He’s not a talk show host, a news anchor, or a content creator. If you ask KTSA’s Joe Pags, he will tell you, “I consider myself a broadcaster, and that covers every single medium I choose to jump into. Luckily, with hard work, I’ve been able to succeed at just about all of them.”
With 1.1 million followers on TikTok alone, and hundreds of thousands more on other platforms, the self-proclaimed “older conservative guy with gray hair” is proud that not all his social followers know about his other gig hosting radio. “I’m cool with that because they’re getting a product or a person or a thing that they now relate to and they want more of that thing.” Pags added, “It means that the tentacles and broadcasting for me have gone well beyond radio.”
From TV to radio and now social media, Pags is a master of all things broadcasting, but expanding his social media reach wasn’t on his radar until recently. “[Three years ago] I was spending a lot of time every single day putting stuff up on social media that wasn’t doing anything. I didn’t have a TikTok yet.”
Pags noted he wanted to “hunker down and figure out why I wasn’t succeeding.”
Cracking the Social Media Algorithm
Pags gave himself 3-6 months to figure it out and had a plan: “If it’s not successful, I’ll just ignore social media. Screw it. I’ll just do radio and my TV hits or whatever else I’m doing. But what I found was when I started doing really good hooks and started doing really interesting stories and started promising great video, then people started really getting what I was laying down.”
His larger-than-life personality, combined with his TV experience, made it easy for Pags to jump from mic to socials… once he figured out the algorithm. “I realized that you’ve got one to two seconds to make [the audience] not swipe; that’s when I started really honing in on that first one to two seconds to make them stay.”
He went from a handful of views to hundreds of thousands. His top viral video hit nearly 12.1 million views. “My most viral video to date is a video that I did on Kamala Harris when she was running for president. She sat down with the Philadelphia ABC affiliate and she kept on saying that she’s from a middle-class neighborhood or she grew up in a middle-class household. She just kept repeating herself, almost ignoring what the questions were coming from the guy.”
A Simple Formula That Works
The structure of Pags’ videos is simple, and no crazy edits are needed. “Generally speaking, I’ll come out. I’ll set the hook. I’ll show the piece of video with me, you know, making faces, watching it. And then at the end, I’ll do sort of a close. And that one went absolutely nuts.”
There is more to it than just a few edits and his opinion. Pags admits, “The platform decides ultimately who sees my stuff and gives them a chance to like it or not like it. The platform wants the people who are on it to stay on it and if people see my video and they stay for a minute or two minutes instead of for two seconds, the platform wins through advertising and through everything else.”
Pags affirmed, “Once I started really understanding that that first one to two seconds is what makes them stay, then I was able to just sort of churn it out and do it like an assembly line.”
Embracing an Audience That Doesn’t Know Him
Today, some of his favorite messages from followers are “You should think about doing radio. You’ve got a great voice.” With nearly 40 years in the business, it’s both humbling and funny to Pags that his newer, younger audience “have no idea who I am.”
The radio legend put a lot of thought into people not knowing him and decided, “This person doesn’t know what I do, and that is so great because now there’s an opportunity for me to make this person seek out other stuff that I do and hopefully subscribe here or tune in every day.”
Pags went on to say the typical “knee-jerk reaction in the business is to debate the person: ‘Why don’t you know who I am?’ But at the end of the day, I’m glad that they don’t have any clue who I am. It’s a real benefit.”
Advice for Radio Broadcasters
It’s a benefit because he can now bring people from social media to tune in to his show or his YouTube channel. It also allows him to have a wider reach than the market he touches, a positive for anyone in the industry.
“I think anything that for anybody who’s in radio, anybody who’s in one broadcast outlet that isn’t doing social media, here’s a little advice. Be a broadcaster. Don’t be a one-trick pony. Don’t act like that audience is beneath you or above you or too technically savvy for you.”
He believes he is the greatest example of this mentality because “I’m a 60-year-old conservative guy and I’m doing very, very well on social media because there is an appetite for what it is that we do.”
He elaborated, “When you pigeonhole yourself and decide this is what I do three hours a day, I do nothing outside of that, you’re going to wake up in 5, 10 years and realize you’re behind the eight ball. And catching up is going to be very hard.”
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