My Actual Social Media Strategy For 2026

We got 32.7 million views on YouTube this month. Here's how. So I posted 35,000 pieces of content this year. We did a $100 million book launch for $100 Million Money Models in 72 hours. So 3 days, we did over $100 million in sales. The issue that most people struggle with is that you're making not enough content, number one, and the types of content that you're making are not attracting the types of customers you want. The promise that I have for you today is that I will show you a framework that I have called SPCL, like special if you want, but it's how to build influence. Rather than how to get as many views as possible or anything like that. All right. But it's a 4-part framework, and I want to break down each of the 4 components for you so that you can think about how you want to approach making content. All right. And building a brand in general. SPCL. These are letters, and hopefully overhead cam works. All right. So SPCL. So what do these actually stand for? All right. So number 1 is status. And this is why you hear me talk about proof so much. But how do you define status from an operational perspective? For those of you who are new to the channel, I like to operationalize things, meaning I like to look at objective reality and describe how you would see it with your eyes rather than try and put a whole bunch of like emotional words around stuff. Because these are like— that type of language is what confused me for a very long time when I was coming up. And it was only after I started defining things by what I could see, what I could observe, did reality feel like sharper, more crisp to me. And my ability to predict what was going to happen next increased by a lot. And so this is why I talk in this way. So how do I find status? So status is someone who controls reinforcers in a given environment. So that's a little bit fancy word, but fundamentally, if you control the good stuff that people want, then you will have status no matter what it is, right? And so the simplest example I have is like, if you go to a bar and it's a busy bar and there's a bartender and you have to get the bartender's attention in order to get a drink or booze, that guy in that moment has status. He controls a scarce resource, right? But if that guy walks out of the bar, no longer controlling that scarce resource, he does not have the same status or even close to it, right? Like outside of the bar, he's not getting tips every single 5 seconds when he like moves his hands a little bit and like says something nice. People aren't waving money at him as he walks in the street. Of course not. It's because he has status in one condition and he doesn't have another. Now, what's interesting about all 4 of these elements I'm going to break down, they all can work independently, but the idea is that you want all 4 to be stacked together. And this is what gives you the most influence, right? So like any of these 4 on their own would give you influence. Like that bartender, if he just says that, he would have some level of influence. And I'll give you a different example of this. If a kid inherits money, right, they're going to have status, right? Like if you just— if you have money, even if you didn't earn it, even if you didn't anything, if you have money, you will have some degree of status because you control something other people want, period. That's how it works. All right. But would that kid who has money have the same status as a kid who has money who also gave you, you know, 10 different crypto coin picks that all popped off? Right. Well, if he gave you 10 different picks and you followed them and they all popped off, how much more influence would that person have over them saying, hey, you should put money in this, or hey, You should give me money for XYZ or whatever it is. Obviously I'm talking money because I'm a business person first, but think about how much more influence version 2 would have with just 2 of those things versus version 1. That's the difference. But if you have all 4, that's when you become super sad. So status is number 1, so you control scarce resources. Power is number 2. I would say if I had to only pick one, I would pick power, and I'll explain why. Power comes from something in the behavioral dynamics world called say-do correspondence. What that means is if I say something, and then you do it, and then a good thing occurs, a reinforcing event happens afterwards, you are more likely to comply with a following request, right? So said differently, I gave you the example of the guy who says, hey, here's 10 stock picks, you buy them, and then a good thing happens, the thing goes up. Great. So that person has status and power, which is why they are more influential than the trust fund kid who just has money. And so to the same degree, for many of you who are trying to make content, one, it's like, okay, status. I want to demonstrate that I control a scarce resource that some people might want, right? And so what makes this a little bit more muddied is that sometimes one event can check multiple boxes. And so I'll give you a simple example. When we launched the book, we did $100 million plus in sales. That in and of itself, me having money from the event, gives me status. Me saying, hey, you can launch stuff in this way, gives me credibility, right? Because I show that I have an event, I have something that has happened as a result of me doing it that gives me third-party credibility. There's something that you you can observe with your eyes, right? The reason that my ads do well when I have my $10 million building behind me is like, oh, well, that's hard to fake, right? And so you have credibility there. And so one event like selling a company can give you money, it can give you credibility. And then if I give people directions on how they can do things that are similar and then good things happen, then all of a sudden you get power. And then the last is likeness. I know I'm