When I worked in-house the social media I was best at was text, imagery and their combination. Now—despite the success you can still have on Facebook, Threads and Bluesky—the main show in town is shortform video. If you can’t plan, shoot and edit a good video in 2025 then you are not getting a job in social media.

So in the interest of self-preservation (but also so I’m not talking out of my arse to clients) I’ve been running a secret history TikTok account to test some of the hunches and suggestions I recommend in this newsletter.

I’m not going to tell you what my account is called because I don’t have the face/voice for video (i.e. it’s cringe), but this is what’s happened and what I’ve learned so far:

• The account is pitched as a generic History account, i.e. ‘History Dude: I talk about history’.

• Experimentation, persistance and a willingness to change tack are still core to hitting on the right formula.

• I’ve tried list article clickbait, History Gossip-adjacent topics, object biographies, vibes posts and site-specific video. Most have been duds (c.1-3k views), but the voiceover videos telling a story with B-roll of a physical place (think this kind of thing) have done the best - with even the worst-performing getting 18k views and 3.5k Likes, and the best getting 240k views and 38.5k Likes.

  • This isn’t going to be sustainable becuase I don’t have the time or the budget to keep visiting historical sites, I just happened to go on two short breaks around the UK and farmed content while I was there.

  • I’ve also thrown maybe a tenner or so of my own money at videos. Sometimes this gives a video the kick it needs to reach a much wider audience, sometimes it just gets the views I paid for and no more. But if you think a video could really kick off and it just needs a helping hand, £3.50 really isn’t that much budget to make it happen.

• On the topic of farming content, I can’t recommend enough just taking B-roll video of everything you do and see.

• There’s no point trying to figure out the algorithm. As far as I can tell having a good hook in the first 3 seconds and lots of <5 second cuts between footage works best for my formats, but I’ve seen single-take videos do well. I’ve seen crappy carousels do well. I think it’s all in the hook and how engaging you are as a speaker or writer.

• I had a video which did shit at first, then after a few months it was picked up for some reason and reached 35k views—so don’t delete the low-performers unless they’re truly awful.

• Content creators have the edge on heritage organisations because they can just talk about whatever they like and also not care as much about copyright.

• I’ve been trying to embrace ‘fast and lazy’, spending no more than 2 hours on a video. But I usually wish I leave things to cook a little bit, whether that’s rehashing a script, chasing down extra facts, storyboarding to make sure the best shots are captured. But when a video does okay without all those things, is the effort worth it?

Content of this week

• I’m obsessed with the Houston Museum of Natural Science. They’re coming up with the kind of original ideas that I can usually only come up with 4 pints deep, which I then talk myself out of by the time I’m sober.

• The SS Great Britain have been on a bit of a roll recently, and I love this response to a user comment. Just a genius intersection of music, BTS and their site.

• This has nothing to do with arts and culture, I just found it very funny.

• I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: people want to find a point of relatability with seemingly distant historic characters.

The bullet point bit

• Nobody could have predicted that asking people to submit id to verify their age would result in a massive data breach. Although this wasn’t a breach of Discord, it was a breach of the 3rd party they were using for the verification.

• I saw this in the StoryThings newsletter: AI Slop is Destroying the Internet. The ‘Dead Internet’ theory (that we’re all just bots talking to each other) has been around for a while, but it might actually be becoming a reality.

• Nobody can really figure out specifically how TikTok’s algorithm hooks people in. So 800 U.S. TikTok users shared their data with the Washington Post to see what patterns there are, and they mainly figured out that it takes advantage of our compulsive traits. So not much new but there’s some nice graphs.

• Sora was downloaded more in its first week on iOs than ChatGPT was, so we’re basically screwed.

Personal stuff I do for me and you can just skip this if you like

🎮📖 what I’m consuming as a consumer

I downloaded Mafia: The Definitive Edition, a complete remake of one of my favourite games as a teenager. It was the first time I remember feeling like I was playing through an interactive film, something that felt like it had been directed and crafted beyond ‘go here, shoot these people, win the level.’

But they still kept the fucking racing level in.

🐕 Keith

I got a tattoo