Last week I was geotargeted for a sponsored Facebook ad letting me know that the following Sunday at 4pm there was going to be a NasDaily meetup at Parque de Amor (Lover’s Park) in Miraflores, part of Lima, Peru.
If you’ve never heard of these videos before, a young Israeli-Palestinian Harvard graduate named Nuseir Yassin has been making one-minute daily videos for a few years now, until he has made 1000 of them, posting the exclusively to Facebook (because he hates YouTube, he told us). I believe he was in the 980s this week.
When Sunday came along, and my wife forbade me to be in the house for a Christmas party she was throwing with her mommy friends so “I wouldn’t stress her out”, I made my way for the afternoon to a nearby Starbucks to get some writing done until it was to start. I joined the WhatsApp group for those of us on the ground who wanted to communicate this way and share information with others interested in the meet up.
That being said, there were a few things that were simple, yet brilliant that I got out of this and will serve as a reminder and review for the serious marketer wanting to grow and spread their influence. This can all be relevant to authors who want to promote and market their works as well, so make sure to watch the LinkedIn video below.
1) Find out what the market wants and give it to them!
The point of the meetup on Sunday, his team’s first day in Peru, was to meet with locals (Peruvians) and get ideas from them as to what would make a good video. He specifically said in the message for the meetup, and in that get together, that he was looking for non-touristy things to do. Fascinating stories and interesting and unique aspects of this culture.
In other words, he didn’t come here with pre-conceived notions of what he was going to film, but asked Peruvians themselves about Peru.
2) Leverage your audience/fans to help promote you and your product. Especially if you involved them in point 1
To tag on to the previous point, Nas included his audience from the meetup in the brainstorming and decision-making process for what he would spend his energy making videos about. As a result, I’m certain the biggest push for momentum on social media is when those of us who were in the video(s) share the links on social media. People love sharing and helping promote something if they were involved in it, especially if they’re able to point to themselves in the video.
Every day this week I have found out first from the WhatsApp group when a new video has gone live on Facebook, more so than from seeing it show up in my news feed or any notification about it on Facebook itself.
3) Put in the work, no matter how long it takes and the results will come.
At the time of posting this, the NasDaily Facebook page has over 11 million likes. However, it took time to grow. Nas told us that his first hundred or so videos were all failures, and that when he started on this 1000 days of daily one-minute videos, he only had a few thousand views at first per video, and only several thousand fans on the page. Over time that grew and snowballed.
To the people who had asked him how they too could do what he’s doing, he kindly pointed out he persevered and persisted for a long time before seeing a lot of hits for his videos.
Check the videos below, and let me know in the comments if you have any other takeaways worth pulling from the video.
Here are the first two videos his team made in Peru, containing footage from Sunday’s meetup. If you know when and where to look, you MIGHT see me in the audience.
