Uploading... philip Podcast - Uploading
Welcome to this episode of Uploading, and today we have the pleasure of speaking with Philip Rafini, who is the head of media at Rupa Health. We're really excited to talk with Philip because, you know, Philip's been a guest on our other podcast, DTC pod, and he is an absolute content expert. He's run an agency, done over 100 million views on social, and now since then, he's moved into the b two B space, and it's just absolutely crushing it in content. So, Philip, before I mess anything else up, I'm going to let you kick it off. Why don't you just introduce yourself and talk to us a little bit about your background and what you're working on.
Philip Ruffini 00:01:10 - 00:01:36
Yeah, so my name is Philip. Background that I think is relevant to this is used to run my own e commerce business in college. I sold it. Then I went to go be a product manager at Microsoft, where I worked on an operating system and App Store. That was the most miserable thing I've ever done. So I left, but learned a ton about product. Left to go do a startup, didn't work out. And then I spent a year and a half doing growth consulting, and I realized that companies were really bad at making organic content.
Philip Ruffini 00:01:36 - 00:02:16
I had grown my LinkedIn to sell a course. I had grown my TikTok for fun and then was working with Alchemy, which is a web three blockchain company. They were doing really well with content. So essentially I was like, short form media, super important. You can make a TikTok account, you can get a million views. I'm going to go start an agency selling short form video marketing for tech companies. So I was basically the only former Microsoft product manager going around selling like five figure a month TikTok marketing contracts to post series A startups. So I worked with companies like Maven, Wayflyer, Drew Classic, which isn't a tech company, and a bunch of others.
Philip Ruffini 00:02:16 - 00:03:12
And then I ran that agency for literally only eight months. And then I got to the point where I was like, what am I doing with my life? Just because agencies don't have a ton of fulfillment, you're not really going to build anything long term, and you don't really see compounding results. Because even with my best clients, one of my best customers turned after three months because it was a crypto company and us regulations changed and we couldn't do it anymore. Then Tara Viswanathan, who's the CEO of Rupa Health, is one of my close friends and her CMO, or head of growth, Kobe Conrad, was basically, like, helping me with my agency because he used to run his own. And then they convinced me to come build a media business at Rupa Health instead. So now I just do that. And at Rupa Health, I'm in charge of our magazine, which is a blog, but we call it a magazine because doctors want to write for a magazine, not a blog. Our newsletter, our podcast, and most of our social media, like YouTube, LinkedIn, and then work with someone else on our Instagram and Facebook.
Philip Ruffini 00:03:12 - 00:03:16
And the whole goal is, how do we build an audience of a million doctors? I love that.
I think we're going to have a whole bunch to unpack here because, like you're saying when you're thinking about media, there's all these channels you're supervising. You need to build a really complex content strategy. And quite frankly, the content landscape has evolved. And a lot of b, two b businesses are trying to catch up, and we like talking to the ones that are really innovating in the space. So I know you hit on a bunch of the channels that you're doing and a bunch of the little things, but why don't we start with.
Philip Ruffini 00:03:44 - 00:03:44
When.
You enter Rupa, what are the first items on your plate that you want to build as you think about running the head of media, what's everything that you have to get in place, and how do you set things up operationally for success?
Philip Ruffini 00:03:55 - 00:04:37
So before I started, one of the reasons I took the job is because I think Kobe is the head of growth, is the best marketer I've ever met. Kobe was the one who started the podcast, which is going to be profitable by the end of this year, meaning despite all of our costs on, it's going to make more money than it. So pretty much my first job was basically like, go figure out YouTube. So our whole goal is we had the magazine that was doing pretty well and was like a pretty linear trajectory, the podcast. But the podcast, it's hard to grow a podcast because there's no growth channel. So my job was to go figure out YouTube. So essentially, I built a team of ten doctors that all started making YouTube videos for us. And then I had six full time video editors editing those videos.
