Stop Scrolling!

by Viktor Grant
July 27, 2020. Latest update 9.18.2020

The average attention span of humans today, according to 'experts' in a recent study is less than that of a Goldfish or 7 seconds.

However, to grab a potential customer's attention on social media and stop them from scrolling past your post or ad, you must do so in 1/7 of a second!

Once you have their attention, you need to do extra work to convince them to pay attention for 2-3 seconds...

You MUST STOP people from scrolling past your posts.

Why?

The latest research on brain science and "neuromarketing" suggests that the human brain can 'recognize' something and decide 'yes' or 'no' in as little as 1/5 to 1/10 of a second depending on the person. That's how quickly people can recognize a brand or shape, or whether they're interested in something or not!

How can you stand out from the crowd?

I'm Viktor Grant.  I'm the creator of the Earthgrid Search Engine, SearchTriggers and most recently SociSNAP, the Social Media Editor.

 
I help people to increase their return on investment in their marketing.

Until today, I've kept my 'secret sauce' very close to my chest. Today, in this article I'll be sharing my TOP 5 Action Tips and resources to help you increase your engagement, deliverability and most importantly stop people from scrolling past your messages.  This is what I use and what enabled me to stand out from the pack...

What is 'the pack'?  When I was surfing in Hawaii many times you would see a ton of people ALL TRYING to catch the same wave at the same time.

Until I learned the 'secret' I was trying to 'fit in' with the 'pack' and 'wait for my opportunity' to come.  The image below shows what it's like to 'surf' with the pack. It's not really a lot of fun. Jockeying for position... 3 people riding the same wave? No thanks.... I'd rather stand out from the pack and ride the waves that OTHERS ARE NOT RIDING!

Would you rather surf with the pack or stand out? 

I teach digital marketing strategy every week and have done so consistently for years.

Every week, I’m a co-host in 2 or 3 live events: Monday’s at 7 PM Eastern for Intentional Mentoring, an audio call, that anyone who has the dial-in number can join, and Thursdays on ZOOM where I teach different digital marketing strategies to a New York city-based E-learning club.

In the Daily Digital Club, I teach different aspects of digital marketing in live ZOOM training programs. Each of these programs lasts 3-7 weeks per topic, ranging from Facebook Ads, "How to Generate Your First Million Views on Youtube", to Email marketing, and now, the ancient roots of human behavior as it applies to engagement and sales funnels.

What led to this article were THREE simple questions:

• Why do most of our people who SHOW UP to our weekly ZOOM webinars originate from Social Media posts, NOT from email or their prior registrations?

• What do we need to do to improve our attendance?

• How can we inspire our attendees to take action?

Chances are if you’re reading this, you’re probably struggling with the same challenges as I was until I started DIGGING

Information Overload?

Did you know that 90% of the world's data was CREATED in the last 2 years!

On the surface, these appear to be universal problems sourced by the global movement towards the singularity fueled by information overload...too many choices and people simply ‘forget’

However, what if there was an actual biological factor or neurological factor behind this challenge?

After doing the research for this article, I discovered, there actually is a neurological connection. In short, people take action not based on thinking but based on something else...more primitive.

At the time of this writing, we have 1207 people registered for this weekly program. With only 100 seats available, you might think that our classes are filled.  Sadly, they are not.

Until recently we relied on ZOOM to send out our mail for us. They send out a reminder email a week before, a day before, and an hour before the event. Upon doing research, we found that ALL these emails that ZOOM sends go to SPAM. Virtually nobody sees these messages. The way we actually get people to show up is by exporting our ZOOM registrations, sending reminder emails to each attendee, and then posting reminder notices on Social media. If it is a really important event, we even ‘boost’ that post to the same people who registered for the event. It is a LOT more manual work, that could be avoided easily if we had different systems in place in the world.

But I can tell you, the “automation systems” of today are rooted in social media and mobile phones.

If you rely solely on email for your marketing you will most likely end up with empty pockets. Yet, if you don’t integrate email WITH social media in the right way for each medium, you’ll also have empty pockets! The key is….i'll say it again.

You MUST STOP people from scrolling past your posts.

YOU need to BE that ONE thing that is different from all the other posts that causes people to stop their mindless automatic scrolling habit.

Here is an image from one of my most successful boosted posts:

What about Email?

It is helpful to think of email as just ‘another’ form of social media.

Most of your email “subscribers” will be on one of the Top 3 free email services or their families, and each of those services decides what letters will reach your subscribers based on their rules, not yours.

People are scrolling thru their emails just the same, probably faster than they are in social media.

In Social media at least you can catch their attention with pictures and short videos.

This article is a synopsis of some of my deepest insights: deep knowledge based on research with my search engine, earthgrid, to find the most relevant information on this important topic.

In preparing for this article, I started by searching for the subject line and then reading several of those articles. After reading them, I realized that what they all had in common were general ideas that were the author’s ‘opinion’ rather than something backed by research and testing. I also wanted to make sure that my article was unique and not based on what others were saying on the topic but included the key refined principles.

