Virality Expert Reacts to Social Media Myths

So today I'll break down social media advice. What's real, what's clickbait, and what actually works if you want to grow in 2025 and beyond.

Now, the first one here is what I call Journey videos. So these creators simply document their daily lives. They're showing people what they're working on without any editing or fancy animations. So this format has been blowing up lately. Now, a good example of this is Sam Sulek. He just takes his phone to the gym, he place the camera somewhere and films his workouts. He doesn't do any of the fancy lighting setup. There's no professional camera, and half the time you can barely hear him over the.

So one of the things I want to point out that, that I have a problem with is when people say something is blowing up, like this specific format. This guy is obviously having a lot of success with it. I don't deny that at all. But I guarantee you 99% of the people that try it are going to fail. Why? Because they don't understand the nuances of what actually makes it successful. I mean, this format, it could be several different things. Like if we were to, if our team were to break down this format, we would take a week analyzing the high performers versus the low performers to really understand, like what makes this version of social media, this social media video format work. Is it the camera angles, is it the asmr or other different variables. So I really hate when people say, well, this thing is blowing up because then it just really makes people think, oh well, if I just do what they're doing, I'm going to be successful. But what we've seen in 18 years of being on social media, it's ultimately not going to be successful if you don't understand the true nuances of what is driving the performance here.

Background music and sometimes the lighting is terrible. And that's exactly why it works. His videos get millions of views because people can tell that it's real. And there are.

So again, the lighting is terrible. I can definitively tell you if you look at 99% of the videos out there where the lighting is terrible, they're not going to have millions of views. So that is likely not the performance driver in this instance are so many.

Creators that are doing this format now, basically just picking up a camera, going for a walk while just talking without a script. And it works, right? Because people are tired of this. Perfect overproduced videos with fancy graphics, perfect lighting. And it all makes sense because people want to see something real and authentic. Now of course, in saying that you still have to know how to do your thumbnails, how to structure your content of your videos to make it engaging. But the key here is that people, people want to see the mess, the real process of someone building something or learning something new. That's why these Journey videos are so powerful right now, because they show everything and not just the perfect results. Now, the second type of video.

So I do agree with him saying that the overproduction people definitely get worried about production or brands will overproduce content. And typically that will detract from performance. Because what's happened to consumers, you and I, when we're on social media, we've become professionals at consuming content because we have seen millions and millions of videos. So within a split second, and this may not be happening at a conscious level, sometimes it's at a subconscious level. If we see something overproduced, we're just like, oh, this is probably going to be an ad, or this is going to be a branded piece of content. So I'm going to move on to the next one and move on to the next one. You're not going to stick around with that. But I think that there's just really an oversimplification that's happening here. And just saying, oh, well, people want something that's real and authentic. What does that mean? What does authentic mean? It can mean so many different things. I'm sure a lot of people watching this have seen, sat down in front of the camera and have really represented their authentic message, their authentic self. But it doesn't break through. And it's not because your message is bad or because anything that you're doing is wrong. It's because the contextualization, the way that you're expressing that message, it's just missing that storytelling nuance in that format to drive that performance. And we've worked with thousands of clients where we've taken the same message that's underperformed and just put it in a structure that is proven to succeed. And then all of a sudden it takes off. But it takes off because we these nuances that go into telling a story through a specific lens. And here I'm not saying that this guy doesn't know that. Maybe he does and he's just not sharing with the audience. But in this format that he's breaking down, he's not really diving into the nuance of this specific individual. He's showing on screen of how he's successfully executing it.

Let's talk about some of the trends coming to social media in 2025. The very first one is going to be about the hooks. I'm calling this one Hooks are getting tricky. Not my best work in terms of tit, but that's okay. Did you notice that my intro for this video was like 10 to 15 seconds max? In addition to that, there were some visual cues appearing on the screen within the first few seconds of my video starting. That was not by accident. That was fully intentional. A lot of us have known that we have mere seconds to grab our audience's attention in our content for a while. The thing that's going to change next year is that the amount of time we have to grab people's attention is going to decrease. And I know that sounds ridiculous because you're thinking, I already only have a few seconds. How could I?