Philip Ruffini 00:04:38 - 00:05:26
And we basically had to just test and figure out what worked, because when I started, our YouTube videos average like less than 100 views, like most companies. And now they probably average like at least 2500. We've gotten ones that are like 20, 30,000. But the content strategy we went with is we do hour long lectures that are like deep medical topics. So at first we started with really simple small ones and realized no one cared. So we now basically take world renowned doctors who have given lectures, like conferences or at universities, and then we pay them to just take their lecture content they have already created, record it into a video, and then we add world class animators and professional video editors to the videos to post. And we do at least probably one video every other day. And then it was just figuring out how do we combine all of our channels.
Philip Ruffini 00:05:26 - 00:06:15
Like, our Facebook page was at 400,000 followers, been already growing, Instagram was at 110,000 followers, been already growing, and the podcast was, like, super Stagnant. So since then, I think a lot of doing content well is having one source of one or two sources of original content. And then how do you combine them? Right. It is a lot of effort to use your big Facebook page or Instagram page to drive traffic to podcast because people don't want to leave a platform. So we have, I think, 13 people full time in the Philippines that help run everything. So, like, for example, with our LinkedIn, I found a venture backed founder that uses Rupa Hell API for his company. Wanted to build a better relationship with Rupa Hell has like 10,000 Twitter followers. He ghostwrites our LinkedIn content.
Philip Ruffini 00:06:15 - 00:07:15
And then I have a VA in the Philippines who actually posted it and manage it in real time because I refuse to schedule anything because I think scheduling on LinkedIn actually hurts engagement. So I was doing a lot of that and going through a bunch of different video editors. I have one video editor whose full time job is to just watch our podcast and cut clips from it. And I was super skeptical that someone could pick out clips and edit them really well because every time I've seen, it's kind of like been two people, but just got really lucky with then, you know, then we have a VA based in Central America, and then someone in the Philippines who posts those clips to LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram so we have a podcast agency that edits our podcast. They send us the video, and then all of the vas know when they get the email to basically go through that and then manage all the posts. So I just write really detailed sops for everyone to follow. Like, hey, Julius, you get the podcast clip. You cut it up, and then you give it to Sam and Veronica, and they post it and just really detailed sops and loops.
Ramon Berrios 00:07:15 - 00:07:38
There is so much to unpack there. I want to take a step back into the first thing you said, which was, it is going to be ROI positive. So what does that mean internally? What does ROI success look like for you when you're running a b two b media operation? And how are you measuring the ROI of the investment? Because you're not necessarily taking sponsors or anything like that.
Philip Ruffini 00:07:38 - 00:08:10
Yeah, a couple of things. One, content is really hard. Companies don't want to spend money on content because it's like a risk, right? If you start a TikTok account, it's really hard to generate a positive ROi. We spend way more money probably on our YouTube channel than we make. But it's like, really quick side story. We do weekly live classes. Doctors come in and give weekly live classes. So I went to a conference, and I was at the conference and some doctor comes up to me and they're like, I just wanted to say thank you because I love watching your weekly live classes.
Philip Ruffini 00:08:10 - 00:08:42
And I was like, oh, do you know we also post them to YouTube every week? And she's like, oh, I'm going to go watch them on my tv. Then she's like, I love this doctor from call Colorado. So I go to one of the people on the team, and I was like, adrian, who was this person, like this doctor in Colorado that made the video? Because if this person's willing to come to me in a conference to say that they like this one person in Colorado, they have to be really good. So I reach out to the doctor in Colorado. I was like, hey, do you want to make more videos with us? We get on the call. It turns out she was the doctor. For a world famous athlete. She does, like, cutting edge research.
Philip Ruffini 00:08:42 - 00:09:12
She sends it to 2000 doctors a month. And when we got on the call, she was in the middle of watching a video of a hormone expert, of a video I made with someone else. So it's like the doctor everyone likes is already watching our videos and sends all of her research out and wants to make videos for us. And it's like, okay, if this woman who's emailing her research to 2000 other doctors every month is watching our YouTube videos. I don't care if it gets 100 views. She's one of them. And that's worth so much more. Right.
