The Right Way To Do Social in 2025

Key Takeaways

the way that we look at social media is very different than what most kind of social media agencies or gurus will tell you to do which is follow the trends you know and what is a trend so a trend is something that's very fleeting so it typically lasts for like a few weeks maybe a few one few months at last like the biggest Trend that I can think of is like the ice bucket challenge it's like people don't do the ice bucket challenge today and the other problem is looking at a trend is 99% of people that do that don't break through with viral success we only see the people at the top so the way that we look at it is we don't want people to go and do Trends because you're not mastering a skill set we we we tell people to look at a format so when we think about movies the past 50 years every movie follows the threea structure in terms of how stories are told so when Steven Spielberg makes a movie he's not Reinventing that structure he's using that structure every time to become one of the best storytellers on the planet so we look at social media in terms of of what we call a format and there's our team has done about 10,000 hours of research and we've acrossed 220 different formats so there's many to choose from I'm not by any means saying it has to be like these three formats are the only ones that work so you have to do them if you don't love them so what's an example we we broke down Tanner leather seen is it worth it format where he deconstructs a $500 Chanel handbag tells you whether it's worth it another one that you've probably seen a lot on Tik Tok or Instagram is we call it two characters one light bulb where it's the same person that plays two different characters so they play the expert and the novice and they break down a misconception about something so an example is Erica Colberg is a master of this format with legal industry where she breaks down the fine print of what happens when your flight is cancelled what happens when your airpods break um there's other people like Mark tberry that breaks it down about Finance so that core format can be used for any industry people use it for legal like Erica Finance real estate nutrition any kind of subject matter can be put into that format so the first place to understand is the formula starts with understanding what a format is versus a trend because I can guarantee you you will not master The Art of Storytelling and really break through without that that fundamental understanding so once we understand what a format is now we can start looking at what format do I want to tackle you know what format am I passionate about and that's why we do so much research cuz I never want to push a client or anybody to do a format that they're not passionate about that they don't enjoy because you and I both know like creater burnout and fatigue is real like if you don't enjoy it or you don't see the business results with it you're just going to stop doing it so once we have the format then we need to do the analysis of that format because most people will look at Tanner and he he did 15 million views on that video or Erica Colberg with the two characters all in lightbook oh she did did 10 million views on that video I know what they're doing I'm just going to go out and do that without any analysis and 99% of people that try that fail because they're they don't really understand what drives the performance of that format so what we do next with the client is we have um a process called gold silver bronze where we'll take an account like Erica or um any Creator that's using a format successfully and we'll choose 10 of their highest performing videos for the format so like two characters one light bulb it could the high performers are probably 5 to 10 million views then we'll take 10 to 20 of the average performers the silver which is you know in the few hundred, views and then we'll take the under performers the bronze which is like 10 to 100,000 views and what we're doing is as I mentioned earlier is we're looking for performance drivers not the content but the context like what is happening in those High performers that's not showing up in those low performers and vice versa so we're doing what we call qualitative analysis so where most people are spending their time on social media's quantitative analysis meaning they're looking at how many views did I get how many shares how many likes comments conversions which is a great indicator of something working or not working but it doesn't uncover the why so this is where we do the qualitative analysis of comparing the high performers in that same format against the low performers to really determine what are the very ibles that cause this the success or the underperformance in that format so we mentioned Dr Julie Smith earlier like one of the examples I do is I break down um that waste P paper basket video that she has versus one where she just has a um kind of cars in in front of her for from a visual metaphor now the waste paper basket video generated 12 million views versus The Cars one generates I think 2 or 300,000 views so we're talking about the same format the visual metaphor format same Creator 12 million views versus 200,000 views so there's a huge discrepancy in kind of that performance and that's where the real learning comes in it's not to point out oh Dr Julie Smith didn't master that video it's more about what drives that success so that if you're going to tackle that format like the visual metaphor format you can understand the contextual elements that allow that success uccessful storytelling mechanism [Music]