Content Marketing for independent entrepreneurs done differently. Here's your first tip: You don't need to grow your following.
I'm Only Going To Say This Once. - Fyreside Newsletter - 2/9/26
Hey Reader,It's the Monday after The Big Game and the Patriots didn't win so, in general, I'm pretty content. Last year, I wrote a newsletter/blog about Super Bowl advertising and the impact of Kendrick Lamar's halftime show. You can read it here. I think it's a good read and it's still very relevant/applicable to this year's broadcast. Go read that if you want more Superb Owl content. Instead of writing about the competing halftime shows, the off-putting amount of ai , or that weird urine commercial, I want to keep our conversation about propaganda going. I'm going to spend some time this week breaking down some of yesterday's more slanted commercials, so keep an eye out for that. But today I want to show you a propaganda technique that I use in my own social media. But first, a video! Replying to @dumbrawknee What makes something propaganda? What does it mean for something to be slanted? Why are we bragging about US steel production? . . . #marketingtiktok #propaganda #digitalmarketing #steel #whitehouse The Posting Strategy If you read last week's newsletter, the content of that video should sound familiar to you. It's largely the same info with the added benefit of an example. In that video, I talk about a graph shared by The White House on Twitter. The content of the video is important, but my strategy is hidden in the way it was posted. I posted this video on February 3rd at 5:47 pm and I haven't posted since. "But you need to post daily and consistently!!!" says the devout marketer in the corner. Here's the thing nerd, we're not marketing, we're educating. The core mission of propaganda is to change public opinion and the only way to change the public's opinion is to educate them. There's a fork in the road of propaganda's education methodology. Down the first fork you'll find the "constant barrage" method. If you relentlessly assault someone with information, eventually it will start to stick. My best example of this comes from linguistics. You've likely heard the mnemonic device "i before e, except after c." It's been hammered into the minds of elementary students for literally hundreds of years even though the "after c" part is wrong about 75% of the time! This fork of propaganda methodology knows that, if you say something enough, people will believe it's true. Down the other fork you'll find the methodology that informed my posting strategy. Instead of saying the same thing over and over again, you can enforce the importance of a message by letting it breath. It's the power behind the phrase "I'm only going to say this once." If you want a real world example, I'll reference something from last week's newsletter. The infamous 1998 study linking MMR vaccines to autism stands alone on an island. It's been disproven A BUNCH OF TIMES, but because it was a sole touch point for so long, it's still referenced as true. The Proof Let me show you the analytics. You can see this video got most of it's views on the day it was posted, but let's look closer. Three days after this video was posted, it got another burst of views. On paper, 68 views may not sound like much, but on a video with 939 views, that's a full 7% of the total. Those who know short form video platforms like TikTok will also tell you that your most recent post is always the one that gets pushed. In layman's term's, making a new post tends to kill the performance of your last post. Ok, one more screenshot. Here's my TikTok profile analytics which shows my total daily views from Feb 2nd through Feb 8th. If you look closely, you might notice that my views begin to rise again on Feb 6th. That means that, while I didn't post anything new, the 68 view burst on my previous video was enough to generate an increase in overall viewership over the next two days. The convoluted point I'm trying to make here is that propaganda does not need to be mercilessly repeated to be effective. Nor should you assume that your marketing needs to be hammered in to stick. Sometimes there is value in saying little and leaving your audience to interpret it over time. -MCp.s.
--- Let's celebrate your wins next. Ask me how!
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Bahnfyre
Content Marketing for independent entrepreneurs done differently. Here's your first tip: You don't need to grow your following.
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