The biggest breakthrough in your business will come from understanding just one word: fluency.

Why Fluency?

So what the hell does fluency even mean? Do you mean fluency in French? Fluency in cooking? What is it?

So first—why fluency? Why are we talking about fluency?

When we think about fluency, we think about language and language fluency—like I’m fluent in English. Language fluency makes sense; we think about that initially.

But when we’re actually creating something, we need to think about fluency in terms of how familiar the thing we’re creating feels, so someone feels fluent in it.

Fluency equals familiarity—like how familiar you feel with something.

It’s the familiarity, it’s the fluency in that I see something and I understand it. I don’t need to understand all of it, but if I understand it a little bit, I will feel more of a connection to it instantly.

How Fluency Creates Success

Let me explain. If you are sort of our era of millennial—we’re millennials, we’re both just on different ends of the millennial timeline, a 10-year gap between us—millennials and others know the band Paramore.

They have a song called “Misery Business.” It did really well, very popular.

But that’s not the song that we’re talking about. We’re talking about a song that used the fluency of “Misery Business” to sell itself.

A few years ago, maybe five years ago or so, Olivia Rodrigo made a song called Good 4 U, and immediately it basically went viral everywhere.

Why? Because all of the millennials—everyone who grew up on Paramore—felt compelled to be like, “This is just Misery Business with different words.”

TikTok was brutal, but this is the thing though—it became very successful and arguably put that artist on the map.

There’s a more current version of that which is Anxiety by Doechii, and it’s like an exact replica of Somebody That You Used to Know by Gotye. It’s the same exact beats and everything, but it’s more modern—more upbeat, whereas obviously that song is very downer.

So they’re not covers at all, but it’s the same exact sound, and you recognize it immediately. But you’re like, “Whoa, this is different.”

That’s what I wanted to say—our fluency in that song instantly gives us the inclination to like it if we liked the original, or even if we didn’t like it. It’s just like, “I swear I know this song.”

Why Familiar Beats Original

There was a Green Day album back in the day—I think it was “American Idiot”—that the first time I listened, I remember thinking, “I feel like I’ve heard half of these songs before.”

But they went back to other familiar historical songs and pulled just little bits that make you feel something. And that’s what we want to do—we want to make people feel something.

Using fluency to create something—whether it’s art, whether it’s social media, whether it’s a podcast like this, whether it’s something that you want a positive outcome from—no matter what it is, if you think in fluency like “how fluent is someone going to be in this,” you’re going to be much better off.

I have one more example: Edge of Tomorrow. There is a Tom Cruise movie called Edge of Tomorrow that I think is his greatest movie of all time. It now has a cult following and everything—it is a really good movie—but it completely flopped when it came out.

Why? Because the phrasing, the titling of it, “Edge of Tomorrow,” doesn’t have any familiarity. It doesn’t connect with the story really in any way whatsoever.

So there isn’t a fluency in being able to talk about it. If at the time someone said, “Did you see Edge of Tomorrow?” I’d be like, “I don’t think so,” because there was zero connection.

When they were trying to push the movie when they were struggling, they took the phrase “Live Die Repeat,” which was just sort of the tagline, and they gave it top billing. They put it huge on the poster, but it was already too late. They weren’t giving us the ability to be fluent in it.

The Opposite

What’s the opposite then of fluency? What would be an example of the exact opposite?

It would be disfluency. Disfluency would be the opposite, which is not familiarity—so it’s something very foreign and different, almost bizarrely different. Not as a negative, but just purely like “what is this?”

I think a good example is actually someone who you meet who’s from another country who has a name that you don’t even know exactly how to pronounce from seeing it. You don’t have a fluency in that person’s sort of identity, and it makes it so much harder to be like, “Oh, did you meet…”

And it’s almost like, “Did you meet Sally’s friend?” because you can’t even—you don’t know the person’s name.

Everything that we do is connection, so there’s a disfluency. Think in terms of a brand—my name, it’s Amara. People always think it’s Amanda, which unfortunately is my least favorite name out there.

So I have a fluent name in a way where it’s familiar, but there’s also disfluency in it because then it’s like, “Oh wait, ‘rah’—you end it in ‘rah,’ not ‘duh.’”

In terms of a brand, for example, like Nike, Coke, Pepsi—these are easy, we understand that. But if you have some letters next to each other that in the English language don’t really compute for the English market, you’re going to struggle because they won’t be able to actually convey that brand name.

What We’ve Been Up To

So what is the “what” section? The “what” is what have we been up to and what are we doing on this planet?

