Content Psychology 101 Series, Episode 2: Retention and Watch Time Psychology. As a content creator, it's not just about grabbing attention. It's about what you do to keep attention, and in this video I'll explain why retention matters and all the things you can do to improve it.

How do you stop people scrolling away from your content and make them glued to it the whole way three? Let's discuss. This is the second episode of my content psychology 101 series where I help explain to you why people react to content in the way they do, so you can make your content better. This section is going to be all about the psychology of retention, keeping people engaged the whole way three, which is very important, because basically every social media platform has one core goal to keep people on here as long as possible. So if your content helps do that, it's more likely to be rewarding. But a lot of people believe that people scroll away from content because our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and shorter, and while there's a lot of data and research to kind of confirm this, I don't think it's the whole picture because people will still pay attention to things if they think it's worth it. Like you will watch a one hour podcast on YouTube, if you find it interesting, you will binge watch an entire series on Netflix in one evening. You will do a lot of research on a product, so it's not necessarily that people can't pay attention. It's just that we're less willing to waste it. Now that we have more options, and it comes to your content retention is basically giving people the feeling that the next five seconds of your video are going to be more invaluable to them than scrolling away and finding something else. In the previous episode of this series, I mentioned that the brain is making tiny predictions every single minute of the day, predicting what is going to happen next and if it can accurately predict what is going to happen next, it's going to stop paying attention. For example, if I was to start a video by saying something like here are three ways to get more protein in your diet, you kind of know what to expect from that video, especially if you've seen something similar in the past. So you're going to be more likely to scroll, but if I said something like, by the end of this, you're going to be fighting with me in the comments, your brain counts accurately predict that any more and attention is going to go up. There is a technique that I teach in the content club, which is my course and community for content creators called the second beat, and it's about adding a line after your hook that sets the tone for your video that kind of creates a bit of contrast and peaks in track. Now, one of the most effective things you can do to increase retention is to make sure there is progress through your video, and there's lots of ways to do this. You can progress with information, you can ask a question, answer a question, ask a new question, answer another question, and so on and so forth, or you can create emotional progress. One of the members of the content club made an exceptional video last week, all about high mothers of the bride can feel more comfortable getting their photo taken at their child's wedding. And she started off by creating a sense of like tension and anxiety, they're moving towards hope and they're moving towards relief, and that video went exceptionally viral. Another thing that helps with retention is keeping things simple, making sure you're not exploring too many ideas in the one video that there's not too much going on in terms of text on the screen flashy editing, because if there's too much to pay attention to, the brain will just not bother with it. And storytelling can massively help as well, because storytelling is very immersive, you can get people invested in the story so much that they forget that they were scrolling in the first place. There is so much more I could say about this, I go into a lot more detail in the content psychology master class that I have inside the content club, if you would like access to that, send me a DM, and I will give you a discount code to get in there, and in the next part, I'm going to talk about the psychology of engagement.