Educational content suffers from retention. Each episode adds value in one session and there’s no structural hook back to the subsequent one. The series that work do so because they employ the same mechanisms as narrative content that addicts you, tension, progress, open questions that make you push forward. Educational content is the bets way of earning premium follower growth through content the audience actively seeks out between sessions.
Open Each Episode With a Problem Worth Solving
The issue of content retention plagues many educational pieces, which serve a value in a single session but fail to structurally necessitate return to the series. The process of making addictive educational content is not to water it down or fill it with useless filler, but to make every single episode designed to make the viewer curious and in turn design the next episode in such a way that it does the same.
Don’t give the concluding statement until the end
The worst thing you can do in a series of educational videos is to give the solution upfront in the first few seconds of the video and spend the remainder of the class discussing it. The phenomenon of a productive curiosity that is maintained through the entire viewing experience is one that is lost as soon as the conclusion is revealed to the viewer in the front-loaded content. Socialwick’s follower growth and engagement on brands and creators’ educational content provides the distribution it deserves to get to the viewers who are hungry for answers it was created to give.
Utilize the audience’s native tongue.
When teaching begins in the teacher’s language, the student loses interest in the lesson. They should hear their words and the same words used by others when describing the problem, the same words used by others when they ask a question, the same words used by others when they type into search bars, the same words used by others when they type into comment sections of related content. That language alliteration produces a recognition reaction that makes the material seem created for that viewer who has uncovered it.
Create a Progressive Difficulty Curve!
A good educational program becomes more challenging as it goes on. Early episodes set up and establish the audience’s trust. Later episodes follow on this theme in such a manner as to reward those who followed from the start. That’s the progressive structure that benefits the longterm followers, who can know in looking back on the series that they have gained knowledge at each installment and thus the series is its own incentive for viewing from episode one.
End each episode with a ‘forward hook’.
The final 10 seconds of every episode should make it impossible for your audience to want to skip the next. The key difference between asking the user to subscribe to a series vs. A standalone piece of content is that a tangible piece of value is offered with the former. The forward hook of a given episode should be what incentivizes the audience to keep watching the educational series rather than simply learning something that they’ll forget 20 minutes later.
Conclusion
Frame each episode around a stated, felt problem, guard the conclusion fiercely, use the language of your audience, build complexity incrementally, and leave the audience at the end with a question the next episode is designed to answer. Education content that manages this consistently cultivates compound return behavior single session educational content simply cannot.