The BEST Social Media to Market On Right Now (It's Not Even Close)

0:00Neil Patel:Three underpriced marketing channels for Q2 2026.

0:04Eric Siu:By the way, all these were generated by OpenClaw, so you can go first.

0:07Neil Patel:All right. So channel number one, we're seeing the social networks that no one likes talking about, Snap, Pinterest, X. I'm not talking about talking about from a political standpoint, but from a marketing standpoint, these channels, they're performing well, the ROI is still massive. And for some reason, companies don't try to run on them. And we believe that if you're going to run paid advertising, don't start first with the metas and the Googles. Start with, especially if you're a smaller organization, start with these smaller social networks because the cost is just way cheaper. They can't scale as much, but that's okay.

0:44Neil Patel:At least you're driving in more profit for whatever spend you have.

0:47Eric Siu:Number two. So I think a very underpriced marketing channel right now is GitHub. Let me tell you this. So I am basically open sourcing all of my AI skills and I'm just tossing it onto GitHub. I just threw it up yesterday. I had 250 stars on GitHub. So do I have the same amount of open call stars? No, I don't. But 250 stars is a good amount. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to keep adding to that repository, that repo, and I'm going to keep upgrading it. Because I was using Gary Tans from Y Combinators. I used this for the first time yesterday. It's like, hey, are you okay sharing your data with us on how you're using?

1:17Eric Siu:I was like, oh my God, that's smart. And then afterwards, like, hey, are you using the most updated? I was like, I took that scaffolding. I added it to mine this morning. And I'm just going to keep adding to it. And then I can see their usage. I can see what they're using, what they want more of and whatever. And in the future, I can see marketers adding like, oh, by the way, what's your email in there too? I'm sure we can ask all those questions. But I think GitHub is going to become more and more of a marketing channel because agents are using it more and more.

1:39Neil Patel:Number three, GEO. So when we look at traffic from GEO, it converts roughly two and a half times better than email and SMS traffic. The number two highest converting channel, I I believe is SMS, the number third is email. And then I believe it gets into some paid advertising channels. GEO converts roughly three X better than these paid ad channels, so this is massive. The cool thing about GEO versus SEO, you can actually get results in a very short period of time, call it like a few months. One of the big factors that they're looking for now when they pull results is how updated is the content.

2:13Neil Patel:So your website content is super important to be updated. They don't like pulling old outdated sites. The other thing is when you're getting brand mentions around the internet, you need to optimize not just for velocity, but recency. They're looking for how many times is a company being mentioned as of recent. If you're Coca-Cola and you've been mentioned a lot over 10, 15 years, those articles from 10, 15 years, the AI doesn't like pulling that as much as an article that is two, three months old. All right. Sorry, I was thinking about these earlier. You want more? No.

2:49Eric Siu:No, okay, I'm going to continue. So thank you. Next topic here. Wait, they are really good. No, I just kept calling you something. It's an inside joke in my own head. So how AI turns B players into A players. So this is the multiplier effect. So we can kind of go back and forth on this because we're seeing it happen in our organizations right now. In my mind, the biggest multiplier effect is when you're able to talk to it and you're able to run multiple things in parallel. So multiple tabs doing different things. So one, you can have a tab doing conversion rate optimization for you. the other tab you can have it doing SEO for you the other tab you can have it helping doing design work you can have it ship different features for you without waiting and so the the way it turns B players into A players is the B players used to need to wait they still need to be told what to do that's to my definition that's a B player you need to be told what to do and A player kind of just does it but the B player if you tell them what to do and say hey you're no longer resource constrained and you can use these co-piots to help you they can do a lot more than what they used to do before and that in effect is more like an A player.

