So I’m doing 75Hard. Or my own version of it, at least. It’s half to take a shot at getting in tip top shape to play semi-pro basketball at 35 years old, half content gag, and all me groaning in soreness when I stand up from my desk.

But you’re here to learn about social media, so let’s talk about:

• How MrBeast teaches his team to make viral content

• My guide to dipping your toe into LinkedIn personal branding

• 11 tools to make influencer marketing easier

—Jack Appleby

How MrBeast trains his team to make viral content

All that adoration us marketers have for Ryan Reynolds? We should have that same love for Jimmy Donaldson, who you know as MrBeast. The guy’s mastered content. Not just YouTube—content in general.

A 36-page document titled “How To Succeed In MrBeast Production” just leaked, and is apparently written by Jimmy himself. This seems to be an onboarding doc given to new employees when they join the company. It’s written in first person, full of spelling errors, and details incredibly deep knowledge on how to make truly incredible content.

If you’re gonna read one How To Make Content guide, make it this doc.

I read the whole thing and distilled the 36 pages into 10 major points that I think brands should apply to their own content + creation processes for brands, along with a “marketer takeaway” so you can immediately implement the thinking into your company.

Let’s dig in, yeah?

The goal of your brand content: to excite YOURSELF.

Creatives & Social Pros: if you don’t think the idea behind your social content is really damn cool, neither will your followers. Here’s MrBeast’s version of that thinking:

“The goal of our content is to excite me. That may sound weird to some of you, especially if you’re new but to me it’s what’s most important. If I'm not excited to get in front of that camera and film the video, it’s just simply not going to happen. I’m not fake and I will be authentic, that’s partly why the channel does so well. And if i’m not excited by the video, we’re fucked. Luckily, I'd say I'm a pretty predictable guy. (at least in this regard haha) What excites me is what I believe will make the audience happy. That’s what it always has been and always will be. I’m willing to count to one hundred thousand, bury myself alive, or walk a marathon in the world’s largest pairs of shoes if I must. I just want to do what makes me happy and ultimately the viewers happy.”

Your Marketer Takeaway: Make brand content that you personally think is awesome. And if you can’t, you should find another job.

The “wow” factor

“We offered someone $500,000 if they could live in a circle in a field for 100 days and instead of starting with his house in the circle that he would live in, we bring it in on a crane 30 seconds into the video. Why?

Because who the fuck else on Youtube can do that lol.

The fact that we lifted a house on a crane didn’t add anything to the title and thumbnail. It obviously hooked the viewers and helped retention but there are millions of ways we could have done that easier. It’s arguably from a data standpoint illogical and a waste of time but the impression it leaves on the viewer is invaluable for us. Anytime we do something that no other creator can do, that separates us in their mind and makes our videos more special to them. It changes how they see us and it does make them watch more videos and engage 10 more with the brand.

You can’t track the “wow factor” but I can describe it. Anything that no other youtuber can do. And it’s important we never lose our wow.”

Your Marketer Takeaway: What spectacle can your brand perform that no other brand could pull off? What level of magnificence can you add to your brand content that makes current followers + potential purchasers say wow? Do more of that.

Create repeatable formats with viral potential…

For most brand social accounts, you’ll have a handful of content pillars—buckets of similar content, usually for ease in creation. In MrBeast’s world, they’re “formats,” and they’re proven techniques to go viral every time.

“One way to boost retention on a video is to have a good format for the video to follow. Let’s use our popular “last to leave” series as an example.”

These videos have many reasons why they do well but one in particular is the payoff at the end. You see once you start watching a last to leave, you get invested in the progress and the challenge. You really want to see who leaves the circle last and wins the $100,000. Luckily the winner isn’t revealed until the end of the video so as long as we don’t make the video boring as hell people are very likely to stick around until the end. Strong payoffs at the end of videos boost retention.

