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Testing your ideas against reality can be challenging. Not everything will go as planned. It’s about keeping an open mind, having a clear hypothesis and running multiple tests to see if you have enough directional evidence to keep going.
This is the How I Tested That Podcast, where David J Bland connects with entrepreneurs and innovators who had the courage to test their ideas with real people, in the market, with sometimes surprising results.
Join us as we explore the ups and downs of experimentation… together.
David J Bland (0:1.693)
Welcome to the podcast, Matt.
Matt Diamante (0:6.402)
Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to chat with you today.
David J Bland (0:18.659)
Same, I'm very excited to chat with you. I feel as if you touch on things that we haven't covered yet on our podcast and social media and growth. Yeah, that's really good thing. It's not a good thing when you talk about the same thing over and over and over. So for those who don't know about you, can you just give maybe a high level of a bit of your background and then we'll jump into some of the things you're testing and share some insights.
Matt Diamante (0:25.826)
That's always a good thing.
Matt Diamante (0:44.278)
Yeah. So my name is Mattie Monte, as you may know from this episode somewhere. I run a digital marketing agency called Hey Tony. We focus primarily on helping businesses show up higher on Google. And for those of you who know, that's called SEO, search engine optimization. That's it. That's the intro. That's the short. Oh, it was a very winding journey. Very winding journey.
David J Bland (1:4.669)
So how did you get into that? How did you get into that business? Was it a winding journey or what? How did you stumble into it?
Matt Diamante (1:12.974)
A lot of testing, a lot of messing up, a lot of moving from different industries. But I actually went to school for advertising and I fell in love with SEO while I was in school. And I always kind of had a client since then, even when I was in school. I got my first client while I was driving to school. I saw like a dumpster on the side of the road and I was like, Hey, I wonder if those guys have a website. So it's the only cold call I've ever done in my life. But I,
So I called the number on the side of the bin and I'm like, Hey, I noticed you guys don't have a website. You don't have any online presence. Like, you know, I'm a student at this college. I could really help blah, blah, blah. You know, give the whole spiel. And I'm sure it wasn't that smooth. And it was probably very shaky and nervous. Um, so that, uh, they ended up being like, yeah, we need a website, uh, built them a website, did some SEO with a very limited knowledge that I had and their business grew by like a thousand percent within a year. It was wild. Um, so
I was doing that, but then also after I graduated school, I went into social media because I liked social media. was like, this stuff is easy. I get to make Facebook posts and post on Instagram. Like that's just, that sounds like a dream. You know, is that really even work? So I, I did that for, I did an internship at a more traditional agency. And then I actually hated it so much that I quit the entire industry and went to work in film, just driving trucks.
and helping out on set, whatever I could do. And I found out quickly that that work is very inconsistent and I needed money to live. So I started trying to find my own clients. And during that time, I found these two guys who were running a website and it was called Fresh Print Magazine, not Fresh Prints, Fresh Print Magazine. And they were like, yeah, we need help with SEO. And I was like,
that's perfect. I know a lot about that. Like here's the client that I helped all this stuff and they're like, we also need social media and we need video. And I was like, you know what? I can do it all. And uh, so I did some work for them for, you know, several months and then a couple of the guys there were like, we should start a new publication, something better than this. Cause that name sucks. This whole publication sucks. Let's figure out how to do something better. So we convinced those people to invest in this new publication. So I did that for a couple of years and
Matt Diamante (3:37.494)
If you want to talk about testing and looking at data, we analyze literally every single part of a piece of content when we were running that publication. So the first, I think four months, we were getting like 30,000 visitors to the website a month, which is, know, in hindsight, that's a lot of people, right? But we were depending on ad revenue to make money, to pay back the investors, all this kind of stuff. And we had to get more traffic.
something happened and I think it was late December, it was 2014. So late December, early January, we went from 30,000 visitors a month to 4 million visitors a month. That had a lot of implications. The website crashed, all our ads weren't set up properly and like, that was my job. I was the one responsible for it because I like quote unquote knew how to do that. And so I had to figure that out. had to, know,
find which server company is the best one that could, you how do we, how do we figure out a way to make sure that this doesn't happen? Because I think that day we lost like 20 grand when we went viral for the first time, like with, this is what the piece of content, it's really hard to do that now. Um, and I say piece of content, mean like a written blog post. Um, but that's kind of where I got my start really looking and analyzing a piece of content for every element that goes into it from
you know what it looks like on social media. So you have the picture, you have the headline, you have the little description underneath, and then you have a caption on top. Like why did that one post get like a couple million views? Right. Was it, is it because we included a number in the title? Is it because the picture included something, you know, specific? Is it because there was curiosity? Is it, was it a negative emotion, positive emotion? Did people think they could make money from it? So we started testing.
we were posting like six to 10 pieces of content a day. So blog posts per day and testing all of this stuff, all the theories that we had as to why did that piece of content go viral? And we eventually just nailed it and not, not nailed it, but had a really good understanding of what went viral. So we were able to keep up that like three, 4 million visitors a month for I think two or three years. And during that time we got partnerships with
Matt Diamante (6:1.310)
Vice, they were selling our ads. We were working with the biggest media company in Canada. We had partnerships with radio stations. Google Plus reached out to us back when that was a thing. And they were like, yeah, like it wasn't that great of a platform, but you know, because it's no longer around. they realized that pretty quickly. But Google Plus reached out and they're like, hey, can we feature you guys as a, you know, a recommended person to follow or.