3:46Eric Siu:It's still not quite they're doing it autonomously yet, but if the Asians push them to work autonomously,

3:51Neil Patel:maybe they become a neighbor there. So I'm gonna give you my controversial viewpoint on this. We see AI making the B players still stay B players and the A players being A players. I don't think that's controversial. I think that's fair because the A players do so much more and they're so much better. The B players are also doing more and they're so much better, but the standards have changed on what is an A and what is a B player. So what we're typically seeing is the biggest thing that is impacting is people are able to just execute faster. No matter if you're A player, B player, C player, and even lower than that.

4:26Neil Patel:Execution, speed is the biggest thing that we've seen. The second big thing that we've seen is it gives you the ideas on what to do and it'll surface things for you. We see it surfacing things for A players, B players, C players. It doesn't matter what level. Because some decisions, like the credit card conversion example that I gave you, that's something that you want an A player to take charge of and not roll it out with a B player because it's something related to finance and money and it can actually have a big impact on money. You need A player judgment. You need A player judgment with that.

4:56Neil Patel:Spot on. And then I would say the third thing that we're really seeing with AI is it allows them to run more experiments at a faster pace to assuming you have the traffic volume or you can buy the traffic to figure out what is the direction that we should take our campaigns. because people all have different ideas. Now you can just run through them much faster and figure out what actually works and then just focus and double down on what works. Well, before it would just take you months and months, sometimes a year to figure out what's the right path.

5:27Eric Siu:So to Neil's point on that one, I would recommend everyone go look for Andre Karpathy's auto research. Go pull that GitHub repo and then you can literally do this yourself. You call that, maybe you're using more synthetic data and then you can combine that with my auto growth, which is also open source as well. I don't have a good link for you there. Just search for Eric Osu at Auto Growth. You should be able to find it. But Neil, let me ask you a question here. You mentioned the B players and A players, they become more of who they are, but the multiplier effect. So an A player using this now, how much better are they?

5:57Eric Siu:Are they 5X better, 10X better? Just throw a number out there.

6:00Neil Patel:We're seeing A players be like 30, 40 % better. And how about the B players? Maybe like 50-ish percent better. We're seeing bigger lifts with B players and C players than we are with A players. this is a bias viewpoint from my perspective most the a players that i know of and interact with in my organization and in other organizations that have marketing they're typically in management we're only seeing so much efficiencies that you can provide to manager level positions with ai versus the people who are actually doing i do interact with the people that are doing but i I don't interact with them nearly as frequently as I do with management and organizations, even excluding mine.

6:47Neil Patel:It's just usually I'm dealing with VPs and CMOs much more frequently than mid-level marketers and managers. Okay. So two more things on this.

6:55Eric Siu:So you look at your organization, okay? What percent of people, so if you think of AI as four levels, so you have unacceptable, you have capable people with AI, you have adaptive, and then you have transformative. Transformative, they're building end-to-end workflows on their own. They don't need to be like, they're completely reinventing how to work, right? What percent of your company would you say is transformative? Because less than 10%. Less than. So here's the thing. When I talk to my other friends and I see this the same for mine, it's like probably less than like 2%.

7:24Neil Patel:Yes.

7:25Eric Siu:Yeah.

7:25Neil Patel:I don't know the exact percentage, but it's not high. I know it's well below 10%.

7:29Eric Siu:So that, I was just curious. I just want to ask you that. But I, my controversial take is I think as a leader now in organization, it used to be you wanted to be the chief inspirer and you still definitely do. But I find myself in a weird spot now. I have to be both the cheer, the chief inspirer and the chief fear monger. Okay. So the inspirational piece, you will get your best people to perform at the highest level. That's what you want. That's a good result, right? Also, if you're the chief fear monger, you're going to get some people to tap out. That is also an acceptable result. Okay. And so for me, it's like, I've never had to do this in my career, but also the last time something big like this happened, we're both children, okay?

8:07Eric Siu:We didn't have to experience this change. This is the first time I've had to play both. And it's a very weird thing, but I see a lot of my friends doing it. I know you're maybe not as front facing with it, but I just, it's like a thing that I've just been looking at. It's like, it's so weird to have to do that.