skipping around, but hey, we're live, we're having a good time. All right, and so credibility is number 3. And I'm going to go in more detail on all these. All right. And then likeness. So what's likeness? So likeness is that you see some— this is— some people say relatability. This can be both psychological in terms of you share similar values with this person. You like, you like their vibe, whatever you want to say, right? You like their behavior setting it. And that behavior set matches to people who have been positive in your life in the past, or they literally just look like you, right? So like Layla and I could talk about the exact same stuff., but she's a girl and so she's going to have more chicks who follow her than me. And for the, for the few ladies who do follow me, I appreciate you. I really do. Uh, but I have like an 89% male audience. And so maybe it's because of the topic, but I would think, you know, at my onset I think, oh, it's because I talk about money and I talk about business. That's why I have a more male audience. But Layla, I think is like 54% female and she talks about almost exclusively money and business. Um, obviously she talks about some mindset stuff too, but I say this to say, okay, if we have these 4 things,. And these are the things that create influence. And I would define influence as high likelihood of compliance with requests. So what does that mean? So if I say, hey, grab my new book, or I say, hey, come to this webinar, hey, I'm going live, come check it out, or hey, you should come to a workshop, whatever it is, right? You make some sort of solicitation, and it could be like or subscribe, it doesn't matter. There's levels of how big of an ask something is. If anybody's played a video game, it's like you have a role for Dungeons Dragons,, and it like depends on how charismatic, how much influence you have, how high of a roll or how low of a roll rather you'd need in order to be successful with the request, right? And so if you want to stack that stat for you, then if you want to min-max your influence, if you will, then you want to stack all 4 of these things, okay? You're like, okay, I think I'm following with this. So how does this relate to content? So first off, starting from the back, likeness, I think so much more of it is just like, just be you. There's zero ROI in trying to be or act in a way that is different than who you are. It's a relatively trite message, but like most people are NPCs. Most people say prerecorded scripts. They look at like the 4 different outfit, you know, combinations that exist for different kind of mental stereotypes. It's like, oh yeah, guy who loves barbecue and craft beers. Oh yeah, that's that archetype. I'm just going to be that archetype. Or you've got like hipster bro who likes hipster shit, right? Or you've got, you know, like just bro, right? You've got just like, sir bro. And people somewhat put me in that status. But I also like for a few years was wearing like sandals that look like really weird. And I wore those and that was not bro-y at all. But I wore them because they were super comfortable and I didn't have to like wear socks, which is a big thing for me anyways. But point is, it's like, I think what makes you unique is if you actually lean into the nuances that make you you and actually have a way to defend why you do what you do, because most people don't even think about why they do what they do.. And if you do things and you don't know why, it's because you're following someone else's directions for your life rather than your own. Weird, like real. And so, so much of us have been programmed by people earlier in our lives. And I say programmed as though we were like machines, but what person do you think in your life has super high max status, power, credibility, and likeness maxed out earlier on in your life? It's your parents, right? It's your parents. So think about all 4 of these elements. Status. Do your parents control scarce resources, things you want? They've got money and they've got toys that they can buy you. They've got food. They act like they control your shelter. Like they have huge amounts of status in your life because they control all the scarcest resources, all the things you want. These are not binaries. So don't think like, oh, I have status, I don't have status. It's to what degree do you have status, right? Like if somebody's got more money than you, they might have some status. If you've got $1 and somebody's got 10 grand, they got more status than you., right? But if someone's a billionaire, they have way more status than the guy who's $10,000, right? So again, think not in binaries, yes or no, but think in continuums. So the next one is think about your parents' power. How many reinforcement cycles do you assume that your parents had from the time you were born? And when I say reinforcement cycles, it means like they said, do this, you did that thing, and then a good thing happened. Now you might be like, ah, I hate my dad or hate my mom or whatever your thing is. I don't really care. That doesn't matter for this purpose. The idea is that they probably said, don't go in the street. Or don't do that and you avoided a bad thing or do this and then a good thing happened, right? You tied your shoes the first time, you put the two bunny ears together, you tied your shoes, a good thing happened. You followed their directions. Think about how many times a parent has given you directions and you followed them and a bad thing was avoided or good thing happened. Many. And so it makes sense that not only do they have a lot of status, they have a lot of power. What else do they have? Credibility. Now this is one where I think parents sometimes might lack compared to the other things. If you have a parent who also has credibility in that specific realm of whatever it is that they're talking about, then you have even more influence on you. And then finally, for parents, are they like you? Yeah, they literally