David J Bland (6:10.813)
or Google+.
Matt Diamante (6:28.098)
you know, publication to follow when somebody signs up for Google plus. And we're like, yeah, that, you know what, that sounds sick. Free traffic, free exposure from Google. That's great. Uh, so with that, like we got a ton of followers on Google plus, and then we have all these social media platforms that we're trying to grow. Right? So everything from, uh, Facebook, Instagram, Google plus at the time, Twitter, like we're on all of it we're trying to make everything go viral that we possibly could. Like at the time we were joining,
Like my Facebook profile is completely messed up and it's unusable because during that time I joined so many niche groups, which was one of the strategies we were posting. Like if it was like, uh, you know, living in a van or van life article kind of thing, I am a part of like a hundred van life groups and we were posting the articles in there and everybody on the team was going and liking them and sharing them from those groups. And that was like helping propel things to go viral.
So we're testing, trying, trying to figure it out, trying to make sure that we had a job and that we had money coming in to pay back the investors and pay ourselves a little bit of money. And yeah, then that fizzled out because surprise, it's very expensive to run a publication with a ton of staff putting out that amount of content. this is 2014, 2015, 2016, way before AI. With AI, like that would have been so easy. We could have tested so much shit.
and gotten like, could have been, yeah, and it would have been a lot cheaper to run. But it's, yeah, it just, we weren't getting enough money on time. We had the money coming in, but I don't know if you've ever worked with like, oh my God, what do they call them? I can't think of the name, like ad networks, basically. Some of them have net terms of like 90 to 120 days.
After the campaign is done. So if it's a six month campaign, you're really getting paid nine months later and you're like, okay, well what we need to eat. We need to pay rent. Right. So after that, I had another brief stint back in the traditional advertising world. It was like six weeks and the second day on that job, I was like, I remember why I didn't want to do this. I remember why I hated this so much. So I booked a two month trip to like
David J Bland (8:32.273)
Yeah.
Matt Diamante (8:50.926)
California and Alberta, like Banff in Canada, just like hung out with friends and did all this stuff. And that was after the six weeks. So I spent all the money that I made during those six weeks, which was, I somehow convinced them to pay me like 50 bucks an hour. And I didn't give them a resume. I just like walked in there. I was like, yeah, here's, know, here's what I can do. And they're like, yeah, this sounds great. So I covered that mat leave six weeks, whatever. And when I got back from my trip, I had exactly enough money for one month of rent.
And I was like I need a client I need something so I threw I don't know a miracle Through something I got one client that paid me I think was like 1500 bucks a month or like $2,000 a month and I was like this is enough for me to pay rent and this is enough for me to you know, go grab some beers with my buddies and you know life is good and from there it just kept kind of snowballing I kept getting more and more clients keeping clients and
eventually had to hire somebody and that was the start of my agency totally by accident because I had too many clients.
David J Bland (9:57.456)
Yeah, it's such a great journey. I was thinking so many things when you were talking. One was when I signed up for Google Plus, I get recommended? Were you recommended to me, which I can't remember, honestly. And I like that you asked why that that is something I know it sounds trivial, but it's part of the mindset. You you went viral, which a lot of people would love for their stuff to go viral.
Matt Diamante (9:58.862)
You
David J Bland (10:26.663)
But you didn't just run with it. You asked, well, why? Why did it? Can we manufacture that way again somehow? And I do think being curious goes so far, especially in your world, where it's not a straight line to success. You're going to have to try and test and learn and ask why.
Matt Diamante (10:39.651)
Yeah.
David J Bland (10:48.945)
I was also thinking...
Social media in general and content can feel so overwhelming to our listeners, especially those trying to do it all themselves. And how you even begin to test that. It's like, where do you even begin? What platform? How would you even start the process? What kind of advice do you give folks on where to begin or help them get unstuck when they feel so overwhelmed?
because there so many different options.
Matt Diamante (11:24.206)
Yeah. So I would always recommend like go to the biggest platforms first. If you're just starting out, go on Instagram because the audience is there. Go on TikTok. The audience is there. YouTube shorts. It's a little bit difficult on YouTube or different, I should say, um, to really pop off there. Um, but you, you need to do video content. Like that is where the eyeballs are right now. It's video, you know, 10, 15 years ago.