Another example of a format is what I like to call stair stepping. A good example of this is “I Bought The World’s Largest Firework” this video opens with us showing all the fireworks and then lighting a $1 firework, then a $10, then $50, then $375, then $1,000, then $10,000, then we did some content, then $40,000, $100,000, and then the world record. As you get deeper in the video the stakes get higher. The payoff of the world record is at the end and It’s such a beautiful format that allows you to deviate if you want as long as things progressively get cooler. I fucken love stair stepping.

Another format would be the ones where I get chased like bounty hunter, military, FBI. Just like the last to leave challenges you don’t know until the end of the video what the result is. Will they catch me? Will I get away? Gotta watch until the end.

Your Marketer Takeaway: Use formats and content buckets and content pillars, but make sure they’re making your content more compelling. If you’re serializing content, it has to be because that format produces real results.

…then ditch formats that work for new formats.

“Throughout the history of this channel we’ve been through many formats. A big one back in the day was “donating to twitch streamers” and people loved them. I’d go into random streams and donate $10k to a streamer to see how they’d react. All in all we did like 12 of them and when I stopped people still begged for more and that’s because like Steve Job’s says, people don’t know what they want.

The viewer may think they want a format forever, but they don’t. They want new and fresh things (this is evident because every channel that rehashes formats for years always dies). This is why I’m constantly ditching formats in exchange for new ones. Ideally two videos from the same format are not back to back, i’d like multiple different videos in between them if possible.”

Your Marketer Takeaway: Trust yourself. I see too many Social Media Managers thinking the comment sections are brainstorm goldmines. YOU are the marketer, not them. Take their feedback and consider it, but trust yourself and keep generating new ideas.

A quick lil’ break to tell you about my LinkedIn personal branding tool, then back to the last 6 MrBeast tips

My first $100,000 newsletter sponsor came from an organic LinkedIn post. My last 3 jobs before becoming a writer? All started in DMs. And all of that happened simply because I was willing to share my thoughts on LinkedIn.

So, I built a little tool to help you dip your toe into personal branding on LinkedIn!

Welcome to Break An Egg 🐣. For just $5/month, you’ll get:

• 30 LinkedIn prompts designed to mine your experience for content

• New ways to highlight your career milestones & accomplishments

• A community of 1000+ other BAEs who help each other!

You can sign up right here. Cheaper than a latte. I’m keeping it at this $5/month mark for anyone who signs up until Black Friday, then it’ll go up a bit (but you’ll be grandfathered into your original price). Can’t wait to help ya break some eggs!

Okay, less chickies, more Beast thinking.

The more extreme, the better

This one’s no surprise—most social pros know hyperbole wins—but it’s pretty essential to getting people to care about content while they’re mindlessly scrolling the feed.

Beast’s phrasing: “a simple way to up [click-through rate] even more would be to title it “I Survive” instead of “I Spent”. That would add more intrigue and make it feel more extreme. In general the more extreme the better. “I Don’t Like Bananas” won’t perform the same as “Bananas Are The Worst Food On Earth.”

Your Marketer Takeaway: Take a second pass at all of your brainstormed ideas & ask yourself if you’re using the most emotionally charged language possible. Then take a third pass after you’ve written the post copy with the same lens.

Make the best SOCIAL content possible

I loved working at advertising agencies, but my #1 gripe was simple: agencies make their money on production value, and production value doesn’t have one damn thing to do with making great social content. The goal should alwaysalwaysalways be to make the best SOCIAL content (which means you’ve gotta know what is good social content, but we’ll get to that later). Or, as MrBeast says it:

Your Marketer Takeaway: focus all your effort on generating ideas that would make for strong social content to support your brand’s goals, then layer on how to create that content.

Creativity Saves Money

God, I love this next point so much.

“People always assume money is the answer and if we just spend more money we can give Jimmy what he wants. Which is wrong, creativity is the answer. Here is an example I use all the time with our gaming team. They love to give away money every video. But. Which sounds cooler to you as a prize for a gaming video. $20,000 or a year’s supply of doritos? To me doritos is so much funnier and I think our audience would find it fucken hilarious. So lets say we define a year’s supply of doritos by 5 packs of doritos a day for 365 days. That’s 1,825 packs of doritos and a quick google search shows you can buy a pack of doritos for less than a dollar but we can round up and just say a dollar per a pack of doritos. Our prize for the video just went from $20,000 down to $1,825 because we didn’t just throw money at the problem and we used creativity.