look like you, right? And oftentimes they share similar values to you to a degree. Obviously some people just go polar opposite from their parents. That's fine. But I'm talking in sweeping generalities for most people. This should at least explain or break down like why do parents have so much power over us? How do they have so much influence over our behaviors? You might not even want to listen to your parents. You might even like your parents, but you can still feel that they— you have to like resist their requests because you are so programmed based on these elements of behavior to comply with their requests, right? And so then the idea is, how do we take these 4 elements and then how do we reverse engineer these into the content that we have so that we can build up true influence? Like, and again, we're defining influence as the likelihood of a compliance with the request, right? And That likelihood will depend on the nature of the request and how much your SPCL is in relation to that thing, right? If I was giving out fashion tips, I probably don't have a lot of credibility for fashion tips, right? I don't know if I control any scarce resources around fashion. I have no, I have no fashion hookups. I probably haven't given anyone specific fashion tips. I have no third-party anything for credibility for it. And you probably don't look like me.. And so like I probably would have very low influence. To some degree they can generalize as you go up and up and up, but you have more influence in domain specificity. If we know these are the 4 things, status, power, credibility, likeness, then for each of these things in our videos, right, we want to demonstrate that we control scarce resources. And so for me, like at the very beginning, if you think about what the intro was, right? So I said we did, you know, 32.7 million views. And we did over $105-something million in sales for the book launch in 72 hours. And so that's me demonstrating status. I have these things, right? Then power. So what I'm gonna do in this video is I'm gonna break down 4 things that you can follow, and if you follow these things, you're gonna be more likely to get people who are gonna comply with your future requests. And so that means that they're not just going to watch your video, but they're going to be more likely to, one, watch a next video,. And if you have any kind of call to action in the video, whatever level of call to action that is for you, whether it's subscribe or like or share or, or, you know, buy something that's smaller, you know, set up a call or whatever it is that you sell, then this is going to be second, right? Like, uh, you'll, you'll have included that in your content. So then credibility is going to be the third party stuff. So the reason that I had at my launch, for example, I had Guinness, I had to pay those judges, uh, to be on site was because I wanted to validate that the books that we did and the revenue that we generated was legit, right? So I had a third party that most people, um, respect as like a legitimate corporation, that their entire business is based on trust, that they validate and verify proof that these records were broken. And so that gives credibility. The likeness piece, like I said earlier, is just you being you, right? And so that's why I'm actually super pumped to do these live streams, because this is like— I honestly hate making YouTube videos. When I mean that, it's like staring at a camera and having like, you know, prompts to, you know, solicit me to say stuff like I will do it because I have a relatively high pain tolerance and I'll do what is required to get what I want. But like, I'm going all in on this. So if you guys are like, what's Alex's kind of like media strategy for the future? I'm focusing on two words. You can write this down: live, interactive. Those are the two things that is describing the ACQ 3.0 or Mosey Media 3.0 vision for what's going forward. Like, that is what I'm focusing on. And I'll tell you a story of why, why I think this is so interesting. So I had a conversation with a mega influencer. I don't think you would mind, um, with MrBeast a few weeks ago, and we were talking about kind of like the future of media and content. One of the things that he was just talking about was, um, the soccer game that came up, uh, that they do like UK versus US. What ends up happening is that they have all these different celebrities or influencers from different platforms, right? And so starting from the lowest, the lowest people on this little totem pole they would walk out in the stadium and this became the kind of the de facto like measuring stick for who had the most cool points, right? These are the A-listers. And so this is your typical kind of celebs from like movies and like '90s and the 2000s or whatever, right? People like they recognize because they're celebs but like they don't have like huge— I guess they have some media presence but it's more like traditional media. The level of applause for these guys was almost nothing. Barely anyone cared. So then the next level that came up was the shorts. The Shorts creators. So this is your like only TikTokers or people who only make Reels, but like only short videos. And so they had a little bit more applause on the applause-o-meter compared to the A-listers. Then the long-form guys came out and this is when the audience got way rowdier. All right. So this is your podcasters, your YouTubers, the people who make long-form pieces of content. And I'm going to pause here for a second to kind of like highlight why I think this is. I don't think there's anything wrong with Shorts. We make tons of Shorts.. But I see the purpose of shorts as many times a way to get someone to watch a long, right? They watch a couple, a couple shorts and then think, okay, this guy seems legit or this gal seems legit. I'm going to risk my time because that's the risk. They're making an investment, right? You're making an investment today. I'm going to