works and what doesn’t.

Overall CNN is a content-making machine - I just wished they took a slightly more social approach to shooting content. If I were them I would do a live stream every single day, streaming directly from their TV program, although I guess that defeats the purpose of having cable.

Now Fox News is a different story. First off - I was wrong, Fox News has 610K posts on X. They have roughly 46M followers across social media X (25M), Insta (9M), YouTube (12M), TikTok (14K). There is a clear distinction between Fox News and CNN, most notably their TikTok - which seems to have just launched earlier this month.

Jesse Watters is probably the most prolific anchor at Fox on TikTok and has roughly 4.5M followers across platforms. Regardless of his takes and the news he shares - what’s interesting to see is that many other channels repurpose content that he posts and content from Fox News.

It’s news, so distribution is key, and when you’re competitors who are distributing content for you (even if it’s to bash it) that increases the viewership and reach and from their perspective, in my opinion, is a huge win. Especially across platforms that have vastly different perspectives than its own. You don’t see Coca-Cola posting much about Pepsi.

As a creator, imagine how impactful, other accounts taking your content and repositing it across multiple channels and platforms for free would be. That my friends is not just happening with Fox News, but with every channel.

Of the big three here, MSNBC is taking the most social-first approach to TikTok. But let’s be honest, they also repurpose content like it’s their job, quite frankly it is. They have about 15M followers across social media X (5M), Insta (1.5M), YouTube (7M), TikTok (2M). For a big 3 major publishing network, it’s interesting to see that are far behind their competitor’s core channels on social media.

Outside of repurposed content, MSNBC uses a lot of green-screen content. They have an anchor or speaker, showcasing content or images going along with the story that they are telling. This isn’t rocket science and anyone can do this style of content if they use any basic video editing app, or the right filter on TikTok.

What’s tough about where MSNBC comes into play is that there is almost no consistency with the anchors in this content and quite frankly I don’t know, and I think the general TikTok user doesn’t know who these people are. If they are going to do something like this, just bring in a social-first anchor to develop that consistency.

But they also have a power hitter with Rachel Maddow having roughly 10M followers on X, and about 1M between Instagram and TikTok. What’s interesting about her TikTok is that it’s taken from her news channel, but fitted into a 9:16 format. To a certain extent, with the amount of content these anchors have on themselves daily - it could be as simple as having a video editor posting their content 9:16 on each platform.