Brock Johnson

There's no way to fast forward.

People forget subtitles.

And so instead of doing a video story, instead of doing a talking head story, your tea is

The T in the STD is text heavy.

So I usually just do a selfie with my face in the bottom right corner where I'm making the expression that the story is trying to convey.

Or sometimes I'll just do like a solid color.

Literally, if you look at my most viewed stories of all time, I'm pretty sure seven of the top 10 have just a plain black background with white text on top.

As simple as it gets.

Wow.

And when I say text heavy, I do mean multiple sentences of text.

And the reason that that strategically works is that story photos are usually only displayed for about three to five seconds.

But when you put that text on the screen, people hold their finger down to pause the story, and then it extends the watch time.

So Instagram, the algorithm is essentially thinking, hey, this story was supposed to be up for four seconds, but it was up for eight seconds.

So it had a 200% watch rate compared to most other stories that are just tap, tap, tap through.

That's a huge difference, the T. And then the D is the most important part.

I have a framed photo back here that one of my subscribers sent me that says this, which is that you can't have an STD without the D. The D is the most important part of the STD story.

And the D stands for what we were talking about earlier, which is DM automation.

Yes, you can do a text-heavy story.

Yes, it can just be a single, but you will not get maximum views unless you get people sending you messages.

And so that's why all of my most viewed stories, I did the math one time, it was like 35 of my top 36 stories all had some form of DM automation telling people, reply with the word blank and you will get blank.