Yeah, you can get away with writing pieces of content and people going to your website, reading your blog, reading your, you know, um, new site, whatever you want to call it. But if you want to start, pull out your phone and record yourself talking about what it is you love, right? What it is you're trying to sell, what it is you're passionate about and just post it. A lot of people, a lot of people, sorry, there's a dog crying outside my door right now. Um, it's very distracting, but there's a lot of people out there who don't want to take that first step.
of posting a piece of content, they're scared that they're not like some people aren't going to like it or they're going to feel stupid. Right. But that is literally the first step is if you post a video and it does well, great. What did, what can you learn from that video? If it doesn't do well, what can you learn from that? Right. Did you, were you too close? Like were you recording your entire face? Was it a body shot? Was the audio shitty? What were you saying?
Did you hook people in? Was there pauses? Did you cut things out? Did you have captions on the video? Right. What was your caption underneath the video? Like in the description. So just post. I know that sounds so basic, but like, how do you get started? Get started. Like pull out your phone and start recording.
David J Bland (13:6.481)
Yeah, that's great advice. So much of it is just getting started and then some level of consistency. And you mentioned all these different platforms and I have to ask you about LinkedIn. This is a somewhat self-serving question, but I think my listeners also have this question. So LinkedIn is fascinating to me because at first I did not use it this way at all. I mostly use Twitter and Instagram, Facebook to an extent.
Matt Diamante (13:12.984)
Mm-hmm.
David J Bland (13:33.982)
And I landed a lot of clients on Twitter. You know, I made a lot of professional connections as well. Some people I would never have access to in my wildest dreams. I was able to either do something funny and or educational and make these connections. Now I'm trying to do the same on LinkedIn and your comment about video really, really resonated with me because I see LinkedIn shifting to video.
I see them beta testing it. I see a bunch of portrait video in my feeds now. What is your take on that? Where do you think this is going or how would you begin to even look at LinkedIn in that way that you might look at TikTok or Instagram?
Matt Diamante (14:21.036)
Yeah. So firstly, I hate LinkedIn. I've just, I hate LinkedIn because I haven't figured it out yet. And it's, you know what? I'm admitting that guys, have a ton of followers on Instagram, TikTok, all these platforms, but LinkedIn, I think I'm at like 1500 followers, which is not a small amount, but it's like, you know, it's not comparable to the followers I have on other platforms. So I post all the same content that I post on Instagram and TikTok. post that on LinkedIn as well.
And it gets some like some engagement, but it's not, it's not popping off, right? If a video gets a hundred thousand views on Instagram, it's getting like a hundred reach, maybe 200 people reached on LinkedIn. And I'm like, is this platform even worth it? But I haven't spent the time to figure it out. So that's my question for you is how, what is your strategy? Like, how are you reaching people on LinkedIn? You were telling me before this, you were getting like millions of, you know, impressions, millions of people seeing your posts.
How do you do that? Are you using hashtags?
David J Bland (15:22.245)
interesting because it's the inverse, right? So I will go on Instagram and get almost nothing and then I'll go to LinkedIn and it'll get millions of views. it is crazy. Now it might be follower count related because I do have about at the time of this recording I have about 36,000 people following me on LinkedIn. So that could be part of it. But I think I learned what worked for me back in early days Twitter.
Matt Diamante (15:35.064)
That's wild.
Matt Diamante (15:44.462)
That's amazing.
David J Bland (15:51.230)
Because I really, maybe it's nostalgia of it because I Twitter has been dysfunctional forever. But early days Twitter felt kind of magical to me. I could get access to people in ways I didn't have access to before. I would post things and memes. And I remember my first thing that went viral. It was this little quote related to my work. And it got picked up by Eric Rees who is a New York Times bestseller. And before I knew it, everybody...
Matt Diamante (16:3.320)
Mm-hmm.
David J Bland (16:21.085)
was connecting with me. And then I had Andrew Chin write an essay on one of my little diagrams I drew while I was frustrated. I call it the product this cycle. And I just drew these three circles. And it's like, I just came out of a coaching session with the team. And I was like, this is driving me nuts. And I spent all of 10 minutes sketching this thing together and put it on Twitter. And it went viral. And then people are writing essays on it. It's been in Ink Magazine. It's been in Forbes. It's been all over the place.
Matt Diamante (16:47.182)
That's wild.
David J Bland (16:48.825)
And I was like, okay, so what was I doing there that I can do on LinkedIn? And in a way, a lot of my tactics are still working for, they no longer work for Twitter, I've kind of given up on that. But on LinkedIn, I'm doing similar things. It's usually a one-liner that I'm trying to make people laugh, but also educate them where they can laugh and say, oh, that's me. Or, oh, know a team member like that, but not in a mean-spirited way. And...
Matt Diamante (17:12.782)
You
Yeah.
David J Bland (17:16.101)
and then either an image or a video that supports the thing where they can mentally make the connections. And it's almost like I'm using my 2010-ish, early teens Twitter strategy on LinkedIn at the moment.
