Book Review: Day Trading Attention by Gary Vaynerchuk
If you're looking to improve your social media game, this book is a great place to start.
There are so many variables to consider when thinking through your personal and organizational social media strategy. Should you create accounts on every single new platform that comes out or just focus on one? Should you post text, images, or videos? Should you hire a company to do your posting or do it yourself? What are the differences in demographics between the platforms?
Gary Vaynerchuk’s new 2024 book Day Trading Attention addresses these questions. I’m going to highlight the most important thing I learned from his book, share some other interesting ideas, and cover some benefits of each platform.
The One Thing
The most important idea in this book is that of the Interest Graph. Social media algorithms are prioritizing content based upon your areas of interest over who you follow. Therefore, you might see more content about books than content from your high school friend you haven’t seen in 20 years. It’s more about the content you like over the people you follow.
This has tremendous implications for you. It means that to some degree, the playing field gets leveled. Even if you don’t have thousands of followers, you can reach people by focusing on good content about relevant topics over spending time trying to amass a huge following.
Interesting Ideas
Here are some other ideas that stuck out to me in the book:
Become a prolific poster on social media platforms. View each post as an experiment. View the analytics and then pay to amplify the posts that organically do well. This is contrasted with running cold ad campaigns where you just hope an ad does well.
Consumer behavior is rapidly moving away from traditional keyword Google searches and is moving towards more advanced voice and AI search. This has implications for your SEO and social media strategies.
There is a great opportunity in running ads on streaming platforms like Hulu right now. For as little as $500/month, you can run a video ad/commercial that will likely show up on someone’s TV, something that would cost tremendously more on broadcast TV.
Gary says collectibles might be the next big thing (think baseball cards, cereal box toys, and Cracker Jack trinkets). What is your organization offering on this front? Do you have products or collectible branded items for people to collect?
Platform Focus
Here are a few highlights concerning the benefits of each social media platform:
Facebook works well for local businesses and a local focus.
Even if TikTok trends towards a younger crowd (Gary says that is changing), it’s worthwhile to practice on TikTok as many of the other platforms adopt features first introduced there.
Older LinkedIn posts move to the top of people’s feeds when liked or commented upon. It’s a good idea to regularly post career, news, or content updates on your LinkedIn personal or company profile.
YouTube offers YouTube Shorts, a way to upload shorter videos to your account directly from your phone. This could be a good way to repurpose some of your longer-form videos.
In all, seek ways to create top-level content that can then be further broken down and repurposed across the different platforms. This helps you to utilize the benefits of each platform without having it turn into a full time job.