So I don't think that there's anything wrong with what she's saying. I mean, it's the reality of the world that we live in today. When I started in social media in 2004, 2005, when MySpace and Friendster were kind of the predominant players, yes, I'm dating myself that far back. There's only a few million people on these platforms creating content. You fast forward to Today, there's over 5 billion people on social media. So when she talks about the decreased attention span for grabbing your attention, it is true in that there's just more people creating more content. And hooks are incredibly important in terms of grabbing that attention. I wrote an entire book on this five or six years ago called Hook Point, how to Stand out in a 3 second world. So if you want to check that out and we'll put a link in the description so that you can get a free copy of it. But the reality is it is critically important. Those first few seconds matter make all the difference in terms of performance on any platform. If you look at YouTube, the thumbnail and title obviously are that initial three seconds that you have to get somebody to click on the video. If we're Talking about Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, it's going to be, you know, just scrolling through the feed, what's happening now? One thing that people rarely talk about is a lot of this is actually happening at the subconscious level. And a lot of it is actually happening faster than three seconds. Like as soon as that video or that thumbnail or title come on the screen in that split second, in a subconscious level, there's decisions being made. Am I going to stick and watch this or am I going to move on to the next thing? Let's watch more of this video to see if she gets into more details on how to create more effective hooks.

How could I possibly have even less time? Well, a study by Facebook revealed that the average attention span for their users when it came to consuming video content was actually just 1.7 seconds when it was consumed on a mobile device. It did go up to 2.5 seconds when it was viewed on a desktop. Now, this isn't the only study which has come out and said that actually you have less than two seconds to grab people's attention. And it won't be the last one either. As more and more creators emerge and more and more businesses start to use social media to promote their brands, we are going to continuously see an increase in the amount of content that we are competing with on our designated social platform. The more content being shared, the harder it is for us to get our audience's attention. In the past, it's been enough for you to say something.

And one of the layers that she hasn't covered yet, and she may cover it later in the video is what's gonna happen with AI and the amount of content that's gonna be produced with that. So AI is gonna lower the barrier of entry to create content for these platforms. Now, one major mistake people make with AI is they treat it as the solution instead of a tool. And my analogy I have is like if everybody on the planet woke up tomorrow using AI to create content, well, there's still going to have to be winners and losers. Just because you use AI doesn't mean it's quality content. Great storytelling. So I think that she's spot on with the fact that there's going to be more and more content. Even Facebook and Meta came out saying that they're probably going to create content with AI to cover news topics and other trending topics that are coming out to again retain people on their platform so they can serve more ads, cookie.

Or do something exciting within the first three to five seconds of your videos. Now you have under two seconds and you probably need to get a bit more creative with your hooks. It's no longer enough for you to just say something that's going to grab your audience's attention. You should now be exploring multi layered hooks. Joe. What? I actually think that should have been the name of this trend. Let's just change it. The name of this trend is now multi layered hooks. Now I know that probably sounds so complex, but a multi layered hook is essentially one which is has a audio component. So you're saying something or There's a noise that captures your audience's attention. A visual component. So something happens on the screen. Maybe you sit down before you start talking. And also a text component. That's when text appears on the screen that grabs your audience's attention. As I've said already, the days of us just being able to use one of those elements as our hook are slowly dying out and we actually need to start getting a lot more creative.

I agree and disagree. The thing that I disagree with is her saying, layering in all of these three things. Now, it can work, but you need to be a true expert on how all of these playing together. One of the biggest mistakes people make when they're trying to hook or grab people's attention is they're doing too much. So in her example, she's talking about text, audio, all of these things happening at the same time. The challenge becomes. And again, a lot of this can happen on a subconscious level is like, what am I supposed to be paying attention to? What is the hierarchy of that attention? Because if you have three things happening at the same time, so let's just say I'm on screen in the first three seconds of a short form video on Instagram, for example, I am talking. There's, you know, captions below me and there's even a title card above, and there's audio. Well, the subconscious trying to figure out, well, which thing do I pay attention first, which thing do I pay attention second, which thing I pay attention third? And if that visual hierarchy and that attention hierarchy is not super, super clear, the subconscious feels like it's being left behind and it's just going to move to the next video. So that's where you have to be very careful. I'm not saying that you can't pull it off. You can, but you need to be a TR expert. And I still fundamentally believe that if you are successful, it's just one of those aspects. You can grab people's attention. You look at one format that we've analyzed. Eight different versions of man on the Street. Just that simple interaction of one person approaching another person on the street. A random stranger can grab somebody's attention, because what is going to happen with that interaction? Is there going to be conflict? Is there going to be rejection? All those things come up in that subconscious mind on its own without you having to prompt it.

The shortened trend cycle. Trends on social media have been popular for a few years now, but it's been within the last few months where they've gone slightly out of control. And what I mean by that is the sheer amount of social media trends that are popular at any given time, but also and more importantly, the shortened length of popularity of these trends. If we take very demure, very mindful as an example, one of the biggest trends of 2024, you see how I.

Do my makeup for work. Very demure, very mindful.

That trend literally lasted a couple of months max. Like if we can.