Matt Diamante (17:29.720)
Yeah, that's like, so I'm sure I'm wondering this and people listening are probably wondering as well. How like are using hashtags? How are you reaching new people? Is LinkedIn just their algorithm pushing content out? Do you have to get a lot of shares? What if you start with no followers like or no connections? Like where do you go from there?
David J Bland (17:48.072)
don't use hashtags very often. I haven't seen a huge difference in hashtags. think I try to target maybe a specific role in the text, you know? So I'll say, oh, this is a funny meme about like product managers, but I'll put the word product managers in the text. And then what I'm noticing with the algorithm, and it always changes, and I don't really fully understand it either, I noticed that if not my first connections, so if my first connections come in, like those are people that are connected with me first degree on LinkedIn, and start,
spamming comments, it doesn't do a lot for the reach, but it's when the second and the third degree come in and start commenting, it feels like it's snowballs. So I'll have a post kind of not really take off right away. And I look at that and I go, well, that one's not going to be a hit. And then two or three days later, somehow we have second and third degree connections commenting on it and then it takes off. And so I do think it's something about engagement in the comments. And I know now
Matt Diamante (18:20.974)
Really?
Matt Diamante (18:42.510)
Amazing.
David J Bland (18:47.131)
LinkedIn's beta testing impressions on comments. So now it'll say only visible to you and I'll see how many impressions my comment got under a post, which is interesting. And they're trying to come up with a comment score, I think, or something like that for engagement. So I do think whether you put a video in or an image or you put the link in the comments or link in the post, I think what they're erring towards more is the not first degree, but second and third degree comments in the post itself.
Matt Diamante (18:49.644)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Diamante (19:14.294)
Yeah, like non followers. Yeah, that's, right now, Instagram is doing the exact same kind of thing. Like when you post a video or a real, sorry, uh, when you post a real, they will show it to half your followers, half non followers, and they have different metrics for each of those, uh, different audiences as to whether that post is worthy of being shown to more and more people. Right? So if your followers are liking it,
then that's a really good sign. If they're commenting, great sign. If non followers are sharing it, saving it, that tells the algorithm like, Oh, this is a good piece of content. They're sharing it. They're saving it. We should send this out to even more and more and more people. And it's, frustrating because you're like, how do you like, you're, seeing me for the first time, like non followers, right? You're seeing me for the first time. And I talk about, you know, marketing tips and SEO and email marketing, like not sexy stuff. Right. And I like,
this guy's coming up on your feed, it's his face and he's telling you this thing and you're like, why should I listen to this person? So it's really like, you have to get creative with like, you know, the hook, right? Hooking people in, giving them so much value that they're like, I need to save this. I'm going to share this with, you know, my boss or somebody else trying to prove a point to, right? Or somebody who needs help. But I think it's similar to, know, what LinkedIn is doing, which is actually like, now I'm like, okay, that gives me, gives me,
some ideas like how do I get second and third people to comment, to engage with this, right? How do I get past my initial audience, which may be an old audience, you know what I mean? Like they could, they, some of those connections could be 10 years old, 15 years old at this point.
David J Bland (20:58.875)
Yeah, it's interesting and it's also conflicting in a way with LinkedIn where I will follow somebody because they come up with my feed and I was like, oh, that's really interesting. And maybe somebody that I am a first connection to has commented on their posts so it gets served into my feed. So I'll explore and find people that way. But when I click follow, like I just followed this guy recently. He does a lot of sarcastic UI and UX stuff, which he's pretty funny. His name is Soren. And as soon as I followed him, though,
What I noticed the LinkedIn feed does is it starts just flooding my feed with all this posts from the last several months. And it's like, okay, I want to follow this guy, but I don't want my whole feed to be this guy. And so I do think there's some weirdness with the algorithm in that I'll unfollow because I can't handle my whole feed being full of this person I just followed. So I do think they over-correct a bit sometimes, but I do think...
It's a very interesting, like I'm, I'm, it's a black box to me too, but I'm just testing as you are testing to see what, works and what doesn't in LinkedIn.
Matt Diamante (22:4.142)
Well, I'm wondering too, like based on what you're telling me, if you're seeing a lot of the same posts from the same person after you followed them, I'm like, is there not enough content being generated on LinkedIn? Like relevant to you? Is that a huge opportunity? Should we be publishing four or five, six times a day on LinkedIn, helpful content, know, entertaining content, memes, all that kind of stuff. Is that what the platform wants? Right. It wants more content.
David J Bland (22:32.709)
It could be. I think it's flooded with lot of AI generated content at the moment and then AI generated comments because I see a bunch of hyphenated comments now from people that are not connected with me and I can tell it's just AI spitting things into my posts which are noise. I think, again, comparing to Twitter, again, old school Twitter, right? Remember when they added feature.
Matt Diamante (22:38.381)
Yep.
Matt Diamante (22:43.510)
Yeah.