risk them to get a good return on this, right? And so shorts then lead to longs. But let me show you the difference from an influence perspective. How many reinforcing cycles do you think you can have in 30 seconds compared to 2 hours? It's like not even close. And so if someone watched 2 1-hour pieces of content for me, period, okay, 2 1-hour pieces, 120 minutes for me to get that same level of exposure and kind of cycles of reinforcement with a prospect. And they were only consuming shorts, right? Let's say my average short, let's say it's 15 seconds. So that means it's 4 shorts per minute. So if I have 120 minutes for longs, I have to do— someone would have to watch 480 shorts to have the same level of exposure as watching 2 hours with me. And think about how important this is. What were the things that people said like this was the quote podcast election? Trump went on and I don't care about the politics behind it, but I do care about influence and persuasion. And so like why is it that the two podcasts that I think really nudged this election, my opinion, is the Trump 3-hour-plus podcast that he did with Rogan like a week or whatever it was. I think that was a huge influential event. I think Elon getting on Tucker Carlson and doing that interview.. I think those two interviews were some of the interviews that really nudged the election. And again, I don't care who you voted for. It doesn't matter to me. I think about this from marketing persuasion. Okay. And so because of that, audiences who were not sure got to spend 3 hours with a presidential candidate. And as a result, it just nudged some of them in the direction to ultimately vote. Okay. Now back to our little story. A-listers have almost no applause. Shorts have slight applause. Longs have legit applause. Then The live streamers. When the live streamers came out, it was like the entire auditorium or stadium or arena erupted. And when I heard that, it was such a visual example of— I mean, we have this saying which is like, butts in seats. If you just make a bunch of like meme content, right, you demonstrate almost none of these things. Some of you guys are chasing views when what I think you want is you want to have prospects who are more likely to comply with a future request. And so we need to change our behavior to maximize the likelihood that occurs. And so in, in looking at this thing, this is why I'm telling you, like, showing my cards, I'm going to be doing more live streams. And I think it's also— and this is me like outside of SPCL, but I think like meta themes overall— I think that the internet will always move towards truth. And so I think the A-listers, everything's super curated, everything's super polished, it's Photoshopped, it's scripted. And as you move closer this way, it's raw. Or like you have a 3-hour podcast, like they're not scripted, right? Or most of them aren't, right? Streaming, it's like, yeah, we're live, right? I can't do anything. Like, we're live. This idea of, of how can we approximate the rawest reality of you, us hanging out?, right? And actually going through this stuff, I think that is what will unlock the most influence as long as you are still including these SPCL elements into it. And I think that's the marriage. Do SPCL and do it as many times as I possibly can. That's the idea. And so livestreaming provides that, that opportunity. Let's also think about this from a context of volume, whether you like them or not. Rogan, tremendous influence, right? To the same degree, PBD, tremendous influence. Uh, Dave Ramsey, tremendous influence. What is it that these guys have in common? They're putting out hours of content every single day. So I said earlier that we have 35,000 pieces of content, right? I hear plenty of times there's tons of, you know, $1 million businesses, $2 million businesses, things like that. They put out one piece of content a day, right? And there's nothing wrong with that. That's 365 pieces of content a year. And if you think about the size of acquisition.com in terms of our revenue, right, compared to somebody who's doing $1 or $2 million a year, and they're doing 365 pieces of content. We're just quite literally doing 100 times more. And as a result of that 100 times the volume, what do you think is happening? We get 100 times the prospects. And so people want to try and like outsmart themselves and thinking that they can like not do the work that's required, but it's actually far more linear than you would expect. So like we just know that like 1 out of 10, you know, Shorts is going to go, you know, is going to be a 2 or 3x outlier. We just know what that math looks like. Same thing for Longs. How do I just jam as much into that input-output machine as I possibly can? And as long as I'm checking these boxes, like I'm making the right kind of content, then you're going to get the right kind of prospects. So I'll give you one more nugget, like I said, which is that some of you guys may have heard this, and it's a concept of social media is now turning into interest media. Okay, so what does this mean? Let's unpack this for a second. If you make content and you judge it by views, I think that's dumb and I'll explain why. If I have a grandma in public come and just do a running slap and just slaps me across the face, that video will probably get views. But does it get the grandma views? No. Does it get me any, any more people who now believe more in my stuff? No. But what it will do is it will show it to people who are interested in humor, which is a lot of people, right? But those might not be your customers and they probably aren't. So assuming you're not an entertainer and you are somebody who's a business person, if you sell services to anyone, you're likely going to be an educator, not an entertainer, meaning you're trying to provide value to people to change their behavior in some way, and ideally changing behavior that gets them to walk closer to you and buy stuff. Okay, so what do I mean by