Robert Frank is one of the fastest growing social media influencers on Instagram and Facebook. With over 1m followers on his Instagram page, Robert’s videos have been viewed over 100m times across his Facebook, Youtube and Instagram channels. Robert is one of the fastest growing Instagram stars and counts fellow Instagram star Dan Bilzerian as a close friend.
Going viral is all down to luck. You can crank out a hundred videos and a thousand blog posts but whether any of them will fly around the Internet is all down to chance. At least that’s what they say. Robert Frank knows different. He knows that it’s possible to build a huge profile on the Internet in a short space of time powered by reliable viral content. He knows because he’s done it. Last year, Robert Frank had zero Facebook followers and no social media presence at all. He now has millions of followers, his videos have racked up more than a billion views, and brands as large as Doritos are clamoring to put their name in his clips. Success doesn’t come much faster.
It looked like an opportunity, one over which he could have complete control. He started by uploading videos but found that they didn’t take off so he switched to a different topic: motivation.
The success of those videos is down in part to their quality. “You can’t make bad content go viral,” Frank says. But it’s also the result of careful planning and strong marketing. Frank soon found that starting a video by talking directly to the lens lowered views so his videos now dive straight into the action with special attention paid to the first four seconds to grab viewers. Even the video thumbnails are action-oriented. Frank has found that an image of him screaming will generate three times more views than a shot of him running. “There’s no easier exit on Facebook than to scroll down,” he warns.
To land those views, though, the videos first have to make their way into users’ social media streams. Frank started his Facebook marketing campaign with an empty page and an old fashioned approach: he reached out to other sites. In fact, he wrote to hundreds of pages, asking their owners if they would upload or share his videos. They ignored him. Facebook blocked his account for a couple of days. He persevered, eventually receiving a message that Mayor Boss, a musician with more than six million followers, had shared one of his clips. That pushed Frank’s follower count from around 100 to over 7,000. He and Mayor Boss agreed to share each other’s videos and Frank continued hustling, uploading three videos a week and offering content-sharing deals to pages that had around 10,000 followers. As his own follower count grew, he was able to work his way up the ladder, landing deals with larger and larger pages.
“Now I can share-for-share with anyone I like,” he says. “So my videos explode.”
That large Facebook following has supported Franks Youtube channel, where he describes his subscribers as “hardcore fans.” He can usually count on gym and motivation videos uploaded to the site to generate between 100,000 and a million views powered by a good clickbait title and votes on Reddit. On Snapchat, he’s now generating about 400,000 views for his daily stories, and his experiments with Facebook live have shown just how much the format has to offer.