David J Bland (22:52.477)
tweets and it was like the cool thing or Pete they called it pin tweets and you could pin a tweet so that one went viral for me the product cycle I would post it on my profile I pinned it there and so then when people would say oh this guy's kind of funny let me see what he's up and they'll see the first tweet has millions of or at least hundreds of thousands of like retweets and everything so they're oh wow this guy must be a thing and I didn't have a ton of followers I think
Matt Diamante (22:53.762)
Mm-hmm. Yep.
David J Bland (23:15.517)
Maybe 10,000 or so on Twitter, but I had very very influential people who had hundreds of thousands of followers following me And so that weird sort of asymmetrical thing I would post something and I wouldn't get a bunch of followers from it But I'd have really influential people repost my stuff and then they would kind of lead their way to me LinkedIn does somewhat similar thing with featured posts
But it's a little bit clunkier in my opinion because you get there and then you kind of have the busyness of the profile itself and then you start scrolling down and you can see some featured stuff but it's in this weird like carousel and everything. And I haven't seen that works as well for me versus Twitter where it was just my profile and some info and then the pinned post was right there. With LinkedIn you have to kind of scroll down a bit. And what I've also noticed is the reposting, you know, I'll have something with millions of views.
And I'll think about and I'll laugh later and I'll say, oh, you know, that was like six months ago, but maybe I should repost that and I'll repost it, which is kind of like a retweet. And it only gets maybe 10 or 20 more views. So there's something about that algorithm where it doesn't necessarily want you reposting things that were viral to keep them going. And I do think unlike Twitter, that viral stuff is really hard to find in LinkedIn once sort of that giant spike is over. The content is really tough to.
to discover again.
Matt Diamante (24:35.512)
Well, I like that you, you're talking about the pin tweet or like the featured posts because on Instagram and on Tik TOK, like there's, there's these quote unquote experts who say, okay, make sure your bio says this, this, this, and this, and like, make sure that you have three pin videos. The first one should be about you and like why people should follow you and you know, whatever other BS. And I'm just like, you know what? I have a video that has like 6 million views. That is the pin video. People liked that video. So if somebody cuts my profile, they're to look and be like, Oh,
This guy's legit, right? He's got like his videos get millions of views and like I want them to see the best of the best. The things that people engaged with the most that people watch the most. Right. And then it's like, okay, well I watch a couple of these, you know, really good videos, which are pinned at the top. Maybe I should follow this guy. And I think that strategy has been working so far. I'm at like almost 270,000 followers on Instagram. I'm not following anybody's rules. I'm testing shit. Right.
David J Bland (25:33.662)
Yeah. Yeah, and it's really hard to predict what goes viral. see right now for LinkedIn, I think my top three performing posts, one was a video of a little girl pushing one of those like dinosaur toys at a playground that you ride, but she pushed it sideways and started dancing with it. I think that one had over 1500 comments on it that were most of those people are not first connections with me, maybe about 60,000 likes and impressions.
Matt Diamante (25:33.932)
And if it works, works. If it doesn't, try something else.
Matt Diamante (25:50.040)
Oh my god.
Matt Diamante (25:55.374)
That's wild. Yeah.
Matt Diamante (26:1.293)
Wow.
David J Bland (26:1.757)
The second one was, it was just this funny video of two people buying a frying pan and one of them was trying to cook something with it and the other one was waving around like she's gonna murder her husband with it. And I made a jobs to be done joke and it was, I think, 20 some thousand likes and maybe about 700 comments. And then the third one was this guy trying to, he's acting like he's.
Stopping a subway and then pushing it which he's not doing anything. He chalks his hands up and everything. It's really dumb Yeah, yeah, so I found that one a long time ago and I was like this kid's like consultants So again coming back to how do you make it relevant to LinkedIn? what I did is I want to make a consultant joke here because I'm gonna poke fun and consultants and I got a lot of hate in that one too from consultants, but I think we were over 2,500 comments on that one and probably around 50,000 likes and you know different
Matt Diamante (26:28.702)
Oh, I've seen that video, yeah.
Matt Diamante (26:35.650)
Yeah.
Matt Diamante (26:53.710)
That's wild.
David J Bland (26:54.173)
kind of things. So, but all those were just a one liner in video. I mean, I know we see all these LinkedIn experts come on and they try to give you all the things and you have to write your posts a specific way and format them and hashtag them and everything. I'm getting millions just by doing a one liner that's witty that I think is funny. I laugh at it, you know, and I'm like, okay, it doesn't offend too many people. I think other people will laugh at this too. And a video and
Matt Diamante (27:12.334)
the
David J Bland (27:20.689)
That was it. didn't put any more. I mean, I put some thought about what the video would be and how it would make the connection. But I'm wondering if we're just overthinking this and really comes back to just posting memes.
