What We Got Wrong About Social In 2026

We've been doing social media content for many, many years and a little tangent from talking about AI, but we've been doing social media content for years. And I know every year we typically talk about what we're going to do with our social content. If I'm not mistaken, when I look at the end of 2025, we're now middle of, a little bit past the middle of 2026.

Yeah.

When I look at 2025, we both talked about ramping up content, focusing on quality, more personal-based content and less AI, right? And we're really focused on improving long-form, short-form, and just the overall quality, not necessarily chasing views, but chasing the right type of audience. How has your social media marketing gone for your own company, your own brand in 2026, and what adjustments have you had to make throughout the year?

Yeah, so That's a good question. The way my social works now, I'm actually just looking at the stats. So X, I'll go through the stats first. So X, usually we're averaging like 3 million views a month right now. And then Instagram, about 400K or so views. And then YouTube's about 235K, LinkedIn is 133K. And so if you add those up, let's just call it like 4 or 5 million a month, something like that. This doesn't include maybe some of these other channels. So That being said, that's what we're getting right now. Now, what's done better for me is me focusing on how I'm using AI as it relates to marketing or me running my business. So I'm more so sharing how I'm doing it right now versus trying to do a bunch of these like podcast interviews with like, you know, finance, dating, or whatever. That's been better for me because when the new year started, when I saw the step change in AI, I just wanted to share what I was doing and that's working out well for me. Because that's generating more leads for us and they're qualified leads. And it's a thing that's in demand right now. Like, how do people handle marketing but also include AI? So that's been a boon for me because I happen to be interested. And because I'm interested, it's an easier time for me to create this content. So that's been me. And one more thing I do, Neil, almost every week I basically do like a webinar and I just share kind of how I'm building things. The thing I do, I've noticed this, Neil, when I do the webinar, I'm a lot more excited, like kind of how I am now, right? I'm a lot more engaged versus like, yeah, you know, here's what you should do for this, the 5 things you should do for SEO, right? So which I see you still doing, right? So but like, but like, all joking aside, that's been good because we take the webinar and we tighten it and we have a hook in the beginning. And we tighten that webinar into like a YouTube video, and the engagement's a lot higher. And so We're going to do a lot more of that. So that's been me. How about you?

And wait, to go back, a few more follow-up questions. What do you think your revenue growth, or what has your revenue growth been from a trailing 12 perspective over the previous trailing 12? Or if you look at Q1 over Q1 of last year?

I would say we're on track for about—

Percentage-wise?

30% or so.

So 30% revenue growth. I'm assuming bottom line is not 30% growth because you're reinvesting a lot.

Correct.

How much of that do you think is coming from your content, like on social?

When I asked the sales team, they're like, they think it's like 60, 70%.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

So it's a pretty high percentage for you.

Yeah, but it's low for you, I know.

Yeah, it's low for me. So we've actually ramped up content more than what we thought we would've ramped up this year. We're going to ramp it up even more in the next, call it, 2, 3 weeks. So we're going to go even more crazy when it comes to creating content. We found it to be decent for branding. We found the speaking to be better for branding. The reason we're ramping up content is it helps to stay top of mind. We don't see it working as well for revenue generation. I can't attribute what portion of our revenue comes from social, I haven't asked my sales team in a while, so I would be taking a guess here, but if I had to guess, maybe 3%, 2%, 5% if I'm really lucky, but I think it's more closer to the 2%, 3% than it is on the 5%. The second thing that I would say is the reason we do it is it helps us get in the door more so for the type of clients we want. And I don't mean this in a positive or negative way. I think Eric and I are going after different company types and different contract sizes. And for that reason, I think social is more effective for mid-market and SMB. I think social isn't as effective for enterprise. And when I say enterprise, I'm not talking about just the logo. I'm also talking about the contract size. You can work with a really big company, Like, I don't know, Dior. A Dior and get a contract for $5,000. Even if you're working for LVMH, I don't know if Dior is owned by them, but let's just assume it is. Even if you're working with LVMH, who owns Louis Vuitton and a lot of the big brands out there, a $5,000 contract, just because they're an enterprise brand doesn't mean that contract's really enterprise contract, right? And I found that social isn't as effective for closing an enterprise deal, but it's very effective to get in the door. So you can attribute a portion of the sales to social, and that's why I give it in the single-digit percentile, because a lot of our revenue at this point is just coming from referrals or being in business long enough or other clients referring more clients. But I would still say social's effective, SEO's effective, because when I look at all of those marketing channels that we're leveraging, I would probably say that it accounts for less than 30% of the revenue. So when I say these percentages, it's also in a place where it's really skewed because a lot of our contracts are coming from referrals and RFPs and things of that nature where I'm guessing, I don't know Eric's revenue split, but I'm guessing 70+% of your revenue comes from marketing efforts and not referrals or RFPs, correct?