social versus interest? If you want to attract the right avatar, make content for that avatar. That sounds so obvious and simple, and the thing is that no one does it because here's the writer-doubter: the content is the targeting. The algorithm is so good now. It knows what you're talking about. It knows it can, it can literally judge your background. It judges what you're wearing. It judges who you are and will display it to the people that they know have a history of watching content that is similar to that, that people find valuable. And so if you're making stuff about how to fix pianos because you're a piano repair guy, then you will find people who are trying to fix their pianos. But if you're making that type of content, you might be like, man, I'm only getting, you know, 1,000 views a video. It's like, yeah, but the market of people who are buying pianos might be significantly smaller than the market of people who just want to be entertained or distracted. So it's not fair to compare your views against MrBeast's. It doesn't make any sense. If I were to think to myself, like, I have a room of 1,000 people that are going to watch this and all of them are only interested in fixing pianos, that's a hell of an opportunity. I care so much more about IRL responses. So what I mean by that, if I make a video and then I get texts from business owners that I like and that I respect being like, yo, that was fire. Then I'm like, okay, I'm on the right track. And so some of you guys, let me know in the comments. You guys have seen a format that we've talked about. We call it Cash Cows. But basically it's me. There's a business owner that presents a little about their business. They come to this side and we talk about how to like how to improve their business. Right. So let me know in the comments if you like that style and if you do, let me know if you're a business owner or not. Okay. So like, I like that style and I'm not a business owner. I like that style and I am a business owner or I don't like that style and I'm a business owner. Or I don't like that style and I'm not a business owner. If you are a business owner, when I have people who are here in person, IRL, in real life in Vegas, right? Business owners who fly out, I ask, I say, what is your favorite type of content? Dollars to donuts, that's their favorite type of content. And so I make more of that even though, and it would make sense, like it would make sense that there's fewer of those people, right? Just think about math. If you've got the whole population here, let me, I'll show you a little graph on this. So let's say that 100% of people like this represents 100%. Uh, let's just use USA cause I already know all the numbers for USA. Okay. So let's say this is 100%. All right. You get 100% of people who are interested. Okay. Well right now only 9% of people even own a business, like 9%. So right off the bat I'm going to have a huge percentage of people that aren't my ideal audience. Now of course I do have people who are business interested and that's why I'm a co-founder of school and we give people a way to go start a business online in a low-cost way, right? Which you can do. It's $9 a month after a 14-day trial. You guys can check it out. And there's a bunch of like training and community and all that good stuff. All right. But you can go school.com, I think, forward slash Hormozy. I think it's below this video. It doesn't matter. Point being, 9% is what I'm competing for. Okay. Now that means that there's about 32 to 33 million business owners in the US. Okay. 32 million. That's, that's 100% of all business owners now. Within that, 95% of that 9% is below $1 million in revenue. 95%. Then I've got 5% of that 9% that are over a million. Now, if you want to get, if you want to get weird with it, what percent do you think is over $10 million? 0.4%. 1 in 250. And then $100 million, 9 figures. Is I think 1 in roughly 3,000 depending on like your data source. 1 in 3,000 businesses gets to $100 million a year. This big. And so it would make sense then that we've given these numbers, right? 9% is $32 million. So I know 5% of that is going to be 1.5 million people. There's only 1.5 million people who are business owners doing over a million based on the math that they— this is Census Bureau data. Maybe theirs isn't correct, but that's the math. Right? And so if we're looking at that's the market, then it would make sense that I'm not going to get all 100% of them to watch my video, right? If I got 1.5 million views and 100% of them were business owners, that'd be insane, right? And so it would make sense that like if I get 100,000 views on a video that has— that's really made for that level of business owner, then I'm crushing it, right? And it doesn't make sense to look at, you know, MrBeast's video with 100 million views and be like, oh man, I suck. It's like, Dude, we're going after— we have different, we have different games, right? And so I'd encourage you to create accurate expectations of the size of the market that you're going after. And also think about the translation of these numbers into IRL. I have two businesses that I looked at in the last year that were doing over $1 million a year with less than 5,000 followers. You absolutely can make plenty of money with a very small following as long as you make content that's directly valuable for that following. All right. With that being said, we just went over SPCL, status, power, credibility, and likeness. What you would include in videos, why I'm going all in on livestream, and why the whole point is you want to get as much time with your prospects as humanly possible. You want to make the topics of your content based on the things that those people find interesting, not based on like being social, but being interesting. And if you, if you make it interesting for them, they will keep watching it. And then being realistic about your expectations on how many views you can get based on your size of market.