Even so, I agree with her on trends not lasting a period of time. And I highly recommend to avoid trends at all costs. Why? Because it prevents you from really focusing on the things that matter. And the thing that truly matters is how do you become a master storyteller on this platform of social media? So I started my career in the film industry. I wanted to be a film producer. So I went to film school. I worked for two movie studios. And if you think about any movie that that's been made over the past, say 60 or 70 years, they all follow the exact same format and it's called the three act structure. So there's three acts to the story. Every movie follows it. No matter whether it's drama, sci fi, whether it's Harry Potter, Star Wars, a horror movie, Indiana Jones, whatever the story is, every director and screenwriter is following this format. Why? Because it's a proven format that works. We never sit down and watch a movie and be like, well, it's another three act structure movie. I'm not going to sit down and watch this movie and enjoy it. So as it pertains to social media, there's not that clear idea of this format. Now, our team's done about 10,000 hours of research and we've identified over 224 distinct formats that have proven to succeed. And what we recommend is look and identify a format that has proven success over and over again over the long term and then double down on that and master that format. Where is it in a trend as she's mentioning, and I totally agree, they're shortened life cycle. Like a trend lasts for a week or maybe a month and you keep chasing the next trend and the next trend and the next trend. And what that does is it really dilutes your efforts to become a master storyteller again. Going back to making a movie. Steven Spielberg, every time he makes a movie, he's not reinventing the three act structure, he keeps using it over and over and over again because he becomes a master of that. So what does that look like in social media? Like, I'll give you an example. One of the most popular formats or successful formats is man on the Street. So you can look at somebody like Simon Squibb that's having a lot of success, or you can look at School of Hard Knocks or my friend Alex Stemp, and what happens is they're using a format that's very simple where, you know, a host is approaching a random stranger on the street and interacting with them in some way and a story unfolds. Now the interesting thing about this format, it was designed well before social media. It was actually on late night television. If you can think back to Jay Leno where he would have his segments, jaywalkers, where he would interview people on the street. Jimmy Kimmel uses a man on the street format. So it wasn't built or designed in social media, but it's been applied to social media very successfully. Another example of a format is called visual metaphors. So there is a clinical psychologist that does a beautiful job with this format where she uses visual metaphors to break down clinical psychology. So what happens when you have a panic attack? What happens when you experience ptsd? And she's using props and experiments explaining what these complex subject matters are in simple to understand visual metaphors. So in these instances, these creators take this specific format and master it and use it for years and years and years because the format is proven. It's a proven way to tell a story over and over again. And the one thing that everybody can understand is if you do one thing over and over and over again, you'll become a master of it. Versus the other side is, let's say we want to learn a musical instrument. For example, like, you wouldn't start week one playing the piano, then week two switch to playing the flute, and then week three playing the drums and week four playing the violin. Like, you would never become a master of a specific musical instrument. So that's kind of the distinction I'm talking about here with formats versus trends. And I just really recommend, if you want to get good at social media, just try and ignore the trends. I know there's so much noise out there, so many people talk about trends. But push that aside, identify the format, and there's hundreds of them out there. So the two that I mentioned have to be the ones that you tackle. There's hundreds of them out there. Go out and find a format, sit down and master it. And that's where real scale comes from. Because you will become a masterful storyteller and breakthrough if you spend the time to really dig in and figure out what makes that format tick.

If we can even say that it lasted a couple months, maybe we can only say it lasted six weeks. It did not last a long time, despite being one of the biggest social media trends that we have seen as of late. Now, what does this mean for you and I? Well, and you're not going to like this. It means that we are going to have to experiment and switch up our style of content far more frequently than we used to have to See, this.

Is where I completely disagree. If you look at the top content creators on the planet, they are not constantly switching up. You look at somebody on YouTube, specifically look at Mr. Beast. You look at Mark Rober, you look at a channel like Veritasium. They are not constantly experimenting, shifting up their formats and things like of that nature. Now, they may experiment within the format and change things up and test certain variables, but they're not throwing everything else out the window that worked and creating something new from scratch. Like, why would you do that? It's like, why are you reinventing the wheel each time? That's where the system gets broken. When you follow the concept of trends.

A couple of years back, you could find the start of content and stick with it for literal years and continue to see success. That is simply not the case anymore. This is.

I disagree. You see this all the time. Why is Mr. Beast generating over 100 million views a video? It's not because he's throwing everything out all the time, or Mark Rober's doing it, or you look at somebody like Graham Stephan or as I mentioned earlier, Dr. Julie Smith or my friend Alex Stemp or School of Hard Knocks or Simon Squib. Like again, man on the street has been around since the late night television shows. It's been around for 20 or 30 years. It still works. The concept of visual metaphors still work. Explainer videos still work. It's just your execution of them determines whether you're going to be successful with it or not.