Yep.

So in that case, social would have a bigger impact. So same with the other marketing channels as well.

Yeah. And I would also say one more thing, like the way we look at it right now is because we're doing more AI implementation as it relates to marketing and business, it obviously it's a newer thing, right? So people want to know, like when you're doing the thought leadership stuff on like X, for example, when you're writing long-form content, there's like a There's a gap in that market. Like, for whatever reason, there's a lot of AI content creators, but there aren't many people that are operators talking about this stuff, right? So I've like, that's the gap that I'm in right now. And this stuff is going to expand over time. Like, it's a lot of this is very much land and expand right now. But I think it's a good fit for my demeanor and how I work in general. And there's still people that want services, but we're kind of, we're rapidly changing how we do things overall. And so I think it's It's just different. And I was trying to pull up something that shows like, um, like all the single brain leads are like 100% come from content, obviously. Um, but it's interesting how like some you'll see from like newsletters, some are like direct, some will come from like X, some will come from, from YouTube or whatever. Um, it's kind of all over the place. Neil, do you know how many views you're getting per month across socials? Is it like 20 million, 30 million? What do you think it is? Like blended.

Real quick.

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I have no idea. So if I just look at YouTube, because that's the easiest one, I just, let me just go to YouTube Studio.

I think yours is like 400 or 500K on YouTube.

No? I have no idea. I haven't checked in a while, dude. Just being honest. Uh, let's see. Uh, dude, it's just easier to go to Social Blade.

Yeah, that's what I— so you should, you should just sign up. By the way, shout out to Metricool. Metricool is awesome because you can combine all your socials, and the cool thing is you can use the API. And I have a skill now, a trial reel skill, um, that basically will like pump out a bunch of trial reels and it'll schedule all the trial reels. And that's cool because The trial reels allow it to show you like which hooks and overlays work well. And then I have the AI actually edit and put the hook in the beginning. So these are all the things I mess around with. Go ahead, Neil.

So YouTube is 500,000. I don't know the others off the top of my head, but let's call it— I don't think it's anywhere near 20 million what Eric's saying. I think I actually may be getting less views than you, and I'm pretty certain on that because there's no way I'm getting 3 million on X. And Eric's doing really well on the views because he nailed it. He's focusing on that vertical that, or that segment that's underserved right now, which is operators and business owners talking about how they're using AI to maximize their growth. And that segment is doing really well. I've avoided most of the AI content. I think Eric has seen that by, if you just look at my channels, I tend to focus on the boring, non-sexy content that generates us majority of our revenue right now. And we have a little bit different playbooks. And I'm not saying one is right or one is wrong or one's better than the other. My playbook is a little bit different, or the way I think about business is different than Eric. Eric is right now focusing to try to be the leader in a specific sector, and then he'll try to go and dominate that, let's say, with a single brain type of company. My model is I keep doing what is making me my money. I keep trying to grow organically, and then I'll use the profits from whatever ends up working. So let's say there's 50 companies that are trying to do what Eric's doing. If that model ends up proving out to work really well within the next 12 months to 2 years, I will go and I'll just buy one of them. So what I do is I focus on what's making us majority of our revenue and profit, and I keep doubling down on that. The moment something gets traction, I don't shift my content focus to that. Instead, I shift my dollars to it and I just go and buy a competitor who's doing really well. And every year we go and try to buy multiple players in our space who are dominating a certain sector that we don't dominate that's done really well. And That creates a synergistic growth because I'm combining their revenue with mine, their profit with mine, but I'm selling my clients on their services and their clients on my services and products, which then creates more revenue and more EBITDA by combining the entities. So it's a very boring, ugly playbook, but I found that to work really well with me. And Eric knows this, my personality type is to never be the first to jump on anything. I just find out what's working and when it is really working and I'm 100% certain, I just push a ton of money towards it. And I found that to be easier than it is to build everything from scratch at this point for me.

