Brendan Kane breaks down how to build sustainable social media presence in 2025, separating fleeting trends from formats that actually work. He uses qualitative analysis to explain what drives viral success and references specific creators to show how storytelling mastery matters more than chasing trends.
The way that we look at social media is very different than what most kind of social media agencies or gurus will tell you to do, which is follow the trends, you know, and what is a trend? So a trend is something that's very fleeting. So it typically lasts for like a few weeks, maybe a few, one few months at last. Like, the biggest trend that I can think of is like the ice bucket challenge. It's like people don't do the ice bucket challenge today. And the other problem is looking at a trend is 99% of people that do that don't breakthrough with viral success. We only see the people at the top. So the way that we look at it is we don't want people to go and do trends because you're not mastering a skill set. We tell people to look at a format. So when we think about movies the past 50 years, every movie follows the three act structure in terms of how stories are told. So when Steven Spielberg makes a movie, he's not reinventing that structure, he's using that structure every time to become one of the best storytellers on the planet. So we look at social media in terms of what we call a format, and there's. Our team has done about 10,000 hours of research, and we've crossed 220 different formats. So there's many to choose from. I'm not by any means saying it has to be like these three formats are the only ones that work. So you have to do them if you don't love them. So what's an example? We broke down Tanner Leatherstein's Is it worth it format, where he deconstructs a $500 Chanel handbag, tells you whether it's worth it. Another one that you've probably seen a lot on TikTok or Instagram is we call it two characters, one light bulb, where it's the same person that plays two different characters. So they play the expert and the novice, and they break down a misconception about something. So an example is Erica Kohlberg is a master of this format with the legal industry, where she breaks down the fine print of what happens when your flight is canceled. What. What happens when your AirPods break. There's other people like Mark Tilbury that breaks it down about finance, so that core format can be used for any industry. People use it for legal, like Erica. Finance, real estate, nutrition. Any kind of subject matter can be put into that format. So the first place to understand is the formula starts with understanding what a format is versus a trend. Because I can guarantee you will not master the art of storytelling and, and really break through without that, that fundamental understanding. So once we understand what a format is, now we can start looking at what format do I want to tackle. You know, what format am I passionate about? And that's why we do so much research, because I never want to push a client or anybody to do a format that they're not passionate about, that they don't enjoy. Because you and I both know, like, creator burnout and fatigue is real. Like, if you don't enjoy it or you don't see the business results with it, you're just going to stop doing it. So once we have the format, then we need to do the analysis of that format, because most people will look at Tanner and see he did 15 million views on that video. Or Erica Kohlberg with the two characters on light bulb. Oh, she did 10 million views on that video. I know what they're doing. I'm just going to go out and do that without any analysis. And 99% of people that try that fail because they don't really understand what drives the performance of that format. So what we do next with the client is we have a process called Gold, Silver, Bronze, where we'll take an account like Erica or any creator that's using a format successfully, and we'll choose 10 of their highest performing videos for the format. So, like, two characters, one light bulb, it could. The high performers are probably 5 to 10 million views. Then we'll take 10 to 20 of the average performers, the silver, which is, you know, in the few hundred thousand views. And then we'll take the underperformers, the bronze, which is like 10 to 100,000 views. And what we're doing is, as I mentioned earlier, is we're looking for performance drivers, not the content, but the context. Like what is happening in those high performers that's not showing up in those low performers, and vice versa. So we're doing what we call qualitative analysis. So where most people are spending their time on social media is quantitative analysis, meaning they're looking at how many views did I get, how many shares, how many likes, comments, conversions, which is a great indicator of something working or not working, but it doesn't uncover the why. So this is where we do the qualitative analysis of comparing the high performers in that same format against the low performers to really determine what are the variables that cause the success or the underperformance in that format. So we mentioned Dr. Julie Smith earlier, like, one of the examples I do is I break down that Waste Paper basket video that she has versus one where she just has kind of cars in front of her from a visual metaphor. Now, the Waste Paper basket video generated 12 million views versus the cars. One generates, I think, 2 or 300,000 views. So we're tech company. The same format, the visual metaphor format, same creator, 12 million views versus 200,000 views. So there's a huge discrepancy in kind of that performance. And that's where the real learning comes in. It's not to point out, oh, Dr. Julie Smith didn't master that video. It's more about what drives that success. So that if you're going to tackle that format like the visual metaphor format, you can understand the contextual elements that allow that successful storytelling mechanism.