Philip Ruffini 00:09:13 - 00:09:56
So, Dr. Answer your question directly, like positive ROi on the podcast. Basically, the Podcast Ripa Health is a marketplace for lab test ordering. So we're basically tracking what percentage of our GMV in the marketplace. So what orders, amount of money in orders per month is directly attributed to the podcast. So doctors who place order in our marketplace, what percentage of that GMV came from, people who said they heard about it from the podcast. The profit on that GMV by the end of this year will definitely be higher than what we spend every month on the podcast produce, paying the podcast host, advertising it on Facebook, the editors who edit it, the agency. And that is only attributable GMV.
Philip Ruffini 00:09:56 - 00:10:16
Right. And the only way we attribute it is when people sign up for Rubah Health. They mark, we heard about Ruba Health from the podcast. It is definitely higher than that, like 100%. But if you use this lowest metric, it took two years. But it's going to also, we're going to sell ad sponsorships on the podcast, and that is going to easily surpass our costs.
Yeah, I love that. I think thinking about it that way, and it's something Ramon and I talk about all the time in terms of attribution, right, where you're looking for, how do you quantify something? And right now, some of the best way is like a simple type form or something. How'd you hear about us? But podcasting, especially YouTube, there's so many other ways to drive traffic that becomes non attributable. So I think just as a content creator, if you're thinking about hitting a baseline, that's like, let me break even or just demonstrate a little bit of profit, clearly the ROI is going to be more than that if you think of it in the long term and all the compounding effects that your content will have. Philip, one thing that I wanted to go over with you was you mentioned YouTube, right? This was kind of, I know when we had talked and you were running the agency, you guys were really focused on TikTok, on shorter form, and now you stood up everything on YouTube. What's your do you like, what was it like launching the YouTube channel? And what did you need to do to get it right? Like you said, you took it from like 100 to 200 views to 1000 views. I know you mentioned you have a couple of different editors doing it. How much a lift is it to really grow YouTube.
And how did you guys pull it off?
Philip Ruffini 00:11:26 - 00:11:59
Oh, it's so much harder. Doing YouTube is literally so much harder than short form because the benefit with short form. So I originally did like, TikTok, Instagram, and I think basically what channel you want to use depends on your right, like, so for us, LinkedIn is way better for us than Twitter. Twitter is basically all consumers, but all the people I engage with their LinkedIn posts are really practitioners, dietitians. All these people use Rupa health. So for YouTube, it was basically like, all right, we would rather do. YouTube has more longevity, right? So it's more valuable. Like, if you make a TikTok, it gets a million views after 30 days, no one's probably ever going to see it again.
Philip Ruffini 00:11:59 - 00:12:35
Versus YouTube, it continuously racks up views. There was videos published before I started that took 300 days, and it went from like zero to 500 in 300 days, then 500 to 10,000 once we started posting more. YouTube is significantly harder because you just have longer lead times. So our videos that are an hour long basically have a six to eight week lead time. I come up with an idea, I ask a doctor to make it. They then basically make an outline lecture for the video, record it. That's two weeks. And then it takes the video editor two to four to edit that hour long video.
Philip Ruffini 00:12:35 - 00:13:19
So it's like, we recently had one video do super well, and it's like we have to do more of those. It's basically eight weeks until we get to that point because I've already made five videos that haven't even been edited. So figuring it out, it's like just testing as much as humanly possible. It's like testing the intro, testing the middle. And YouTube is harder just because it doesn't make sense as much like short form, it's like if you get your retention past, like 60% based on x amount of time, it's really easy to go viral. If your video is longer than 30 seconds and you have more than 50% retention, you'll probably get 100,000 views. And it's like very clear. Just retention on watch time equals numbers of views.
Philip Ruffini 00:13:19 - 00:14:02
Whereas, like, YouTube, I got really frustrated lately because our best performing video right now has a worse click through rate and a worse watch time versus other videos of ours. But it's doing really well, and it's because of the topic. It's more browsable, more trending, searchable, so it's a lot more frustrating. But yeah, it's just hyper testing everything. And then once you find something that works. We found a topic that worked, and we went to chat GBT, and we're like, okay, these topics worked really well for a YouTube video. Give us 20 other things that are all related to these three to go make videos on. And then I pinged my network of doctors, and I'm like, hey, can anybody make videos on these?