This is supported by a social media Trend reported by Hootsuite. They said that in 2025, more organizations will step outside their creative comfort zone and test content which pushes beyond their brand guidelines to capture and delight audiences. What that's basically saying is that brands and creators alike are starting to experiment with the content they're creating and are beginning to focus on creating fresh, relevant content. Because the trend cycle is so short, in order to create content that's fresh and relevant, you do need to be switching up your content fairly regularly.

I don't even know what that means. Fresh, you know, regular content. Like, what does that mean? I mean, and I just want to make a delineation. Everything that I'm talking about here is how you be at the top 1% of social media. If you're okay just kind of having average performance and not truly breaking through, then sure, you can do this. But again, like chasing trends and trying to freshen it up every time you create a piece of content. Like, where is the mastery coming from? Again, going back to that analogy of learning a musical instrument. If we're changing the musical instrument that we learn every single week, like how are we going to become a masterful musician?

If you're worried about how you're going to do this, one of the best ways, and again, you might not like this, is to be on the platform. You need to be a viewer of the platform to be a good creator on the platform. Spend some time on a daily basis consuming what's working and that will give you a clear indication as to whether or not you need to make mix things up.

Okay, so I agree with that assessment of like being on the platform and actually studying the platform. The one thing that would add to what she said is yes, you want to dive into what is working, but you also want to cross analyze what is working versus what is not working. So the way that our process works at a very high level is we'll take a very specific format from a creator. So let's just say it is man on the street school, school of hard knocks. To really understand why that format is successful, we'll open up a spreadsheet and we'll do research. It'll typically take us like a few, few days to do it. It's a pretty in depth process, but in that we'll take 10 to 20 of the high performers, 10 to 20 of the average performers.

And there's some examples of one like X steps to desired result, like five steps to boost your website traffic. Mistakes I made when target audience. Mistakes I made when starting my business. Don't hate me, but. Don't hate me. But here's the hard truth about success, right? These are just hooks. Again, it would be the first sentence of your video just to draw the viewer in, to make them interested in watching your video and seeing for what's to come. So this was the biggest trend in 2024 was these verbal hooks in the importance of these verbal hooks. Now videos that went viral with just a verbal hook last year are barely working now because everyone's kind of just mastered them. Everybody is good at creating hooks nowadays.

So if you I would hesitate to Say that everybody is good at creating hooks. I mean, you're talking about a massive audience. And I think that one of the things, and he may be covering this later in the video, but the hook is only, you know, half the equation here. Like, what happens with the story unfolds after the hook. So to just blanketly say that verbal hooks don't work anymore, I just don't think that that's an accurate assessment. We need to kind of see and really measure, well, how are these verbal hooks actually being executed? What is the format it's being leveraged in? What is the framing? What are the other things that are happening on screen? What is the story that unfolds after the verbal hook is delivered? Now, I definitely could see that potentially some of these verbal hooks don't work for certain people, but to blankly state that these verbal hooks don't work anymore, I just don't know. I mean, it looks like these verbal hooks were pulled out of an AI template because, you know, he had an AI database set up there. And again, I think one of the most important recommendations, I think AI is an amazing tool, and I think it's going to transform a lot of aspects of content creation. But just remember that AI is a tool. It is not the solution. So if you don't understand these verbal hooks on why they work, you're likely not to perform with them. You need to not just say the verbal hook. You need to understand why it works and make sure that the story that you're telling matches your understanding of that verbal hook. So it really builds retention into the video that you're creating. So if you just have a good.

Verbal hook, it's not enough to get millions of views anymore. It was back in 2024 or the beginning of 2024 and 2023, having a good verbal hook, you could get millions of views just off the hook. But now it's not enough.