Something that we’re working on—we’re a little rusty, we had last week off because, honestly, to be fully honest, life will catch up to you. Something that we talk about with people always is consistency, and we personally do struggle with that because it is very difficult.

This podcast we film fresh every single week, which we could batch ahead of time, but we like to have topics in the moment where we’ve been reading something or digesting something because we’re so much more passionate in the moment about what it is that we just learned.

This is also us practicing. This dialogue together and educating together—it’s not something we’ve done. So if we did batch a month at a time, we would basically get 12 at-bats. Now we get 52, or 50 if we miss a couple weeks, but 52 at-bats every year to improve this and figure out how this works.

Introducing Hiveway

We are working on a product called Hiveway. It is a very complex product—what we started with versus what it is now has evolved tremendously.

Complex for us, easy for you. It’s so easy for the user, which is why it’s even more complex for us, because it’s essentially step-by-step, no steps skipped, of a variety of content creation.

We fly all over the country to work with small businesses and realtors in their market, and we have learned so incredibly much. There are so many different types of content that you can make, and it’s very difficult and stressful to try to make it on your own, so we’re trying to make it even better for people.

Something about that which is what we’re talking about this week is familiarity—making the product feel so familiar to people that it doesn’t feel scary, it doesn’t feel like “what is this?”

For me, using Notion, for example—I still don’t even know what the hell it is. It’s a note-taking app, like super reductively. I love it, I can’t stand it. It’s so different, there are way too many options.

I love tech, I find it really fascinating, and I can learn things immediately, but that is so overwhelming to me I don’t even want to touch it.

People love Notion because there is a cult of Notion basically, which I fully admire and respect. There’s also a podcast that we have a friend who really likes, and their tagline is “give it a year” because people aren’t fluent in it instantly, but eventually you are and then you’re part of the little cult.

Same thing with Notion—Notion takes an investment, and then people really like it. But that is the anomaly, that’s the exception, not the rule.

If we want to do things and not have an uphill battle with everything we do, we want it to be familiar.

So what Hiveway is—and it’s myhiveway.com—what Hiveway is in terms of familiarity on our end is we want it to feel familiar when you use it. But then on the flip side, the product that we’re helping you create—your hyper-local organic content—we’re giving you all the tactics that are working and packaging them up so it’s familiar to the people you’re creating for.

Learning Through Practice

It’s been a lot of trial and error with my own personal content, being like, “Okay, how does this exactly function?” Our whole philosophy is you can’t—it’s more helpful if you make the type of content or do something if you’re trying to help with it or teach it.

It’s eating your own dog food—it’s doing the exact thing that you’re trying to teach people to do.

We’re trying to condense our experience and hand it off in a way that feels familiar and also helps you be familiar to others. Because we are systems people through and through—we love not only developing systems but finding new systems, finding the best way to do something, constantly improving things.

We’re trying to make Hiveway feel so familiar, just like you immediately know how to use it—like an iPhone, any Apple product. You immediately know how to use it. That’s why it’s so successful, and that’s why it feels good, and that’s why so many people model their websites after Apple.

How to Implement Fluency in Your Business

How can someone listening create and be a more fluent product? As a realtor, for example, they sort of are the product—they’re selling themselves. They’re not selling a house; they’re selling “why I’m the best person to buy or sell a house with.”

Personality-Based Content

There are a few different ways you can go about this. One of the ways that we historically have used is doing personality-based content.

What does that mean? It’s basically doing content to tell people about yourself. You do want to try to have a “what’s in it for them” in your content whenever you can. However, make a story—don’t put you as the punchline, but make it maybe funny.

If you can make more personality-driven content, that is a great way to have people be more familiar with you, specifically in a storytelling aspect.

We all know stories—storytelling has been around forever. It’s why Disney was so successful, it’s why you watch movies, it’s why you watch TV shows, it’s why you listen to anything and everything. Because we all want to know more stories. That’s what we learn best from.

That’s why mythology has existed and religions and everything. We want to know what happens next.

Having more personality-related content—because then, specifically talking for realtors or small business owners—people already feel like they know you. They know a little thing about you.

For example, something that I would always ask people: “Would you rather live in a tent or live in a Subway restaurant?” You’re sort of making a story because then you go through the hypothetical: “Well, every day I would probably rather live in a tent because then I can live in the woods and I love camping and I love hiking with my family.”

You just introduced two or three different things that people now will know about you.

The person who you’re going to be working with closely as their realtor—your client—wants to know more about you before they even get to know you, because you are sharing who you are.

