Season 1. Episode 16: Secrets of Building 120M Followers

When you realize that Saul Leal, General Manager at FamilyShare Network, has developed a following of 120 million people, you might conclude that he would be a great source of advice on content strategy…and you would be right. Saul took time out recently to record an interview with Jeff Pedowitz. Jeff asked him if the skill sets of the content marketing team were changing and how he trained and prepared his 4000 contributors. The answer was very illuminating.

“Most of our employees are statistical oriented, more mathematical oriented, more numbers oriented. Most of our employees are not journalists…even though we create anywhere from 600 to 1200 media posts a day. None of our content creators are actually journalists even though articles are a big piece of our assets. The reason we set it up this way is because at this point in the maturity cycle it is all about understanding the audience. And the best way to understand the audience is through behavior, and through their natural behavior as they engage with the content, as they “like”, as they comment, as they share. And that behavior is what drives our content strategy. So as a content strategist you have to be more statistical, more mathematical, you are understanding that behavior through the numbers of the audience. That is a change from 10 years ago. The time response from social media is very quick. This is an important concept I want to share with you. What social media has brought to us at FamilyShare is that within 20 seconds, sometimes even less than that, I know if a piece of content works or doesn’t work. I know if a piece of content is going to become viral or not within a minute, and if it doesn’t go viral I know what content doesn’t work, and if it goes viral I know what pieces of content do work. Now I can create a whole table based on the behavioral feedback of the audience and that provides feedback and trains my contributors, and I can make a normal contributor become a super writer, a super author, that can create viral content constantly.”

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