This applies to everything every single one of you do. Whether it be finding a crane for a video, deciding prizes, picking locations, finding critical 16 components, or doing the most minuscule thing, use creativity to save money. Because every dollar we save allows me to give you guys more stability and hire more people to make your life easier. If you want to succeed here say this 10x in your head “Creativity Saves Money”

Your Marketer Takeaway: Convince yourself that “it’s too expensive” can never, ever be a barrier to making great content. Get clever. And if we’re talking prizing, what’s a clever framing of your brand’s product as a prize? Can you offer a year’s supply? A semester’s worth? Breakfast for the summer? Or maybe get creative with who you prize!

You should actually know the brand you work for.

“If you’re going to be working for the Beast brand you should be a fan of the Beast brand. A lot of very valuable knowledge comes with watching vast amounts of our videos. I feel silly for having to write this but all the time I talk to 32 new people that have at most seen like 5 or 6 of our videos and it’s mind blowing that they don’t see a problem with that lol.”

You’d think this is obvious, but I know so many creatives who’ve never touched the product they’re working on. It’s not always their fault, either—when I was a Sr. Director at an agency working on Beats By Dre, I had to buy my own headphones, which is insane.

Your Marketer Takeaway: Own your client / employer’s product. Use their product in your daily life. Really get to know the product you’re being paid to market. But also, go through your brand’s social content. Know the best performers & the worst performers by every imaginable metric. Then watch UGC + creator videos about your brand + the product category. Become encyclopedic about your product + the content around your product.

Hire A-Players, train B-Players, fire C-Players

“There is only room in this company for A-Players. A-Players are obsessive, learn from mistakes, coachable, intelligent, don’t make excuses, believe in YouTube, see the value of this company, and are the best in the goddamn world at their job. B-Players are new people that need to be trained into A-Players, and C-Players are just average employees. They don’t suck but they aren’t exceptional at what they do. They just exist, do whatever, and get a paycheck. They aren’t obsessive 5 and learning. C-Players are poisonous and should be transitioned to a different company IMMEDIATELY. (It’s okay we give everyone severance, they’ll be fine).”

This. This x100. And if we’re honest? It’s usually pretty obvious who fits into which ranking. But I’ve seen a lottt of agency social work flounder because they insist on teaching old dogs new tricks (never works) instead of hiring new talent with the proper skills to create modern social content.

Your Marketer Takeaway: stop asking people who don’t love social media to make social media content. Start hiring people who love social media and are fascinated by it. Then get rid of the dead weight so your best can make the best.

Write another piece of content.

“If you wrote a banger piece of content but it is a 50/50 chance of working, write another piece of content. Content is unlimited, don't be lazy.”

Your Marketer Takeaway: self-explanatory. Do volume-based brainstorming. Don’t just pitch 2 ideas. Have 40 more ready to go.

Give the whole doc a read.

There’s even more gold in the full 36-pages—I just wanted to make your life easier.

Social Cues

There are so many social big thinkers out there, writing all kinds of amazing strategies, analysis, and breakdowns. All ships rise with the tide, so here are a few reads from other places I think you could learn from.

11 Tools to make influencer marketing easier (Kendall Dickieson). I will soak up every list of tools I see, and I’ve loved how Kendall makes social sound so easy.

The State Of Instagram, Mid-2024 edition (Lia Haberman). It sure seems like IG rolls out new features every 10 minutes. Lia does a great job quickly summarizing all the shenanigans and giving you a lil’ direction.

The Desperation of the Instagram Photo Dump (The New Yorker). I’m going to bite my tongue and let you form your own opinion on this one. Feel free to email me or tweet me your thoughts.