Matt Diamante (27:31.276)
We honestly like half the videos that my friends and me and family are stupid memes, right? Like it's, we are really just cavemen, just, you know, pounding our chests and being like, Oh, funny picture, funny picture. Like let's, let's all laugh about it together. But one thing that's really interesting that I think it's worth mentioning is you have the strategy on LinkedIn. It's working really well. You know, not every post hits. And that's something I think we should all remember is like,
you are like, not you, but everybody's constantly testing, right? You need to figure out what works, what doesn't work. And then you have some kind of idea of what works. So you do more of that thing. And I'm definitely after this podcast recording, I'm to go creep your LinkedIn and look at all your top performing posts and be like, how can I do almost the exact same thing? Obviously different video, different texts, all that kind of stuff. But you've already been testing the strategy. You've, know, you're going to cut my learning curve by a million percent.
You know what I mean? that's literally go watch somebody's video on Instagram or TikTok or whatever platform and be like, why did this video do well? Or why do they keep doing this similar style or like these slight variations on the videos? And they're like, they're doing the work for you. Like, and I think that's one, one thing that if you aren't actually using these platforms, you will never get it. Right. You need to consume that media.
David J Bland (28:55.933)
That's a good point. And what works on one platform doesn't always work on another platform as we were talking about earlier. Yeah, I think I haven't cracked YouTube. I've really pulled away from Instagram and Twitter at the moment. And I'm just focusing on LinkedIn. But I think the inflection point for me was 2020. Everything was locked down and we were all very serious. And I thought, I think people could.
Matt Diamante (29:1.336)
God no.
David J Bland (29:22.673)
Maybe they want to laugh. And LinkedIn wasn't necessarily the platform I would go to to find humor. So I think that potentially I struck a chord at the right time because people were looking for some humor in life. And I really thought, well, this worked for me and Twitter back when I first started. Maybe this will work on LinkedIn. So I like to say there was some elaborate system I went through, but it was really.
kind of reading the room and saying, I think I can do something a bit different here and we'll test it and see. And not everyone's a hit. I've had some that had millions, I've had some that did not do well too. But I think there's a theme enough with the ones that performed well. And so when you're talking, so we talked a lot about LinkedIn, you do many other platforms as well. And what are some things you're excited about or things that you wanna test this year as far as,
trying different things and trying to find a way to make these algorithms work for you.
Matt Diamante (30:21.569)
So I am constantly testing different content formats and different, I guess, styles of video. So the videos that I was, I've been posting, I still post these videos, just not as frequently anymore are me talking head telling you, here's how to, know, here's what Google loves in 2025. That is a terrible hook, but you know, something like that. Here's what Google loves in 2025. Um, and then it's like, marketers don't want you to know this hook or sorry, sorry, know this trick.
So you're like, okay, well, people don't want you to know this guy's going to tell me he's going to, you know, you know, bring me into the alley and tell me the secret. And then I like reveal like, here's how, here's how to do this one thing. And those videos can do really well, but it has to be so unique, something that they've never heard before. And because I have a lot of followers and like I post one to three videos a day. So I'm like, they're seeing a lot of my content. If it doesn't stick out.
way more than everything else. If something they haven't already heard just packaged differently, they're not going to watch it. They're not going to like it. They're not going to. And so those videos still do work potentially with new audiences, which also Instagram has a trial feature. Have you seen this? Oh my God. It's the best. So basically you can click this button that says trial and it won't post it to your feed. It will only take that reel and post it to non-followers.
David J Bland (31:31.993)
up.
Matt Diamante (31:45.240)
people who don't follow you. And so you're reaching a new audience right away. And that is the goal of all social media platforms. Like I want to reach more people, reach more people. So you can like test, you know, five different videos if you wanted to with different hooks at the start, but the rest of the video is the same. You could test all of those and be like, okay, this one is the clear winner. We're going to use that hook. And then you could just publish that and it'll start going out to your followers and stuff. Um, and, or you could just take your best performing videos, put them as a trial and it's reaching new people. It's tried and true.
David J Bland (31:46.727)
interesting.
Matt Diamante (32:14.904)
You already know that that video did well. like, let's, let's reach new people. But all that to say is people get tired of seeing the same stuff over and over again, especially when you're, you have a higher posting frequency of, you know, even if it's one a day, that's, know, still seven a week. Um, it's, or if you're doing three day, it's 20, over 20 posts per week. That's a lot, but that's what you need to do to grow on these platforms. Um, I'm getting more into
kind of the fun content, um, like the entertainment content with the digital marketing tip or digital marketing overtone or undertone or whatever, whatever, whatever that is. Um, so if it's like a video of, I don't know, I actually, uh, my wife helped me out with this video. So I'm sitting on the couch playing video games. She comes in and says, Matt, I'll give you all this money. If you can tell me how to get a backlink in under a minute.
and she whips this cash. mean, so there's a lot of cash flying around. So you have that visual hook. It's a bet. There's, know, uh, then I take out my phone and I'm like, cool under, you know, a minute I set my phone on the computer, start the timer. So there's a timer going now I'm racing against the clock and she's like, come on, you're running out of time. You got it. And I'm telling people an actual tip, right? So it's like, you know, we're, we're in the movie speed here. You know, you can't slow down the bus.