So these are my top 5 tips for stopping people from scrolling and the research & resources behind them.

What is Tube Relevance? Simply said, its my YouTube Training where I show you the exact pathway that I did to generate my first million views on YouTube. Yes, it is included with the software.

Thumbnail images are the #1 Factor in Causing Your Videos to be seen on YouTube. Period.

If your video clip on Facebook is longer than 15 seconds, the only thing people will see is your thumbnail image with a 'play' button so you must have an Eye-Popping Thumbnail or your videos won't get played and your video ads will cost a lot more!

Action Tip #4

TIP #3:  Build short video clips that are less than 15 seconds in length that CONTAIN your main ‘hook’.

Use animations to get your point across in 2 seconds. By far the best performing posts are those where I use my friend Joey Xoto's tool (see video above) to craft short animated video openers.

Facebook and Instagram will auto-play these videos if and only if they are less than 15 seconds in length. If you don’t already have it, I highly recommend you start making these short animations with Viddyoze before you spend another minute posting on social media or running ads by picking it up here.

I have used this tool hundreds of times. It’s my go-to software to make attention-grabbing videos and introductions to my longer streams.

Action Tip #3

BONUS: NINJA MARKETING ACTION STEPS

- FIRST make your longer video (see tip #5). Upload this to YouTube and/or Facebook

- SECOND make an Eye-Popping Thumbnail (see tip #4). Set this as your preview image.
- THIRD make an animation of under 15 seconds. Upload this to Youtube and/or Facebook. PIN IT!

- BOOST your short <15 second clip.

- RETARGET people who watch your short clip to view your longer video!

Keep reading for more tips... because just having a video and great content IS NOT ENOUGH..

These next 2 steps are essential if you want people to TAKE ACTION on your videos.

Tip #2: Keep your core message to 100 characters or less.

A brief history of mobile texting

Back in 1985, the chairman of Global Systems for Mobile Communications ( a group that sets STANDARDS for the global mobile market ) was given an important job: set the limit on the number of characters a text message could contain.

Being a practical man, the story goes that he sat down at a ‘typewriter’ (remember those?) and started jotting down random sentences and questions from the top of his head.

When he’d written them all out, he counted up the average number of characters for each sentence and arrived at the magic number: 160

Next, he did the same with postcards he had received and found the average character count was around 150.

Lastly, he counted the number of characters that came thru a Telex transmitter. He found that it was about the same as the messages he received on postcards, 150.

He took this research back to the Board of Directors and they set the global standard for SMS to 160 characters.

In 2006, Twitter pioneered its service by limiting messages with links and hashtags to 140 characters. 20 characters were reserved for the username.

Facebook has around a 106 character limit before the ‘...See More’ appears on a post. Using our software, SociSNAP we can measure any block of text and give an accurate count.

What you may not realize is that Facebook counts the '...See More' as a 'click' typically when you run ads to it.  Our research shows that the majority of link clicks OUT of our website do not originate from the 'learn more' button, but instead from the plain text link ABOVE the image!  I know this because I've looked at the stats on my ad manager.  The majority of our 'clicks' are 'see more'.  I found that if you place a short link next to the 'see more' it increases the number of clicks that leave the ad and continue to your website.

You can further enhance your posts and ads by simply adding 'formatting' to your posts. Like this:

This ad did very well for my client. Notice how its perfectly uses emojis and formatted text to make the post much more friendly and engaging!

What's nice about 'Unicode' is that it 'works' on any device that is able to support it.  Our software CONVERTS the common 'HTML' into the closest 'unicode equivalent'

Tik Tok publicly announced the 100 character limit on its posts.  To get your point across on TikTok you want to use emojis. If you're the only one there with bolds and italics  you'll also stand out from the crowd!

The bottom line is you need to learn how to ‘hook’ someone in 100 characters and do so effectively and consistently with your writing.

See https://search.earthgrid.com/?q=160+character+message+limit+origin

You must use effective copywriting that speaks to the ‘action brain’

We’ve split-tested this with countless ads and variances.

The image or video itself IS NOT ENOUGH: you need the words too!

Oftentimes, a single Emoji will affect the performance of the ad by a huge factor!

Studies in Neuroscience revealed some interesting insights:

• Human beings possess TWO two parallel circuits in their mind, one for thinking and one for doing. Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman suggests that 95% of purchase decisions are made by the non-conscious ‘doing’ mind.
  
  
• The brain is designed to avoid using the ‘thinking mind’ by using shortcuts to make purchase decisions. Since the ‘doing’ mind is designed to help us survive in a hostile natural environment, the ‘doing’ mind has developed energy preservation strategies. The brain, which accounts for only some 3% of body weight, accounts for approximately 20% of all energy consumed, the ‘doing’ mind seems to have focused on finding ingenious decision shortcuts that eliminate the need for thinking.
  
  
• The challenge to ‘sell’ is to shape memory and trigger the ‘doing mind’ to say ‘yes’, while minimizing the ‘thinking mind’s high energy activity. This is why ‘brand strategy’ is so important. In a fraction of a second, we recognize a brand or a symbol and purchase based on that.
  