So one of the other big things that I would recommend is if you had something that was working and today it is no longer working. Like, one of the simplest exercises that I can recommend is you put the video that worked on one side of the screen and the video that didn't work on the other side of the screen, and play them side by side and understand, well, what was the difference? Because I've seen this with creators, especially successful creators, where their performance typically falls off is sometimes they've just been done it so many times they get stuck in a rut and they forget what actually drove their performance in the first place. And it Kind of falls off in terms of the execution. But if you're following the exact same format, and this is a critical, important point is you need to be following the exact same format. As I mentioned earlier, you know, we have examples of like man on the street to visual metaphor. Like, you don't want to be comparing a man on the street format video to a visual metaphor because they're completely different. It's comparing apples to oranges. But what you want to do is make sure that if you're doing that comparison and something has stopped working, it's the same format. It's not that you're chasing trends and flipping things around over and over and over again, and your performance drops off that way. You need to have a consistent basis in terms of the storytelling structure or format that you're using. And then you can clearly do that comparison. Because in his analysis, it could be the verbal hooks, but it could be 10 other things. And until you do that side by side comparison, you won't truly know what's driving down the performance of the videos. One of the other aspects of why he's probably seeing a decline in the performance of verbal hooks in 2025 is so many people have caught onto the concept of a verbal hook. They go into ChatGPT and then ask ChatGPT to come up with a hundred verbal hooks. The challenge is they don't understand the dynamics, the storytelling dynamics of what makes a verbal hook successful. So just because you have ChatGPT or maybe you download their verbal hook report doesn't mean you understand it. And if you don't understand it well, then how are you going to be successfully executing to tell a compelling story? Just because somebody delivers something to you doesn't mean that you're actually going to be successful with this. What does that mean? Let me give you an example. So again, I started in the film industry. We've all watched movies. We sit down, we probably watched collectively thousands of movies. If I were to hand you a camera and say, well, you know what, what's successful is? Haunted house movies were successful in 2024. So you've seen a bunch of haunted house movies. Here's a camera, go out and shoot it. And by the way, here's a script to shoot it too, are you likely to be successful? No, because you haven't studied the art of making films. You don't know all the nuances of directing, the writing, the cinematography, the lighting, the dialogue, the acting. So just because you're handed something from ChatGPT or AI with here's a verbal hook that will be successful or has a chance of going viral does not mean it's going to work because it all comes down to your ability to execute off of that. For example, Mr. Beast has said so many people have tried to copy him, but very few have made that duplication of that level of success. Because there's so much nuance that goes into Mr. Beast making a video that makes him successful because he spent 10 plus years mastering the art of the formats that.

He tells story through into what the shifts in transfer 2025 are. The first one is that I truly believe is that visual hooks are going to be king. Now, visual hooks are just visuals that grab your attention instantly, not with words, but with eye catching actions, transitions or different editing effects. So the difference between verbal hooks and visual hooks is verbal hooks, you would try to capture someone's attention with your words, right? You would say something, try to like catch their attention, get them engaged. A visual hook is where you're using visuals, usually sometimes even with words as well. So a visual hook could be something like someone dropping on glass and the glass shattering like that would catch your attention or maybe jumping into the frame of the video or maybe doing like a long zoom or some type of zoom in, right? These are all visual hooks and the reason why they're taking over.

So first, before he dives into why they're taking over, I just disagree with the standpoint that verbal hooks aren't going to work any more and visual hooks are going to be the key. Both will work. And I don't disagree that visual hooks will work. But people watching this video or taking this advice, 9 out of 10 people are going to fail. Why? Because you need to dive into really the storytelling elements of why a visual hook works, how that visual hook plays into the ongoing story that you're doing. What specific format are you using to tell that story? Same thing with verbal hooks. Like there will still people that will be successful with verbal hooks. But I'm not saying, you know, verbal hook or visual hook is the way it's. You need to choose your format first and then look at what types of hooks that you want to use within that specific format. Again, the format is the storytelling structure that allows that vehicle for the story to unfold so that you can get your point across to your audience so that you can connect with them emotionally. So I'm not saying that what he is delivering here is necessarily wrong, is this. There's so much more depth into it. You can't just say, well, if you do this, you're automatically going to be successful. You need to understand one of the things that he's not really getting into his specific specifically with the visual hook or the verbal hook, and I haven't heard him talk about it thus far is, well, let's dive into a successful use case of a visual hook versus an unsuccessful use case of a visual hook and compare them side by side so we can really spot the difference. He's making a blanket statement that is visual hooks are going to be the way to success in 2025 and verbal hooks are not. Well, okay, let's dive a little bit further and understand if we are going to dive headfirst into visual hooks, what's a successful use case versus an unsuccessful use case so that we can really understand how to master this.

Because people are starting to scroll faster than ever and you truly only have like half a second to actually stop them and get them to watch your video. And unlike verbal hooks, which rely on someone listening, and if you didn't know this, this is a stat for you, almost 50% of people watch TikTok or Instagram without audio.

So with verbal hook, and this is accurate, but you can simply have captions below as you're talking. So that can overcome that issue.

Verbal hooks, if you're only relying on someone listening, you're kind of losing 50% of your audience almost. So the difference with visual hooks is that visual hooks capture tension without sound, really making them universal and irresistible. Okay, so here's some examples.

So again, I don't want to say that I am disagreeing with anything that I'm saying. It's just, it's very surface level is we need to dive three steps deeper to understand like what makes a visual hook successful versus unsuccessful. Because if not, I can guarantee that 9 out of 10 people, 99% of people trying just to do what he's saying are ultimately not going to succeed on a consistent basis, break through on a consistent basis, because we're not diving into the real roots of the storytelling. Aspect of the difference between a visual hook and a verbal hook.