Ramon Berrios 00:14:02 - 00:14:38
Wow, this is really cool. Just between the network of doctors, you're building the system from scratch, iterating as you go. This isn't a blueprint. This isn't like a plug and play with an existing agency. I have two questions. One is, do you ever pick the keywords, et cetera, the titles from the SEO and the search volume, and work backwards? And also, I think I'm just listening to the conversation on how you're talking on short form. And I think we kind of skipped saying that you've already generated over 100 million views on short form. Is that right?
Philip Ruffini 00:14:38 - 00:15:12
Oh, yeah. So I do marketing for companies doing short form, but there's just, like, short form has a low ROI where it's, like, really expensive making videos. The time, the editing, the posting, you kind of got to do one a day, but the long term value isn't there as much. So that's why I think YouTube's better. To answer your first question, though, around search volume. Like, our top magazine article is, what is heart rate variability, which is basically how your heart beats. The problem is, there's a ton of content on YouTube about that, so it's way more competitive. A keyword.
Philip Ruffini 00:15:12 - 00:15:40
So I don't think it actually works. One to one, what's worked for us? And this addresses Blaine's earlier question, which is, like, how do we kick start YouTube? Our magazine gets, like, 500,000 plus visits a month. What we do is whenever we make YouTube videos, we append the video to the bottom. Magazine article. So this is super cool. One article on gallstones that gets, like, 30,000 visits a month. That article takes about 1520 minutes to read. We then put the YouTube video that is on gallstones at the bottom of that article.
Philip Ruffini 00:15:40 - 00:16:07
People read that entire article and then click the link and watch that entire video. And that is just like, dude, even if that's only ten people, that's so powerful, because that means that person is spending 30 minutes their time with you, and that means they like and trust you. Yeah. Short form just, I think, doesn't have as long a brand. I mean, it really just depends. Like, if you're a d to c company, you probably shouldn't be doing YouTube. You should go do short form. So I think it really just depends on your target audience.
My other question, Philip, was going to be, in terms of what you were talking about, the editor and the production time on that YouTube stuff, from getting the actual lecture to the production, what goes into your production to create the publishable asset that you're posting to YouTube? How much animation, how much editing, how much, like, what's going into the final product.
Philip Ruffini 00:16:28 - 00:17:03
My whole philosophy on content is now and it's changed is like, don't do scripted. Let people just make what they really enjoy. So I basically tell the doctors, like, yo, go do whatever you want. There is too much opportunity on the nicheness of medicine of these people I work with that they all want to do different stuff, right? And I don't have a medical background. I can tell you what's trending. I'm just really good at pattern matching across LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Google keywords. I'm like, all right, methylation is. I've seen methylation now on every single channel.
Philip Ruffini 00:17:03 - 00:17:28
Let's go make three videos of methylation and see how it does. And it's like, just go do whatever makes you happy, right? One of our videos was on GLP one, which is doing really well. Which. GLP one is a peptide. It's basically like kind of the off brand. It's like the non name brand version of Ozempic. That's why it's doing really well, because Ozempics, but, oh, man. Anyway, got really excited, went down a rabbit hole.
Philip Ruffini 00:17:28 - 00:17:52
I'm very much like, kind of let the doctors do basically whatever they want. Oh, production time on the YouTube videos. Sorry about that. I basically do nothing. So I got really lucky. And when I wasn't looking for a job and Rupa health asked me to work with them, so I got to bring my five. I had 16 full time animators at my marketing agency. The five best ones all came to work with me full time at Rupa Health.
Philip Ruffini 00:17:52 - 00:18:19
So I've been working with all these editors. They're all based in the Philippines for over a year. One of the girls I worked with was president of the number one film school in the Philippines, and she basically does everything for. So the doctors create the video. I tell them, you can mess up as much as you want. I have them all filming in descript. I taught them all how to use descript. They just share their project folder with me, go into the project folder, create a new project so whenever they make it, I instantly have access to it.