So I'm actually doing something right now. I'm looking at Neil's webinar page because I know that Neil puts out, his topics are actually proven topics that convert, right? So I have it open up in 2 harnesses right now. One's Codex, one's Hermes. I was like, hey, look at how Neil formats his webinar topics. These convert well. How should we adopt these for our webinar topics? And then so it calls out yours and it's like, Neil's best performing format is urgent problem or contrarian insight plus specific business outcome plus proof mechanism outcome or proof of mechanism. So anyway, all that to say is if you guys are doing webinars right now, webinars convert both well for Neil's company, which is services, and my company as well. Now what Neil's saying too is, Keep in mind, a lot of you listening right now, most of you are like, well, how do I do that? Right? The thing is, you need to think about like where you are in your business lifecycle. And many of you are maybe not able to do it, or maybe you can go get some SBA financing and you can go buy some stuff. But you need to get to significant scale first before you can do this. And so you just, again, you need to think about the highest leverage thing that you can do right now. It just so happens to me that, right, at least right now, to Neil's point, There aren't many companies doing this. And so because I'm on top of this stuff, I might as well just go and do it. And it's been working out well for us. And so I think Neil can certainly buy and there's going to be businesses that are available to buy. I also think that this stuff is just moving so quickly right now and we've never seen anything move this quickly. But I don't think anything's wrong or right. I think it's just like, what strategy is right for you ultimately? But yeah.

Yeah, exactly right. And This strategy that I end up using plays really well to my strengths. And even when I was younger, I always looked for deals to buy. Like I bought Ubersuggest for $120,000 back in the day. You know, I've always been someone who likes buying. I bought Hello Bar back in the day. I ended up buying— I bought the assets from Kissmetrics when they were struggling and I merged them into Neil Patel. But I've always been someone who likes— Acquiring and it's just my personality type.

Neil, check this out. So this is after analyzing your— so look at how Neil formats his webinar. And so how I adapt this for Single Grain. So topics I prioritize, and you can steal these too if you want.

Anybody can steal these too, by the way.

Getting cited isn't enough. How to turn AI visibility into pipeline. Like, oh, that's pretty good, right? Your AI tools aren't a problem. Your marketing memory is. Oh, that's pretty good too because we sell memory to write. We'll with our single brain gateway. The AI search traffic drop is here. How to grow pipeline when clicks— this is good. Neil, this is pretty good, isn't it?

Yeah, it is pretty good.

Yeah. So all that to say is I would also encourage this as you guys listen to this, when this goes on YouTube, our Marketing School YouTube, take that video, go to youtubetotranscript.com, dump that in there, or you don't even need to do that anymore. You can just take the link, And say, hey, what are all the spikes that Neil and Eric are talking about? How can we apply this to our business and run it through whatever harness that you have? And you're going to be able to do better with your topics. Because again, why do I need to reinvent the wheel when I know that Neil painstakingly, when he, to his point, when he knows something works already, he's going to double, triple it. I already, like, it picks apart the patterns, right? And I'm like, oh, this is, Neil is indirectly or directly helping me make more money and generate more leads.

But by caveat, and I'm going to end up telling you this because I know what Eric did here and I think that's really smart. My client profile is also very different than Eric's client profile. So you just have to be careful because if he replicates it, which I don't mind, his pipeline conversion to a deal close is not going to be the same as mine because we choose topics that helps us get global contracts. Eric can't do global contracts because he doesn't have enough people in enough countries that some of these clients would like. So we had to adjust the topics that would work for that ideal customer profile that he's targeting.

By the way, that's true. I would also say one more thing. This is why on my ChatGPT, it doesn't have all of my— it doesn't have all my memory and my harnesses. Now, when I'm running it on Hermes, it's a different type of answer, right? So this one, it's more talking about pipeline and revenue, which still applies to my audiences. But when I look at Hermes, for example, it hasn't— like, we audited 100 websites for AI search visibility. Here's what gets cited. SEO or EO, where should you invest your next, you know, X amount of dollars? How to build an AI marketing engine without adding more headcount. Like, these need to be massaged more, but your mileage may vary. So I just wanted to add that.

Yeah. Or like, we have topics that we do like on web analytics or tracking a whole funnel. I don't know if Eric has a data and analytics division.

Nope.

Right? So like the leads and the contracts wouldn't convert as well because he— and we're doing some of these topics specifically to generate revenue in some of these buckets.

So that is it for today and we will see you tomorrow.