Here is that all the platforms want you on the platform so that they can monetize you. Because the longer that you stay on the platform, the more you're going to see advertisements. And let's be clear, ads is the main way that all of these platforms make money. So if they cannot retain people on platform with your content, they're going to give that content to someone else. Because all of these people have a limited amount of time on the platform.

So I know both Sean and Mike, they're both great guys, been in social media game for quite some time. And what Mike is saying is 100% accurate in terms of how social media actually works. And this is what I kind of use to debunk. Oh, my content is being suppressed to get me to pay for reach or it's being shadow banned. Typically, content is underperforming because the algorithms are suppressing it because it's not holding attention. So again, what Mike is saying here is the way all these social media platforms work is the longer people spend on the platforms, the more ads they serve, the more profit they generate. So they're always looking for content they can grab and hold attention longer than other content. The reality of social media is we are the fuel that runs them. The people that create the content makes the fuel that allows social media to run. This is not like Netflix where they're going to invest $15 billion a year in original content. So they rely on us as content creators to create the content that fuels this engine to keep people on the platform longer. Now the challenge is there's 5 billion people on social media and there's billions of pieces of content being produced and syndicated across these platforms. So that means the algorithms have a lot more choice in terms of the content that they can serve to keep people on the platforms longer. So just to kind of demonstrate how cutthroat it is, we were analyzing a client's account and this was a successful content creator on TikTok. He had over 20 million followers. We looked at his highest viewed piece of content which was 100 million views and an average piece of content which was around 5 million views. The interesting thing is the hundred million view video had an average watch time of 27 seconds versus the 5 million view was 21 seconds. So we're talking a six second differential represents 95 million views in performance. That's the level of cutthroat nature in terms of grabbing and holding attention in terms of performance that these algorithms are looking for.

So we need to reframe our mindset because what happens is the entertaining content gets bigger, everything else gets pushed out, everything else gets smaller. So the new reframe now is, is not more, is better. It's not more subscribers, more followers, more this, more that. What's the new reframe is right is better than more. The right people is greater than more people. And that's really important. You need to attract the right people, no matter how big the number is. If you can attract the right people Then you can accomplish whatever your mission is, Right? So if your mission is to sell more of your books, you need to attract the right people. If it's to sell a consultancy, it's the right people. It's not about the more people, because when you attract the more people, generally speaking, it means broader topics and it means they're probably not likely going to buy whatever it is you have to sell. So small is the new big. That's the first concept.

So I'm going to kind of reframe this a little bit. I know what Mike is going after. I look at it a little bit differently. What he's saying is not wrong. We just, in our model, we approach a little bit differently. So what Mike is saying, just to recap, is what I do fundamentally believe, it's just not produce as much content as possible. It's quality over quantity. But what he's starting to say is just go after the right audience and the right audience to sell. Now, the challenge with that is what I just talked about with the algorithms is if we're not focused on how we can create content that can keep as many people on the platforms as long as possible, they're going to suppress it. They want content that they can see to millions and millions of people. Now, with, with what I agree with, what Mike is saying is, hey, we don't want to just go viral and create content for the sake of going viral and getting views. That's not going to translate into sales. It's not going to translate into business objectives and goals. Completely agree with it. Now, I approach it just a little bit differently. Where we call it the generalist principle is how can we still speak to that specific audience that we know are going to buy our products and services, but yet still talk to the wider possible audience so that we can play to what the algorithms want. We can still go viral, but it's still lending itself to fundamental business goals and objectives. So let me give you a prime example. Some of you may have heard of Ryan Sirhant. He's a luxury real estate agent in Manhattan. He now has a show on Netflix. But I can tell you he was successful on social media before Netflix, and he is successful on social media, not because he's on tv, because he understands what we're talking about in terms of this generalist principle. So if you think about his core audience that buys his products, he's selling luxury properties anywhere from 15 to $250 million penthouses in Manhattan, New York. So the people that can actually afford that are super, super slim. But he knows he needs to beat out all of the luxury real estate agents in Manhattan because it is a cutthroat industry. He wants to stand out, he wants to own that market. He wants to be the brand and the face of that market. So what he does in order to win that market, he plays the generalist principle. So if you go to his YouTube channel and you click on the tab of his most popular videos, it'll be something like, let me take you on a tour of a $7 million closet. Let me take you on a tour of a $250 million ranch. Let me take you on a tour of the most expensive real estate property in the world. So what he's doing is anybody would be interested in seeing those videos because, yeah, I want to see what a seven million dollar closet looks like. I've never seen a 250 million dollar ranch. So he's generating millions and millions and millions of views of people that are just interested in seeing that. But what he's doing is he's still layering in his expertise of real estate. He's not watering down it to the fact where he just looks like some, you know, moron that doesn't know anything about real estate. Ryan is really smart. He understands the market, he understands what makes property value super high. So if a million people watches one of those videos in, only five are his core target audience. Well, he's won because he has built that credibility with the audience of going on that tour with him. He has even said that he has sold a 30 million dollar property off a YouTube video alone. Now there's other Instagram and TikTok account that I followed that I think does an amazing job. Amalfi jets, where the owner of this private jet company plays videos of him having. He puts clients on speakerphone and he shows the experience of what it is for somebody to book a private jet. These videos generate millions and millions of views because there's like interesting conversations, there's crazy people making crazy requests. You want to see how the story is going to unfold. But again, because he's generating millions and millions of views for free, organically, he's beating out the competition because only 1% of the people viewing that content have to be his core segment or his core audience for him to beat out the competition. So that's where I view this a little bit differently of, well, let's just create niche content for a niche audience. Because typically what's going to happen is the algorithms are going to suppress that because the Minute they try and extend it out to somebody that isn't interested in the subject matter because of the way the content's designed, it's going to fall flat. But there is a way to achieve both goals at the same time, and that is following the generalist principle.