Philip Ruffini 00:18:19 - 00:18:49
So if there's any issues or they think they messed up. I'm able to actually view what's wrong instead of them having to download the video, upload to Google Drive, share it, so they upload it to descript. I download it from descript. I apply like studio sound, I put it in Dropbox. And then I basically have a notion that all my video editors self manage from that notion. So I put in video title, thumbnail, like what to put on the thumbnail. And then I put the doctor's name and then the headers, and then the video editors just go in and grab a video whenever it's free. Takes them about two weeks.
Philip Ruffini 00:18:49 - 00:19:06
And then we just have a monthly creative review meeting. So basically I'll go in and I'll watch all the videos, and I create a loom, giving feedback on all the videos. What I like, what I don't like, what we have to be consistent. Where are the inconsistencies? And then I have two editors review every single video to make sure all of them are the same and all brand awesome.
And then my next question was going to be about how does YouTube and that content strategy? I know you've got the magazine, you've got the doctors doing the lecture, you've got your long form on YouTube. How does this fit within the broader ecosystem of your content strategy? I know you mentioned newsletter and some other channels. Where else are you distributing? And how are you managing content for those other channels?
Philip Ruffini 00:19:27 - 00:20:16
So our slogan is we create content for practitioners that is consumed by consumers. We ultimately want to make really in depth medical content, like Peter Atiya, but that still layman terms explanation so consumers can find them. Because our whole goal is how do we monopolize all of the content in functional medicine? So essentially what we do is we have LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, which are like really good awareness channels to grow on. Then we have YouTube and the much. And then we have the podcast that we publish twice a week. So we publish one new episode a week and then one rerun every week for the podcast, the podcast we post about now we do an Instagram story, a Facebook story, a Facebook post, an Instagram post, and a LinkedIn post. The LinkedIn has its own ghostwriter. So the LinkedIn content is strictly for practitioners.
Philip Ruffini 00:20:16 - 00:20:48
Facebook and Instagram is more for both consumers and practitioners, just because of the nature of the platform. But a lot of the Instagram and Facebook content, most of it is actually just repurposed podcast content. So we have someone go in the podcast and pull out quotes from the transcript and then post about it. Then we tag in all the posts, all the doctors who are guests. The YouTube videos get pushed to our Facebook audience, which is 400,000 people. And then they also get plugged in all the magazines. That is basically, I think, all of, like, flywheels. We have.
Philip Ruffini 00:20:48 - 00:21:11
Oh, and then we have a newsletter. So then in the newsletter, we publish all of our magazine articles that get published that week, and then we publish our YouTube videos as well. And the way we do it, and this is freaking genius. I did not come up with this, but we gatekeep our magazine content. So after you read three magazine articles, a pop up comes up. So you have to input your email to sign up for a newsletter to keep reading magazine articles.
Ramon Berrios 00:21:11 - 00:21:13
Is that working? Is it getting leads?
Philip Ruffini 00:21:14 - 00:21:24
Yeah. So that alone, man, you're a 30,000 plus email, and then we segment those if they're a practitioner or a consumer.
Ramon Berrios 00:21:24 - 00:21:46
That's huge. I'm taking notes as I'm listening to you, and I don't often do that. I'm, like, taking notes on my computer and in my notebook. But you're preaching to the choir in terms of the long form. And I have conversations with creators and they'll tell me, well, I don't want to start a podcast. I don't want to start a YouTube. It's a ton of work. I'm like, no, you have it backwards.
Ramon Berrios 00:21:46 - 00:22:00
Like, the long form can feed all of your other content and you can get it all done at once. So what is your view on that? On repurposing specifically, what is the best way to repurpose?
Philip Ruffini 00:22:00 - 00:22:34
Yeah, so I've been definitely 50 50 on this because, for example, I'm not a huge fan of posting podcast clips to TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, because I just don't think it works super well versus scripting something designed to get a ton of. Right. Like, for sure, I think there's just two strategies. Right. Which, know, one is what we do is a lot of repurposing. We grow extremely linearly and very slow. We don't really have a lot of viral like. Cause I'm also spreading.