One of the most difficult things when you meet somebody for the first time is “I know nothing about this person. Do I like them or do I hate them?” That’s kind of the human thing—it’s like a survivalist instinct. You’re getting rid of that question in their head immediately.

Understanding Tactics vs. Strategy

What’s a tactic versus strategy?

A strategy is a collection of tactics. Our strategy for MAVEN, our strategy for Useful Not Famous and Hiveway, is the culmination of everything we’re doing. Our strategy actually encompasses all three of those. How we’re approaching them is the strategy.

But individual things that we’re doing—such as personality content or scoops, or we do “out and about,” we do all these different things—those are all tactics.

The fluency in a tactic also helps. Doing the “would you rather” or “underrated/overrated”—these are things that people see. We’re not reinventing the wheel; we’re taking the wheel and polishing it up a little bit to make it our own.

We’re adjusting that wheel because we want people to be fluent in the topic.

Familiar Content Formats

When it’s something like “the five best coffee shops in Miami,” if you’ve spent any time on TikTok, you probably have an idea of what that video looks like already. Just me saying that—because it’ll be either a still image or a little B-roll with a little moving image that says “five best coffee shops in Miami,” and then it goes to a different image with the name of it, a different image.

This is familiar. There’s a fluency. People know what to expect.

And it’s storytelling because it’s a very, very loose story, but it is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. It is a list of five things. But if I want to know whether or not this person is right or prove them wrong, I need to get all the way to the end of that story—that fifth item—so then I can be like, “You’re wrong,” or “Exactly! I love number four; that’s where I go.”

It’s just the tactics, and this is what we’re delivering in Hiveway—a collection of tactics that are working, that we know are working from making 4,000 videos last year, and delivering it so you can be fluent to the people that you’re trying to reach, or they can be fluent with what you’re making.

Practical Implementation Tips

Finding Content Ideas on TikTok

Before you stop listening to this episode, I have one more thing to recommend to you. Another thing you can do—specifically talking to real estate professionals just because that’s who we work with—go find, using hashtags, three people on any platform of your choosing: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, whatever.

Which would you do?

I’m biased—I would do TikTok because that’s always trendy. Instagram to me is—no shade—but it’s so far behind and it’s such a different platform. If you want to find in-the-moment things, in-the-moment tactics, always go to TikTok. TikTok is a thousand years ahead of any other platforms by far.

Use TikTok. Go to TikTok, look for specific hashtags: “real estate,” “realtor,” “realtors of TikTok,” and maybe a local one for wherever you live—whether it’s city, state, whatever. Look at what people in your area are doing.

Find videos in your area of real estate agents doing really great videos. It might not have the most views, it might not have the most engagement, but if it’s something that makes you stop and be like, “F*ck, that’s a really good idea”—do it. Do your own version.

That’s the beauty of especially TikTok—you can do the same exact thing, and it’s going to work. I’ve been on TikTok for five-plus years. I did my own original content, but now I’m seeing you don’t need to do original things.

You can do the same thing that other people are doing because you have the fluency—the familiarity of the trend—but then your own little funny bent to it. And that’s why these trends succeed so well.

The Importance of Consistency in Content Type

One final note about this: when you find the video that you want to try to make, try to stick with that type of content for a while, because then you’re telling people what to expect on your profile, which again is a form of fluency.

So many people don’t stick with one thing long enough, and that’s kind of the problem. If you’re going everywhere, people aren’t going to know what to expect on your profile.

This is something that I struggle with personally because I love history—my whole background is in history, I have degrees in history, I’ve taught history—but now I have a new love of making really great content with people and for people and teaching them how to make their own content and feel confident in it.

So I’m trying to blend the two together, and it’s a weird profile, I’m not going to lie, because you have all these history dorks and then you also have these social media nerds.

Just trying to make your profile as familiar as possible—that’s something that we’ve been talking about with our friend Tori, figuring things out.

Key Takeaways

This is the biggest breakthrough in your business—this is a shift for us that we’re making as we speak. There’s a little pivot in things, not dramatic, but we’re looking at it differently.

We’re actually considering fluency now in a way where before we sort of spoke about it differently, but the word “fluency” has unlocked things in our minds, and that’s why we wanted to share it with you when it is fresh, when it means the most to us.

Remember: Fluency equals familiarity. When you make content that feels familiar to your audience, they instantly connect with it. Use proven tactics, tell stories, and be consistent with your content type to build that crucial sense of fluency with your audience.

We’ll talk with our Top Banana clients about this strategy too, because it’s proven to work time and time again when building authentic connections with your audience.