Anyone who creates the right kind of content can get views and exposure. But I think what I'm trying to tell everybody is views and exposure alone are not going to be sufficient to sustain a long term objective here as creators, as entrepreneurs, as marketers. Instead, it's all about the right numbers. So that's the most important thing. So don't get caught up in one of your YouTube videos getting tens or hundreds of thousands or even millions of views, because there's a pretty good chance that that probably is a very broad video and it's probably not necessarily attracting the kind of people that will ultimately buy your products and services. So it's much better for you to get a thousand people to watch a few videos, or even hundreds of people of the right people to watch a few videos and then ultimately want to do business with you, than to get millions of people watching the wrong videos and never wanting to do business with you.

So again, we just covered this. I think that I have just a little bit of a different approach to it. I don't disagree what he's saying. Again, going viral, getting views, getting people to engage with your brand or follow your account, it has to have a fundamental business goal and objective. Otherwise what's going to happen is you're going to burn out. There is a real thing called creator fatigue and it happens all the time. If you don't really focus on how does all of your energy, resources and effort play into your fundamental business goals and objectives? Yeah, typically it's going to fall flat and you're going to stop creating content because you're just going to burn out, not see results. With that said, I still think that, that you can apply how do we get millions of people to view our content while still communicating to the core audience that we're going after to drive those business results. So again, it's not going viral for the sake of going viral, but being intelligent about refining that message where it can straddle both audiences, the audience, the general audience that's going to build the numbers, play to what the algorithm that wants so that you can get in front of millions and millions of people and still play to your core subtextual audience that you're going after. So, for example, you could have videos on an average generating 10,000 views per video. And of that, maybe 50% is your core target audience. It's never going to be 100%. It's just not. So if we have that so that we have 5,000 people that could potentially buy our products or services now, let's say that on average, you are able to get it up to, let's just say 500,000 views a video, but that core percentage drops down to 20% of the people of that 500,000 can buy your products or services. So in that instance, that's 100,000 people. So we just went from 5,000 to 100,000 people just by reframing it and thinking about, well, how can we make this interesting to the general population, but still at the same time really subtly communicating to our core target about how we can add value in whatever way our business or service does.

Big influencers are in trouble. And if you're just starting out making content, you're going to love this one. Of course, if you're a big influencer, you have a huge audience. I'm sorry. Now, the reason big influencers are ruined, and I'm not saying they're all ruined, but the majority of big influencers that had this moat around their following that are kind of approaching it lazily, or they bought their followers.

They bought their followers.

They don't want to say that, but they did. You look at their engagement, it's low. And you can tell they bought their followers. Those influencers are in trouble. Their years of getting $50,000 brand deals are running.

So one of the things I just want to point out is a lot of people say, well, people bought their followers because the engagement's low. When there is an instance where a lot of influencers created their audience five or 10 years ago where it was a bit easier to succeed on social media, the barrier of entry of great storytelling was lower because there's less content on the platforms and because there was less content on the platform. And the platforms need content to fuel their engine of keeping people on the platforms to serve more ads. You'll get more reach and distribution of your content. So if you think about 10 years ago, if you had, let's say, a million followers, you were almost guaranteed that 30 to 50% of your audience would see that content when it was published, versus you fast forward to today, when there's 5 billion people across these platforms, you're not guaranteed to even get 10%. Like, you're lucky if you're getting 3 to 5% with an underperforming piece of post. Now, I'm not saying there's not instances of people buying followers and thus it's tanking the performance, but a lot of the performance tanking is in relation to the actual content not performing. And again, there's a lot of big influencers that created their audience a while back. Again, we're thinking like five or 10 years ago. And their storytelling is just not matching up to the level of storytelling that's on. The platforms today are running low.