Philip Ruffini 00:22:34 - 00:23:06
Like, our content team is basically, like, me and a handful of other people and then a bunch of people in the Philippines. And basically, if we wanted to go viral on one channel, I have to dedicate my entire time to that. I can't do anything else because you have to spend a ton of time. So I think repurposing is really good for going linearly, but you have to ultimately put a lot of effort into at least one channel. We're lucky that we have a lot of people working on it. So I give feedback on our podcast. So we slowly are improving our podcast. So it's just like really good.
Philip Ruffini 00:23:07 - 00:23:30
And then we have someone just managing our LinkedIn. So in a sense, we do a lot of really focus and then also repurpose. But I think the key to repurposing is just like, finding people who are really good at. Yeah, I'm a really big fan of having people in the Philippines help me with that because you basically can build systems to do. I mean, I think you just slowly.
Ramon Berrios 00:23:32 - 00:23:52
If someone is listening and they're thinking, look, I've been trying to implement content as a media into my business. I'm going to go ahead and try it with a VA. What should that first VA that you hire? What is the first thing you should delegate if you only have budget to hire one VA?
Philip Ruffini 00:23:52 - 00:24:34
Yeah, I think people are terrible at hiring overseas contractors, and I think the VA companies are a complete rip off because they're marking everyone up 100% to 200% on VA salaries. And then I think it's so easy. Basically, I think you add one task at a time and you do whatever you focus on. So let's say you have a podcast, right? You have that person go through and find clips, right? Or you have that person go through and find quotes for Twitter and LinkedIn. But you start with one task at a time. I think what people mess up is like, you're not going to be able to hire someone like a VA overseas who's amazing at doing it right off the bat. You have to be able to work with them. So I'll give you an example.
Philip Ruffini 00:24:34 - 00:25:24
One of the people I have is a video editor who watches our podcast, cuts our clip. He picked out clips that made sense and were good. I was like, all right, we can work with this. And then I told him, I was like, I need you to pick out a clip before every new episode airs so we can post that clip to drive traffic to the new episode. And, like, this week, one of our episodes is on breast cancer. But the clip he found was on how old people need community. Terrible mismatch, right? If that's you, you're like, okay, why did you pick a clip that has nothing to do with the title of the episode? Okay, so you tell him, hey, next week, find a clip that we air the day of the episode that aligns with the bot, because no one told them that and they're not going to know. So my advice is like, lots of looms, lots of statement of processes, lots of examples, and just very clear, articulate.
Philip Ruffini 00:25:24 - 00:26:00
But always look at the platforms where you have the highest density of people and the lowest competition. Like, the amount of people that are putting out high quality YouTube videos, that are hour long lectures, that are professionally edited, that are like cutting edge topics on peptides on YouTube is just like no one, right? So it's like. And even on nobody, there's no doctors who are going ham on writing these long posts that are basically like blogs every time. So I would say repurpose content where you have the highest density of consumers but the lowest amount of competition.
Philip, the other thing I want to talk to you about, and I love your perspective on this, is because I know you were literally in the short form clipping game, and one thing that you just said was, you're know, I'm not a big fan of just taking random podcast clips and just posting them because I don't think it really works.
Philip Ruffini 00:26:16 - 00:26:16
Right.
It's something that Ramon and I had done before, and I saw you when you were working on your agency, you guys literally had the most produced short form clips I'd ever seen. It was like, wild, the amount of production that went into them, and obviously a bunch of them did blow up. But I'd love to get your perspective on clipping as we move into 2024. It seems like there's a bunch of services that pop up that clip. I think there's a little bit of saturation in the clipping space, but how do you envision short form as a strategy? Do you see it working? Do you see it being a little oversaturated? What are your thoughts there on just short form clipping? Clipping a podcast and posting it to Instagram or TikTok?