You got to make it to the end. Everybody has got to get off the bus. You're like, are they going to make it? Are they going to make it? And it's just like fusing entertainment into educational. So it's like edutainment, if you will. That's where I'm really leaning into this year and at least on on social media. And YouTube's a different story. But yeah.
David J Bland (34:4.446)
It's just finding this new way and I think what you said really resonated with me with just the frequency You know I post on LinkedIn like it sounds like you almost post on Instagram and other things and yeah people you get super fans you have people that follow you for so many years and you know you can't just Rehash the same content over and over again. can't take the same meme and change a word or something It has to be something different and and the way link well LinkedIn's a really interesting stuff. You mentioned how this trial feature from Instagram
LinkedIn's rolling out boost posts now and I've tried a few and I don't think it's it's it's it's in beta It has a little beta tag next to it But what it does it lets me target, you know a segment like I would run an ad and I can boost a post and I don't have to go through my company to boost a thought leader post or something because I felt that was a clunky experience and then I I got
Matt Diamante (34:37.688)
Thank God.
Matt Diamante (34:53.856)
Oh my God. I just, I, sorry, I need to cut you off there. I was trying this out, trying to figure it out. like, there certainly has to be a way to boost a post on LinkedIn. And like, I, took me hours and hours and I saw this one YouTube video. He's like, you have to set up your company page to boost a thought leader posts and connect it and do well. And I'm like, what a shit experience. I'm trying to give you money, dude. Like, sorry, continue.
David J Bland (35:18.713)
Same. It took hours. And then it had very restrictive post types. So I would do all that. And then I'd start creating my campaign and it would say, that post isn't eligible because it's got whatever, something in it that they didn't like. So boost. So boost.
Matt Diamante (35:28.866)
Yeah. It's carousel. You can't do carousel.
David J Bland (35:33.914)
It's literally says, hey, you can boost this. It kind of reminds me a lot of what Instagram does. And when you click that, you start setting your your target audience demographics, all that stuff, your spend. Now, what I'm conflicted by is, well, I can get millions of views just doing funny stuff. But do I pay for some of these posts that are lower performing to get to people who are second and third connections? So I've tinkered with it a bit. I haven't really had any really successful ones yet. It was.
I'm thinking cost per thousand impressions, somewhere between six to $10 or something like that. So not horrible, but I would be surprised if they don't roll that out quickly across the entire platform.
Matt Diamante (36:14.616)
Well, it's just money for them, right? Like why is, why hasn't that been a thing? You could boost a post on Instagram 10 years ago, right? Like what are we doing here? Let's go Microsoft.
David J Bland (36:24.283)
Yeah, not new. Yeah, it's sort of like not necessarily a first mover in their space. So we talked a lot about different kinds of social media. And what I want to wrap up on is maybe something a little different is how are you taking this thinking of I'm going to test and learn and applying it to things that aren't social media? So, you you have your agency and how you structure your agency and all that, you know, maybe share some insights of.
Matt Diamante (36:28.014)
crazy.
David J Bland (36:53.187)
This isn't just for social media, but I also use this in other parts of my business.
Matt Diamante (36:57.548)
Yeah, you literally have to use it in every part of your business. So one of the things that we do with our clients and they are aware of this is we will. So I have a team of about 13 people at this point, depending on when you're listening to this podcast. So we have a lot of clients that we work with and what we can do is start rolling out tests with like two or three clients in different industries and looking at did that.
one thing that we did differently that Google says not to do, but it's not like quote unquote illegal to Google, but like Google says not to do that, but we're going to try and do a little bit of that. And if it works for these three clients, we're going to roll it out to like five clients. If that keeps working, that is going to become part of a larger strategy. Right? So we're constantly testing things and a lot of these tests come back negative, right? It didn't do anything. But when you find something where like, I'm to get a little bit technical here, but like
If you're doing two heading one tags, which is usually the biggest text on a page on a website. So that is like the blog post title. Let's say that's usually a heading one tag. Google has always said one heading one tag on, you know, on every page. That's what the page is about. I've been doing two, you know, sometimes we test that, but like it's the exact same text. One is for desktop. One is for mobile, but guess what? Both of them show up. Those keywords show up twice. Right? So it's like, we're trying small things like that, not on every post.
Right? Not for every client, but if that starts working, we rule that out. Right?
David J Bland (38:25.757)
I like it. Do you feel as if you have some clients that are more willing to participate in that than others? Like ones are like, yeah, yeah, as long as we don't tank things or do you have others say, well, wait and see and maybe do that later.
Matt Diamante (38:34.774)
I mean, yeah, like our, like the client wouldn't know that we're doing this stuff because you can't see it. Right. Like if once for mobile, once for desktop, it's imperceivable to a human that it looks any different. It's the same title, same tax, all this kind of stuff. Um, and our goal is to help our clients show up higher on Google, get more traffic to their website and, know, ultimately make more money. So if we can do that,
with doing these tests, like they're small tests. We're not like, you know, changing an entire page or anything like that. It's like, we're going to add this word in quotes on this page. And this is a very basic example, but like, we're to add this word in quotes that we want that page to rank for whatever it might be. And if that page does well, it's like, cool. Was it because we had the word in quotes or did we do something different with the content? You know, you want to try to not make it too different because if you're testing, you know, you're testing for one thing.
