When you’re coming up with new lesson ideas not everything you come up with will be a hit.  In fact most of it shouldn’t.

The Genki English superhero lesson took me 7 years of experimenting and experimenting and flop after flop to finally, 7 years later,  become the hit lesson it is today.

Even the Genki English Come on, Come on song which is a huge hit now, the first version I tried I thought “Nah, I don’t need to try this on a small class, I’ll do it straight on the big gig”

So in front of 1,000 kids it totally flopped completely!! 🙂

Yes, I used to teach classes of 1,000 kids at a time!

Luckily kids are awesome and they tell what they like and what they don’t like and that’s how the Genki English lessons became the hit lessons they are today.

And it’s just the same with social media….

Don’t expect all your posts to go viral straight away.

If you look at any of my friends who have hit it big on Youtube,  they experimented with tons of different ideas and then when one hit they did lots and lots of variations, trying different ideas to try and improve it.   Just look at how many different versions of Baby Shark that Pink Fong did!

Plus it’s just the same with Tik Tok.

It’s not all 1m view hits,  if that’s all you did the algorithm would burn you out straight away.

You do more of what works *and* you also experiment with different new ideas to see what your students love.

For example,  many teachers LOVE Baby Monkey.   They want him in all the lessons.

And many teachers absolutely HATE the Genki English Aygo character. But look at the Tik Tok stats!   The Aygo character is waaaayyyy more popular than Baby Monkey.

Why is this?  Because we’ve tested it and the stupid things we can do with the Aygo character,  like dropping 1,000 kg for “my foot hurts” or having the dentist illustration drilling a shark’s tooth, get the kids’ attention.

They go “Eh, what??” and it becomes MEMORABLE.

And memorization is a huge part of learning!

We still keep testing and trying new things though, because if we can make graphics or sounds or songs even just a little but more memorable, that compounds and that’s how we get the great results for the kids.

Plus of course with social media you have to learn the rules….    

For example on Facebook I can put up a free lesson that is hugely popular, but Facebook will show it to no-one if it has a link in it.  It might get maybe 3 likes!

On the other hand I updated my profile photo the other day,  Facebook shows it to everyone and we get over 100 likes!  Which is crazy!

I’m pretty sure this shouldn’t be getting so many likes! 🙂

So you do have to know the latest “best practices” for the social media networks you choose.

And, more importantly, all the things not to do that will get you “shadow banned” i.e. where you post stuff all the time but the social media channels purposely don’t show it to anyone!

Yes, they do this to you!

Believe me, there’s nothing worse than posting content everyday but no one seeing it because you broke a social media “rule” that you didn’t even know about!  Especially when it’s something new like Tik Tok.

So keep trying new things to grow and expand.

The big explosion ideas where you get millions of views help lots but also the everyday small increases you can do to your lessons or social media to make them 1% better each day really build up over the years.

There’s certainly no way I’d have the 99% success rate with Genki English lessons (or be able to guarantee them!)  if it wasn’t for lots and lots of mistakes “learning moments” along the way!

Be genki,

Richard

P.S.   If you want to learn more about how to get new students on Social Media,  my “How To Get New Students Using Social Media” training for teachers is included with the Genki English Teacher’s Set!