Philip Ruffini 00:26:54 - 00:27:37
Yeah, I think if you have a professional podcast, it's easy. If you have money to spend, you might as well do it. Kind of is my opinion. Like, for us, it basically cost us less than $3,000 a month to do one reel on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok cutting from our podcast. And we're in a position where it's like, we might as well do it just to kind of diversify content and impact it. Right now, we're testing, like, we might not do it one or two months from now because I'm not sure if it's worth it. I think, again, it really depends on the brand. One of the companies that I've worked with, they do pretty well, and they're pretty happy with the results, I think.
Philip Ruffini 00:27:37 - 00:28:13
Yeah, it mostly depends on your budget and bandwidth. I mean, AI tools are getting better at doing it. But again, content is a very big power logging. So it's like if everyone is doing the bare minimum, you're probably going to get average or the bare minimum results versus if you script things out and go really hard. I also want to mention, I don't think production quality actually matters that much at all. I think the number one most important thing is audio quality. Like, if you have shitty audio, you need really good content. I actually think visual content does not matter that much based on things I have personally seen.
Philip Ruffini 00:28:14 - 00:28:15
Yeah.
Ramon Berrios 00:28:18 - 00:29:11
That is so encouraging and valuable for anyone looking to make the leap even into making content. Because if you look at some of these YouTube courses, et cetera, just a camera to start is like, what, a grand, $1,500, the lighting set up, you think you need to set up the whole studio and have a show and before you know it, shoot. I might just want to keep writing blogs or making short form, but I agree with you. I think that the context of the content is what's most important and comes first before even the video quality, production, et cetera, is in the mix. Some creators are spending six figures a month. Are you guys spending media like, what's it called, paid media behind the content you're making, or are you just driving the organic wave 100%?
Philip Ruffini 00:29:11 - 00:30:04
So we do paid media on Facebook and Instagram. That was decided and run by someone else before I started. I am torn on paid media because I am very tinfoil hatty. I am the person who's like, no, we don't schedule TikToks because they're going to perform worse. And there's no real data to basically prove those things except anecdotally. But if you go through the logic, it's like, okay, if you're a brand and you start spending money to advertise your YouTube videos or Instagram posts or Facebook posts, do you really think these platforms are going to want to promote you much as organic? Right? They want to make money off you. Don't quote me on this might be wrong. I'm almost positive I've heard that TikTok will suppress your organic post if you run ad, spend, or are a brand account, because they want you to have, like, you have the money to run the like.
Philip Ruffini 00:30:04 - 00:30:30
Really? I don't have a clear cut decision on this. I will tell you. We don't run ads on our YouTube account. And I'm like, and we don't run ads on our YouTube account because I think it hurts organic we stopped running ads on Facebook and our organic fell. Well, no, our organic grew when we stopped running ads on Facebook. But overall, posts obviously go down. Yeah. So we don't necessarily do it to grow our like we did in the past.
Philip Ruffini 00:30:30 - 00:30:48
But I'm not as big a fan on that because it's just you want to make sure your content's good. It's not just because you're spending money, because obviously Facebook and Instagram is going to make it work if you are spending money. But I don't think that's how you build a cult of people. And you want a cult. You don't want followers. Followers are worthless. You want a cult.
Philip, as we wrap up here, my last question is just going to be a pretty easy one, but if you're a creator and you have one platform or not platform, what is the biggest trend? I guess, in 2024, that if you're a creator, you should be leaning into to grow.
Philip Ruffini 00:31:06 - 00:31:41
Okay. This is irrespective of Root of health, my personal opinion is Twitter. I'm super biased. I think Twitter is the best position because if you look at all the platforms, basically the only thing that you have to look at all the platforms and what they have that no one else does, right? And the only three things that I can think of is, like, one, LinkedIn. Nobody has resume. Like, no one's going to ever compete with LinkedIn because no one's going to really ever be able to duplicate professional network that LinkedIn has. The other one is like, kind of YouTube's ad revenue, right? Like, is anyone going to be able to copy how YouTube pays, create? Twitter is literally doing that. I got paid $150 for my tweets.