You don't want to test for too many things because you don't know what worked. so that's like, we're testing our content like that as well. We're also testing client onboarding. We're also testing leads. So when somebody emails in, you know, fills out the contact form on the site, you know, they're, so this is one of the big things that we're doing because we're based in Canada. Uh, but we charge us prices cause a lot of our clients are in the, in the U S and I kept getting Canadians reaching out being like, Oh,
I don't want to pay us dollars. And I'm like, that's totally fine. Um, but that's what we, that's the currency that we run in. So now I've set up, if they select Canada or there's certain countries, if you select, you will get the Canadian pricing, like in Canadian dollars, which is equal to the conversion of, you know, the us dollars. Um, but they're, you know, we're, we're, that's what we're testing right now. So that's an automation that goes out.
here is the, you know, here's our pricing in, in Canadian. Here's our pricing in us. Um, yeah. And just like we're testing, like sending out a follow-up video, like it's pre-recorded video, taking people through the deck, you know, and getting to the pricing at the end, but they have to listen to all the strategy that goes behind what we actually do and our process and everything. Um, and then we're also just testing, let's just send out the video instead of sending out the deck, right?
Matt Diamante (40:53.550)
because then they have to watch that to get like, they can't just skip to the pricing page. So they have to watch the thing. So it's like we're testing everything. You can't not.
David J Bland (41:1.917)
I like it. Yeah, especially in your world, feels as if all these algorithms are always changing and standing still is not an option.
Matt Diamante (41:12.746)
Oh my God. It's like, think it's so fun to test things too. Cause when you find something that works, you feel like, yes, we did it. Like we figured it out. We know the algorithm and then like the next day it changes, but then you have to do it all over again. But it's just, it's fun, right? Like how boring would it be is if, if all you had to do is, okay, we're going to write, you know, this piece of content and we're going to use the keyword 10 times. And if we're going to always end it with, if you want to work with us, contact us here.
Like, and it's just the same formula over and over. Like how boring would that be? Right. And imagine doing that without AI. Some businesses do that and have been doing that for the last, you know, 10, 15 years, which is like, man, that's crazy. That's the worst. Like let's have some fun with this shit.
David J Bland (41:47.357)
Yeah, that's a good boy.
David J Bland (41:59.154)
Yeah, testing doesn't have to be boring. I really want to thank you for joining us today. I feel as if we could talk about each platform much, longer in an episode. If folks want to reach out to you and they're like, hey, I need help with social media. I need help testing things. Where would they reach out to?
Matt Diamante (42:3.532)
No. Yeah.
Matt Diamante (42:21.262)
Okay. Firstly, don't reach out to me for social media help because it's like, it's actually impossible to help people with social media. Like you need to do it yourself. You need to show up every day on camera, get what's in your head and you know, put it on the internet and video and blog and whatever format that you want in VR. Maybe if you want to find me to connect though, uh, learn about digital marketing strategies. You can follow me on Instagram at HeyTony.Agency.
or if you look up Matt Diamante on all these platforms, it'll always be the profile that has the most amount of followers there. And I'm just going to warn you right now, there's a lot of people pretending to be me selling crypto scams and schemes. And sometimes they get people. And then I get an email saying, Hey, do you sell crypto? And I go, no, why? And they go, well, I just sent a guy 750 bucks. Uh, and he said he was going to buy me some Bitcoin for a really good deal. And I was like, Nope, not me. I'm sorry. Like they're like, you should post a video about that.
that you don't sell. And I'm like, I have, but guess what? People don't watch the entire video because it's boring. It has nothing to do. Like they're not getting any value from it. So it doesn't get pushed out to them. Anyways, I'm, going on and on. Hey Tony.ca is my website. You can contact us there if you would like help with your SEO or showing up higher on Google. Um, I also have a ton of free resources, courses, um, you know, free downloads, all that kind of stuff, which I'm sure you will be putting in the show notes.
David J Bland (43:46.801)
We will and we won't be putting any crypto scams. So I thank you. Thank you so much for joining us today and just really deep diving back and forth. It was fun to talk about the black box that is LinkedIn as well. And I just want to thank you so much.
Matt Diamante (43:49.910)
Yeah.
Matt Diamante (43:57.186)
Yeah.
I'm going to get jump on LinkedIn right after this. Absolutely. You think I'm joking? Like I actually like have the tab loaded up and everything.
David J Bland (44:4.752)
Sounds good.
David J Bland (44:8.901)
Sounds good. Thank you so much for joining us, Matt. I had a blast talking to you.
Matt Diamante (44:13.304)
Thank you, appreciate it.