113: Billy Bone – Why Meta Ads Are The Future & How To Create Scroll Stopping Content 

So, what the Thunderdome system does is we leverage the Facebook algorithm by saying, right, I’m going to give you four different concepts, and I’ll just explain what a concept is for maybe any of the listeners who haven’t actually come up with concepts of social media. So when I’m talking about concepts, I’m talking about key moments at a wedding. So it’s things like the dad’s reaction, the groom’s reaction walking down the aisle, the confetti shot, the couples walking outside. It might be a venue shot. A concept might be a mashup of everything that that I’ve just mentioned there. So what we do is we’ll give the the we’ll tell in our Facebook ads. We’ll tell Facebook, right here is four different concepts. You choose how to spend my money on, the one that you think is going to get the best results. Now what most people in the wedding industry do, they will upload a video with the copy that I’ve just talked about based on pricing based on book Me Now for a discounted price.

But what we do in the Thunderdome system is, and what people do is they’ll have the same image and they’ll have the same video. And what’ll happen is because they’re spending all of the money on one creative or one concept, people start seeing that ad 4 or 5 times and you just get you just ignore it. Well, if what the Thunderdome system does, because we give it up to four, sometimes even up to six concepts on day one, Facebook might feed out my confetti shot. The next time someone sees the ad, it might be the groom reaction. The next time we add served out to someone, it might be the the first the first ad again, but then the fourth time it might be a complete different video, but each time the message is also changing as well. So one ad that worked incredibly well for my wedding videography business was it was a dad reaction, and the copy across the top of the page was I’ll never forget the look on my dad’s face when he saw me in my wedding dress for the first time.

Now you can see straight away how that message is so much more powerful than book me now for the discounted price. Because if you’re getting married right, what do you want to do? You want to wait and watch what the dad’s reaction was like? Um, and one of the even outside of ads, one of the reports that I uploaded that got over a million views on Facebook was a groom reaction. And all it basically said was wait for his reaction, and that’ll go over a million views. And it’s because you’re given people. Right? I want to see what his reaction is here. And they can see a groom standing at the, at the, at the altar in the church. I can’t remember where it was, but um, and then, yeah, it just went mental on social media. So it’s never about tricking the algorithm. No one can ever trick it. But if you understand how it works, you can you can leverage it to to your advantage.

So one of the biggest mistakes that people do make is and I totally understand why people do this, because we’re all creatives. So the automatic thought is if you’re a wedding photographer, you want to go and show your best work straight away and it’s the most polished work. And if you’re a videographer, you want to show that you’re real and you really want to show like the best video. But you’ve got to play the social media game. And the first let’s talk about the video. Let’s talk about videos, because even photographers should be leveraging videos, um, for social media now. And there’s some fantastic examples online of photographers implementing videos for their creatives that cut from video to photos. So you are showing your work, but you’re kind of playing the social media game because the way people are viewing content now, like on TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, you’ve got that’s what people are expecting to consume and they go on social media. So even as a photographer, this is what you should be doing.

But to answer your question, the first thing that people should be doing is concentrating on the first three seconds of your video. Because if you do not grab someone’s attention in the first three seconds, you’ve seen how fast people scroll on the phone like this. If you don’t stop the scroll, they’re not going to see the rest of your content. So the first three seconds is important and one of the biggest mistakes people make and I’m going to this is a real videography example is they’ll upload the show reel or highlight reel, social media and the mindset of a bride and groom and the scrolling on social media. They’re not there to to look for wedding content. So if you’re if you start your showreel with a really nice drone shot and then it fades in from black and then your logo comes on the screen like there’s really cinematic opening. You’ve lost people straight away because they see a black screen and they’re like, oh, I don’t know what this is. In the scrolled through past. So this is why the first three seconds on the video that got over a million views organically on my page, it was the groom standing.

It had wait for his reaction. And it gives people who are who know it’s a wedding straight away who are interested in weddings, the know they want to watch more because they want to see the reaction, but also it’s the aspect ratio that people upload as well. So most people, when they upload a showreel, it’ll be in 16 by nine, which is how you would edit a show reel, because that’s how people are going to watch it on a TV, where on a phone it needs to be vertical. I mean, it doesn’t have to be vertical, but it gets more attention. So if you just think about the real estate that it takes up on the phone, if it’s vertical, it almost fills someone’s screen where if it’s 16 by nine, you’re losing all that real estate. So it’s all about having the correct aspect ratio for a reel or a TikTok video to how people would expect to see it. But you must give them something, um, that’s going to hook them in. Now, one of the again, I’m going to give a videography example because I am a videographer, but one one that’s worked incredibly well on my ads at the moment is obviously wait for his reaction.

But another one that performed very well was it’s like pressing play on my wedding photos, because what we’re doing here is right. We’re. And I’m not digging out photographers here because you can totally reverse that as a photographer and say it’s like freezing time at your wedding, or like freezing the moments in your wedding where most people are focusing on the copy in the same packages from 4.95, we’re we’re painting that picture of having the moments recorded at your wedding and that. And that’s what it’s about.