And that's because of the shift to for you content. Because in the for you content era, followers don't really matter. Followers are really just a proxy to show have you made content? And how bio optimized are you? But followers don't matter. Brands will stop rewarding based on followers and start paying based on views and engagement.

Because. Yeah, and that's exactly what I was just talking about, and I agree with what he's saying is just because you have a certain number of followers doesn't guarantee that all those followers are going to see your content. There's no free wins in social media today. So your content needs to stand on its own. It needs to perform in order to get that reach with your followers and beyond.

Because what really matters in the 4U era is depth of audience and reach per unit effort. That's if I spend one hour making content or I spend four hours making a video, how much reach am I getting in that four hours? Content efficiency. That's what really matters in this era. Existing following as a moat does not matter. So the big opportunity for brands is that the best ROI is in micro and nano influencers. These are people between 2 and 25,000 followers that have posted over 100 times. And you're probably saying, wait, I thought you said followers don't matter. Followers are a great proxy metric to reference how big or small someone is and how optimized they have been. But that's not why brands will pay. But the good news is, if you're just starting out.

So what he's saying about micro and nano influencers is spot on. I mean, this has been going on for five or six years. The one thing that I would say in relation to influencers, like I've done influencer campaigns, I did the first influencer campaign on YouTube back in 2007. The reality is with influencers, whether it's micro, macro, nano, no matter the side, is you need to test. I think that oftentimes influencer campaigns don't work because you don't really test to see if that audience is going to convert, because there's. Well, it's not necessarily just the audience. Like, there's different variables. Is one, is that influencer's audience the right match for your product or service? Number two, is that influencer actually bought in to your product or service? Do they actually authentically love it? Because that is going to come off in the actual performance they do. And third is like, what is their ability to actually create content that promotes a product or service? Because a lot of influencers, no matter the size is, the minute that they're talking about a product or service, they change their delivery, they change the way that they go about creating the content, and that diminishes their performance. So what I say is, in terms of executing on influencer campaigns, test as many as you possibly can. I had a friend that was the chief growth officer at a company called FabFitFund. I think they're validated over a billion dollars, a quarterly subscription box. And they were massively successful because one of the things that they did is that early on they tested over 10,000 influencers and they were just measuring which one drove the lowest cost per action, the lowest cost per subscriber that they were going after. So I'm not saying you have to go out there and test 10,000, and that's a huge task. But don't put all your eggs into one basket or do one influencer deal, or even five or even 10, and expect that to solve your marketing problems or expect that to actually perform.

Just starting out, I mean, this is music to your ears because there's never been a better time to start. In the previous era, you were up against people with existing followings, where the follower moat mattered so much more. Now the follower mode matters less and less. You can go viral on your first video. You can grow on your first video. So it's a golden opportunity to start making content today. And the truth is, the field has been completely equalized, completely neutralized. It's actually surprising how easy it is to get paid from brands if you know what you're doing. It doesn't really matter how big you are if you just know how to make content. And the strategy behind how content works, it's surprisingly easy to get paid. I know this because.

So one of the things I would just say is I don't think that there's anything wrong in what he's saying. But if you are that influencer, if you are that person that wants to build a social media profile or presence to make money, I would just challenge you to think Bigger, because people often ask me, what's the ROI on social media? Well, the real answer is the ROI is as big as you can dream. And to give you an example, I have a friend, Michelle Phan, who's one of the original YouTube beauty influencers. She had millions and millions of subscribers early on, and there was other beauty influencers on YouTube that had millions and millions of subscribers. And the other influencers were doing what he was saying. They were taking brand deals. They were making 50,000, on some cases, 100,000. So they're making, you know, a good six figures a year off of these deals. Michelle was way smarter. What she said is, I'm going to take my knowledge, team up with a few friends, and we're going to build a company using our audience and using our knowledge. And she created the company called Ipsy, and it was valued over a billion dollars at one point. So in one instance, somebody is making, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is. There's nothing wrong with that. Off of their audience on YouTube in the same industry or sector, same kind of audience size and view numbers, and then somebody over here in Michelle, that creates something that's valued over a billion dollars. So as you're getting into social media, your ability to monetize it is just as big as you can dream. What is the business that you are building behind it? Earlier in the video, I mentioned how we helped Tanner letterstein grow to 800,000 followers and generate over 100 million views in just six months. If you want to see exactly how he was able to do it, I put together a full breakdown of the process and you can watch it here.