  

We’ve found that the simplest way to trigger the non-conscious DOING mind is through EMOJIS.

Action Tip #2

What is an Emoji?

It’s actually quite simple. An emoji is symbol or character within the Universal Standard Code otherwise known as Unicode. Started more than 20 years ago, unicode.org organizes the character sets that the world’s information systems use to communicate. Until the Unicode was invented it required that each country install a ‘font’ in order to display its character sets.

Mobile phones, computers, and other digital devices all use the Unicode.

How did Emojis Take Over the World?

Back in 2007 Japan was going crazy with emojis, these little characters to symbolize initially human emotions as cartoon characters, FOOD, and animals. At the time there was no mobile device that could generate those special ‘characters’. Apple computer embraced the emoji and built it into the iPhone. The word on the street was that, Apple, wanted to sell its phones to the Japanese market because it appealed to the Emojis. The story goes that ‘slyly’ they added Emoji characters to the keyboard of the phone and ‘hoped’ the West would not notice. The 'West’ did notice and demanded Emojis. Emojis were a hit and a large part of the popularity of the iPhone. It was a craze.

Why does YouTube not have emojis? * Guess what, with our software you can!

With its hundreds of millions of videos the titles, descriptions, and text are all plain text. Until the first version of our software released in 2018, there are was no ‘formatting’ on Youtube.

With our software, you can create ‘rich descriptions’ like this and garner more attention (and more views)

SociSNAP is the software I use and recommend every day.

It is built to keep you in the ‘FLOW’ of communication without breaking your flow.

Before SociSNAP I had so many tabs open and switching back and forth between them. I was writing my documents, I was searching for emojis on ‘free’ sites, I was using ‘free’ tools to convert one word or phrase into machine-readable Unicode. I found myself wasting a ton of time and the worst part was I often got DISTRACTED

By the time I pasted in the emoji into my post or ad, I saw something that took me somewhere else.

Bonus Tip: Stay Focused. Avoid Distractions

Researcher Gloria Mark found that on average it takes 1,395 seconds to get back to your task at hand (23 minutes and 15 seconds) after a distraction!

See https://search.earthgrid.com/?q=distraction+study+23+minutes+

Our software not only will help you get attention, but it also will help you write those 100 character attention-grabbing ‘hooks’ that are so essential for stopping people from scrolling past your posts.

If you can’t stop people from scrolling past your posts, you will be LOSING A LOT OF MONEY if you advertise.

Contrary to the popular idea that you only ‘pay per click’, the way the cost per click is computed is based on the GROSS number of IMPRESSIONS they deliver. It is that way with EVERY advertising medium. The more you are able to inspire people to take action FROM the medium the less it will cost you to reach them.

Wondering why suddenly your cost per click is going WAY UP all of a sudden?

It simply means MORE people are scrolling past YOUR POST or YOUR EMAIL, and simply NOT NOTICING IT!

It is all about getting NOTICED.

I made SociSNAP so that you’ll get Noticed TOO!

In fact, I’m confident you’ll love it because SociSnap is:

Incredibly easy to use - Have you ever seen social media posts with the eye-grabbing bold or italics and wondered how they did it? With SociSnap it’s a snap. Just click a button, et voila! ... Your content is formatted and vetted for delivery with the most popular alternative phrases being offered… ready for you to use in Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok or any social media platform

Brand new Favorites & Popular Tabs - discover the most popular emojis and keep your favorites quickly at your fingertips. The more you use them the more SociSnap learns what emojis you use the most often. In addition, the top 100 emojis of all our users are visible in a single click. You’ll never struggle to find that perfect emoji again!

Facebook, YouTube, and Conversion Training Included - Want to learn the secrets and science of sales conversions that very few marketers know and understand? It’s all there in the SociSnap videos section. If you were to buy these programs individually you’d spend more than $300 but during this pre-launch only they are included with your SociSnap access. Ever wonder how to make effective Facebook ads? Want to learn how I, grew my YouTube channel to now more than 2.2 million views from nothing? You can when you access your SociSnap tool. Video training is given freely as a bonus.

Ridiculously Effective - The posts created by SociSNAP and the Facebook Training inside is based on everything I’ve learned over the past 25 years studying the world’s greatest digital marketers. As a result, they’re specifically designed to build maximum engagement, so you can achieve incredible results.

Unbelievably Safe to Use - With SociSNAP, you’ll never have to worry about writing something that can get your social media accounts flagged, or your emails going to spam again. You’ll get over 350+ "trigger" words that we've identified cause problems with email and social media. With one mouse click, you can quickly identify and highlight all the 'challenge' words and replace them with more professional and friendly equivalents. We even provide an ever-growing community 'thesaurus' of terms that our members are updating each week as more people use our software.

If you’re ready to get SociSnap, there’s no better time than the present. You can save 30% if you act now by using this exclusive promo code: prelaunch.

Action Tip #1

Learn more about Socisnap: The Social Media Editor