Nicki Minaj Celebrates "We Go Up" Going #1 With Twitter Q&A

Nicki Minaj's new video "We Go Up" featuring Five Foreign debuted at #1 on YouTube's Trending video section. To celebrate the achievement, Barbie took to Twitter for a Q&A with the Barbz to answer some questions about the song and video. She talked about her favorite bars, her favorite looks, Papa Bear being on set, and more.

She even talked about how her husband Zoo can't watch her in "Barber Shop" because of Common. The video has 2 million views and counting. Enjoy the video as I break down some of her answers from the Q&A.

Watch "We Go Up" on YouTube here.

Follow me on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram.

The Battle for Short-Form Content Monetization Is Just Getting Started

I feel like gamers, and content creators are only scratching the surface with what they can do with their content. With TikTok increasing their CreatorFund to $1 Billion, I feel like the battle for creators is only beginning. This means it's time to ramp up the frequency and posting. Not only are there big brand deals out there, but I think TikTok and Instagram will soon start to compete at the same level of YouTube in terms of CPMs and payouts. Right now, both of those platforms are rolling out new features to monetize purely off of views and streams, and that is only going to continue.

Advertisers are only spending more, let’s pay the creators keeping users scrolling on those ads.

This is because social platforms are going to have to start competing in a major way for users eyeballs on their platforms. Also, they will most likely see a hit in their ad revenue due to new privacy laws. Even though ad spending will still be monstrous, it will probably be a slightly smaller monster due to the inability to track conversions going forward. Google is going to have cross this bridge sometime in the next few years. They already are beginning to with GoogleAnalytics4, emphasizing engagement instead of conversions. Either way, at this point, social platforms are probably as saturated as you are going to get.

Facebook isn't getting bigger, for example, and new users aren't just springing up out of nowhere. The platforms that are getting bigger, like TikTok, are only gaining new users from existing users on other platforms, not people just discovering social media. These are people leaving Facebook for TikTok, for example. The gold mine of new user acquisition is drying up. One hundred million people won't just pop into existence tomorrow to create a new social media profile. It is more or less the same problem with subscription services. They are all fighting over the same users, which is why Netflix is even considering an ad supported platform -- to compete

The top creators can earn a living off of their content, but once that opens up even more, the possibilities are endless.

So, how to get people to create content and keep eyeballs on the platform to view all of those ads people and companies are going to be spending big money on? Pay the people creating the content to keep them creating content! YouTube creators are getting burned out from long-form content, hence the advent of YouTube Shorts, and creators want a more efficient way to create and earn. Not only that, they want to earn money they can eat off of from the content they are posting. Platforms need to create the incentive outside of just gaining followers. The world of short-form content is slowly emerging from this burn out, and it is time social media platforms open up the books to create real incentive for those creators and gamers generating those billions of views to keep people scrolling on their feeds.

It's happening now. You can earn tens of thousands of dollars per year, if not more, on Instagram and TikTok if you have the followers. Once that starts getting into the millions like it is on YouTube, the floodgates will truly open. It's time to start building for that future now.

It’s time for social platforms to share more of that ad revenue.

How I helped grow a songwriter’s TikTok page by 80,000 followers.

Everyone wants to blow up on TikTok in today’s social world, but doing so takes some finesse and know-how. So, when one of Justin Bieber’s songwriters reached out to me about helping her roll out her new singles and grow her TikTok at the same time, I jumped on board immediately to assist with some creative consulting and targeted advertising.

If you have a TikTok account, you might already be aware that you can promote your content through the app itself. However, TikTok has a slew of powerful advertising campaigns you can also run through the Ads Manager. Setting up an advertising and business account is time-consuming, though. You also have to check off a few boxes to allow your account to run ads and then generate special codes from each post, or Spark Ads, as they are called. These are similar to Instagram Boosts. If you have never set up an ad account or approved your account for ads before, it can feel daunting and confusing, so people tend to resort to the advertising they can run through the app.

The ads manager looks like this:

However, running ads directly through the app instead of the Ads Manager severely limits the power of your ads because the interest targeting is straightforward. This is done on purpose to increase ad revenue on TikTok since people can set up an advertisement for their post in five minutes. As someone who has tried both methods, I can tell you for a fact that you get much better performance and more bang for your buck when you go through the more rigorous method of setting up ads through Ads Manager.

This is where I came in for the songwriter I was helping out with. She had been running ads through the app but wanted them to perform better, so she handed off her ad spending to me, and I took over by running more targeted ads through the TikTok ads manager. Within ads manager, you can search and discover new interests, target people who have viewed a video in a certain time frame, target users who watched the full video and even target people who followed a page from an ad. There is A LOT of power behind doing that and doing that the right way.

From there, I calculated a budget based on the Cost Per Followers formula. Basically, if she wanted to reach a certain amount of followers, I had to figure out how much that total would be for her. So, after a few rounds of initial testing, I was able to determine that the average cost of a follower for her was about $0.10. Which, compared to Instagram and Facebook which is about $1 per follower, was an amazing deal. After we figured out that, we then just had to figure out which content to promote and which content to keep producing while she was seeing all of this additional traffic to her page and new followers.

After a few consulting sessions with her and her manager, we discussed how she should talk about her songwriting history, while also promoting her new singles. Even though the focus was on her new music, her legacy was also important to communicate with new followers. She wasn’t just another songwriter, she was Justin Bieber’s songwriter, and that carries a lot of weight. We finally came to the idea that she should start filming a series highlighting her song and giving her followers a behind-the-scenes look at her writing process.

So, now that we had the creative component down, it was time to get down to the advertising portion. This is where things start to get interesting! We first started off just by boosting the posts for views and engagement, with the intent that people will check out her page and give her a follow, and it worked a bit. Then, along the way, TikTok rolled out a campaign to optimize for Followers. This was when I started to see actual results. Suddenly, her page was growing by thousands of followers a day, all from the advertisements we were running.  After four months, we not only achieved her goal of 50,000 followers but surpassed it and hit 80,000 followers! Now her new followers engage with her content, and one of her videos hit 1 million views for the first time organically.