Facebook - Cracking the Code with Dennis Yu
Dennis Yu gave an enlightening presentation at the annual DMC conference about Facebook and how to crack the code that is Facebook.
Dennis Yu is the Chief Executive Officer of BlitzMetrics, a digital marketing agency that focuses on providing education to young adults at no cost. Dennis has been featured on CNN, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and several other prominent publications.
In his presentation, Dennis starts out by talking about the ACC Funnel and how people are born to be great sequential storytellers. This is the theme throughout his entire presentation so it is important to understand what the ACC Funnel is.
Here is a slide from his presentation that explains the ACC Funnel:
After explaining the ACC funnel to the audience, Dennis asked several questions:
- What are people paying money for?
- Who are people that have authority in the topic you’re looking at?
Dennis explains that according the ACC funnel, you should be presenting your best 9 pieces of content—3 pieces of content for each of the 3 ACC funnel categories. He says that by creating quality content using this method you will be able to reduce your CPM (cost per impression).
Here is a good visual that explains this concept:
Dennis then goes into more detail about what videos in each of these categories could look like:
Dennis then breaks down some very simple but important video stats and strategies:
- The average watch time for a Facebook video is 6 seconds.
- Facebook videos should be in the 4:5 vertical format. Do NOT use landscape mode.
- The average view through rate on Facebook is 30%, but you should strive to be at more like 50%.
- When using video remarketing, do NOT use the default setting—choose 10 seconds.
Here is a slide from Dennis’s presentation that presents even more in-depth video stats related to the ACC funnel:
After presenting these strategies, Dennis transitions his presentation into talking about how people should get into the habit of creating 1 minute videos. He says 1 minute videos are the key to great content—they are relatable and just long enough to keep someone engaged.
“What if I don’t like filming myself?” an audience member asked. “Then point the camera at someone else!” Dennis responded.
Dennis explains that there are 3 components to a one minute video:
After explaining what each component of the one minute should be, Dennis gives a timeline of how long each of these three sections should be:
Dennis says you should absolutely waste no time in the first 40 seconds of the video—get right to your story. The first 40 seconds of the video should explain “why” someone should even care what you’re saying. Once you’ve finished the first 40 seconds, you should transition from the emotion you just told to the overarching lesson of what you stand for—this should take about 15 seconds and be a very brief and concise belief statement.
Dennis closes out his presentation by reiterating that “content building is like a diet” in that it takes time. It takes time to build an audience. It takes time to see high engagement results on your content. Dennis encouraged the audience to create evergreen content—content that can be used, reused, recycled, and that is always relevant and never goes out of style: “unicorn content,” as Larry Kim calls it. Dennis encourages Facebook users to lean into the algorithm, letting your content drive your targeting and strategy and give the algorithm what it wants, and then you’ll succeed and you’ll be able to crack the code that is Facebook.