EPISODE SUMMARY

JT Barnett is a founder, creator, and strategist. He’s built multiple TikTok accounts including @honeyhouse, @jtandsami, and @jtbarnett which together amass over 1.5M Followers. He also runs BarnettX, where he teaches businesses how to create on TikTok and headhunts creators to be the “face” of brands.

EPISODE NOTES

On this episode of DTC Pod, JT joins Blaine in the LA studio to talk about how brands can unlock massive growth by thinking like creators. They cover topics including building your tiktok strategy, the ins & outs of the tiktok and instagram algorithm, types of content that perform best, how to generate winning content, brands that have done tiktok organic the right way, finding inspiration for meaningful creative, the role of consistency in content performance, finding your brand voice across channels, how to build an organic audience, launching an SMS community, and much much more.

Learn more about JT here:

https://www.barnettx.com/

JT's TikTok Masterclass for Brands:

https://www.thetiktokmasterclass.com/

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EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

9:32 Get Your Brand Voice Right On Every Channel

Oh, a hundred percent that the companies right now are trying to get one person to speak Chinese English, German, French, all of them at the same time. And what I think they should do is go and find somebody that speaks that specific language that enjoys it, that is like native to that platform and bring them in for only that you'll go, you'll go deeper. It probably will be cost efficient when, because you can just hire them for just that on a project basis. and I think that you'll get way more out of it because the person that you're hiring now knows what they're doing and can go deep into that.

21:50 How Organic Algos Work

the way that it takes off the algorithm works is it is testing your content when you post it, it gets shown to a certain amount of people. I usually just call it. Let's just say it's shown to 10 people and it gets shown to 10 people. And it's testing to see out of those 10 people. Do they engage and interact with that? Th those the metrics that they're actually tracking or like, do they watch the whole thing? Did they share it? Do they favorite it? Do they like it? Do they comment on it? Those kinds of things. If they do, if a certain number of those people engage with it, it gets shown to a bigger set of people. And then that test because it recurs and recurs, so it happens, starts at 10, say a majority of them engage with it. Then it gets shown to a hundred, a majority of them that it goes to a thousand. So on and so forth to where it's on the main for you page, where it's like, what people consider viral.

22:40 Content & Advertising Basics

So to get people, to actually engage with the content, you need to be doing something that is providing them value. Most people call it like educate, entertain or inspire, but like, you're trying to provide them with some sort of value or something that will get them emotionally engaged. When people talk about advertising, what they're really trying to get as a consumer to buy in with their emotions, because that's what you usually buy with. So what I think about in content is like, you need to be doing something that they will actually like want to watch and want to share with somebody or want to save to their phone and, or like favorite app. 

23:15 How To Tell Your Story

And, and the thing that works the best that we see is some sort of storytelling. That means that within the content that needs to have some sort of challenge in some sort of resolution. If you look at like a narrative arc, like, you know, everybody that went to English and then in high school, you learn about these narrative arcs. I was a terrible student, but now I'm going back. I'm like, I actually feel like I remember that you're talking about, you know, you have an intro to video and then you have some sort of a rise to it that sets it up. And then there's a challenge. And then there's a resolution. And I think in every single company's story, if you were to just literally like timeline, like the origin, the company to where you are now, everybody has so many of those little challenges, but they don't talk about them because we come from an Instagram culture that is don't show the flaws, just show the wins, just show the wins. 

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