Philip Ruffini 00:31:41 - 00:32:10
You'll get paid as much, but hopefully you'll get there. But what Twitter has that no one else has is real time news. And people make content on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and everywhere else based on what happens on Twitter. So my whole thing about what platforms get disrupted, what has the same power is nobody has real time news like Twitter. And I think Elon is just, like, super dedicated to making Twitter work. Long form videos get pushed. They're obviously going to have short form videos on Twitter soon. So I personally am bullish on Twitter.
Philip Ruffini 00:32:10 - 00:32:44
And the one thing I really want to plug this, because this is my new learning past three months, which is like, when creating content, my biggest suggestion is just doing what is authentic. And the best example I can think of is, like, I've tried to grow my Twitter for two years, and there was three times in my life where I sat down and I wrote, like, a Twitter thread every day, and I tried to grow it, and I did all the right things, and I did all the hacks. I did in short form and nothing worked. And then Tara, the CEO of Twitter, goes viral all the time. And she is one of my close friends. I was like, all right, why do you go viral all the time? And I don't, what are you doing? And she's like, oh. Whenever I thought, I just sit down, I write it, and I tweet. I was like, all right, I'm going to try that.
Philip Ruffini 00:32:44 - 00:32:56
I'm not going to schedule anything. I'm not going to try. I'm just going to use this as a public journal. I'm going to do whatever I want. I'm just going to write what I like. I did 10 million views in one week. And of course, it's. I was like, all right, this is it.
Philip Ruffini 00:32:56 - 00:33:31
So when it comes to creating content, I'm very big on just, like, being super authentic, doing what you really enjoy. And I now very much less come up with, don't try and just figure out what works, because, Blaine, to answer your question, what is the trends? The thinkboy Twitter threads don't really work anymore because everybody uses it. And that's the problem with copying whatever works. And what everyone's using is like, no one's going to ever be able to copy my original thoughts and content that works on Twitter because it's just me being me, right? If you use these formulas to consistently go viral or whatever, it'll work for a short time period, but it will not work forever.
I was just going to say, really funny, Ramon. I was just going to say, I think Phillips, what he said about the power law in content and something we talk about is so, so important because content's a copycat world, and if something's working, people are going to see it working, and then they're going to just do whatever else is working. So the name of the game in content is how do you stay ahead of the curve and how do you skate to where the puck's going instead of just copying what's already been done? Ramon, I'll let you chime in for the last word.
Ramon Berrios 00:34:00 - 00:34:35
Yeah, no, Philip. I also was writing a bunch of threads and stuff on X, and they weren't performing. And I just made my dream work from home setup on mid journey, and I tweeted it and it just, like, I've been back to back viral on these work from home setups, and people are asking, like, is it real? Is it not? And so I'm like, man, I was spending all this time trying to write X, and X Entrepreneur story wasn't working. I just share my work from home setup, and so it opened up my worldview of Twitter. And Blaine and I were playing golf.
Philip Ruffini 00:34:35 - 00:34:37
The other day, and I just look.
Ramon Berrios 00:34:37 - 00:35:03
To my side and I say, blaine, I think X is, like, the most underrated, and it's going to be the go to media, because Elon boycotting the advertisers for the greater good. I'm like, I'm kind of developing this thesis that maybe social media platforms shouldn't be public companies because they're in the interest of the shareholders and too many politics involved, and X is the complete opposite of that. So I totally agree with you. I am all in on X as well.
Philip Ruffini 00:35:03 - 00:35:04
Sweet.
Well, Philip, for anyone who's tuning in wants to learn more about you and follow along with you on Twitter or any of the other stuff that you're doing, why don't you shout out your socials and where we can connect with you?
Philip Ruffini 00:35:14 - 00:35:27
Oh, yeah. Twitter is the only thing I use now because I personally don't like making content because once you get on the hands, really, you can never get off. So it's just Philip with one l underscore rafini ruffini on axe Twitter. Sweet.
Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. We had a great time.
Philip Ruffini 00:35:30 - 00:35:31
Oh, thanks for having me, Blaine.
Ramon Berrios 00:35:31 - 00:35:36
Thank you, Philanth.

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