I’m Aleyn, and I work as a communications specialist at contentgroup. One of my favourite parts of the job is creating TikTok content for Rugby Unity, a podcast we produce that brings fans closer to the game they love. For me, social media is a tool to connect communities and spark conversations.
Who’s the best person you know at growing a presence on social media?
For me, it’s The Attention Seeker’s Head of Growth, Jony Lee. With more than 332K followers on Instagram and 763K on TikTok, Jony is a social media master and marketing genius. From outrageous bets (like wagering she’d never quit her job if she failed to hit a follower milestone) to viral stunts, Jony has built a reputation as a creative storyteller.
I caught up with Jony to talk about the strategies behind her success.
If you could synthesise your marketing strategy to the bare bones, what would it be?
Our marketing strategy is “how do we get as many eyes on us as possible organically?”
The Attention Seeker in itself, is just showing what we preach. So, practicing what we say we can do for clients.
Once we have attention, we can [encourage] them to do what we want. So, whether that is to purchase something, click on a link, sign up, or give their email, I can only do those actions if I achieve a very high amount of viewership.
Last time we talked, you made a massive bet about never quitting your job. In less than two minutes, could you summarise the entire saga and the outcome?
The bet was that if I achieved this thing, I would get something great. If I don’t reach this thing, I’m never allowed to quit ever again. And if I do quit, every dollar that I make with any other employer must go to Stanley Henry (CEO of the Attention Seeker).
OK, but you can’t do that legally. But we made the series as if we got a lawyer to, you know, write up this thing, and we ended up getting a few million views.
If you’re a marketer, the reason we did it was for a two-prong approach: one, get people to understand that we were going to New York, and then the second thing was to attract attention that may lead to followers. Then hopefully that followership, I could lead them into watching the journey of us just existing in New York.
What do you think about omnichannel strategies?
If the platform can take the content that you’ve made and the format, you should post it there because it’s just another channel for viewership.
There’s no point in not posting it, because it’s not made for the platform. No, the content may find an audience that you didn’t know existed. You can’t assume that it’s not made for that platform.
We cross-post stuff all the time, and they’ll be successful across all the platforms because good content is good content. It will resonate with someone, and it will have that snowball effect.
So, when you make content, you're not filming specifically for TikTok or Instagram?
Yeah, I think “How do I make this entertaining to a wide audience?”
That’s it. I’m not saying, “How do I make this entertaining for Instagram? Or how do I make this entertaining for Facebook?” Rather, how do I make this entertaining, full stop, for anyone?
What is your favorite social media platform?
Instagram. Essentially, [Instagram is] getting better at finding the right people to push your content to. So, we all know that algorithms are relatively random. If there’s a piece of content that resonates with a certain type of person, it will continue to try to find that person.
Do you have any tips for LinkedIn?
If I were to give you 5 tips, they would be:
- Connect with 10 people a day.
- Meet up with the people that you connect with; it’s just a free way of getting more people into your LinkedIn network
- Comment on posts! People think that you must post content as a written post for it to count as content. Comments are the highest prioritised metric that LinkedIn looks at.
- Post consistently.
- Do all of that together – it creates like a strong wrap-around effect, and now you’re the king of LinkedIn. That’s essentially what Stanley Henry does. That’s why you can’t get rid of him. You see him in every single person’s comment section. You see him every single post, and all you can think of is Stanley Henry.
What advice would you give smaller creators on growing their audience?
Identify the human truth of your story. What is the human truth that is relatable to everyone? It will just manifest in a very specific way.
For the Attention Seeker, the human truth is hierarchy. The hierarchy concept, superior and subordinate, you don’t just see that in a work setting; you see that with your eldest sibling and yourself, with your parents and yourself, or you see that with a student and a teacher. A 16-year-old can understand, and a 60-year-old can understand; they don’t have to understand what it’s like to work with a boss.
In our content, I always say the word my boss because it instantly puts an idea in someone’s brain of how that dynamic is meant to play out. That’s the human truth that we use, but now it can manifest itself in so many things, so sometimes they’ll manifest in me asking him a question, me doing a podcast with him, or me doing a vlog.