8:20Neil Patel:All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host,

8:23Eric Siu:Neil's agency called NP Digital. And they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and Answer to Public. all you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side.

8:39Neil Patel:I don't really see on at least in our organization we don't really have to do too much of the fear stuff when we look at the most transformative people in AI we've taken our approach instead of saying hey we need to make everyone a player with AI we now look at it as that's unrealistic it's like saying hey Eric you're recruiting 50 new employees I want you to take every single employee and take them through this training methodology and they need to all go through this practice be onboarded in this specific way and learn how to use cloud code all right so that way they can do their job better marketing and then how realistic is it then 30 days later hey everyone open claw came out you guys all need to go through onboarding and learn how to be the best at open claw it's just not realistic in an organization so what we found is there's every organization has their elite tech people who are really good at adapting with times and you don't have to push them, they tend to adapt before you even tell them about the new product services because they get a kick out of it and they just love doing it.

9:37Neil Patel:With those people, we just put them in charge of figuring out how to help different departments with AI and build the tech and provide it to them and integrate the SOPs so that way people are just more efficient and we don't have to keep training these people on how to relearn a new technology or how to be amazing at everything. Instead, the AI adapts to them versus having everyone to be amazing at using AI when it comes to at least marketing. Yeah.

10:05Eric Siu:So our philosophy on this is we want to build the bridge for everyone, but not necessarily everyone's going to want to cross. The majority of people are going to cross the bridge, right? How you bridge that gap. The other thing is it is within your like if you're a leader listening to this right now, you should you have to build this because if you know how to do all this stuff alone, it's not enough. It's on you to teach everyone how to do it, right? Because if everyone can spend the 20 to 40 hours over like a 60 to 90 day period to learn how to do this, everyone's a lot stronger for that. And that's good.

10:34Eric Siu:The other thing that Neil's mentioning here, so I said earlier, we have four levels that we're looking for. And this is Adaptive from Zapier. You have Unacceptable Level, Capable Level, Adaptive, and Transformative. We are not looking for many people to get to Transformative. That's extremely hard to find, okay? That's like best of the best. But Neil, we want everyone to get to Adaptive because today's capable is tomorrow's unacceptable. So if you get them to adaptive, they at least will quickly fall back to capable. And then you got to get them back up to adaptive, right? That's how we see it.

11:01Eric Siu:But I will say, Neil, there's gonna, obviously there's gonna be some stragglers that don't want to adapt, right? And that's okay. And that's why I say those people, it's okay for them to tap out. I'm okay with that. But I think the majority of people at my organization, they want to do it. And we've been facilitating that. And I think it's same thing for you guys too.

11:18Neil Patel:Yeah. But I think that is, you know every organization is going to have to figure out what works for them and there's no right or wrong but this stuff is just moving so fast it's too complex to try to get everyone to

11:31Eric Siu:adapt you can't and i think it's just like remember i told you i i did tell you this my dad said that you know it took years and years for all the companies different companies he worked at to adapt to get getting email addresses right so like i just i don't think we have the luxury of that to wait this time, it's very different. So, and to illustrate this, and then we'll cover maybe another classic topic, but the Anthropic team doesn't write code anymore. Okay. So this guy's friend got hired at Anthropic three weeks ago. Nobody on his team had handwritten code in three months. Okay. So they haven't written like anything handwritten.

12:03Eric Siu:They run multiple agents in parallel and act more like managers than engineers. This isn't just an Anthropic thing. This applies to your organization. It applies to my organization. Now, you know what I do, Neil? I send people looms on how I'm just going through Slack on how I'm working with the different, I'm querying different things. I'm like, guys, this is how you do it. You see how easy this is? This is awesome. Look at how much time you save, right? And you know what I'm doing now? We have this thing called Gather Town where we like go around virtually talking to people and I'll just randomly hit the gong and people will hear this gong noise and I'll walk over to Autorium and I'll pull someone in and I'll start training them.

12:32Eric Siu:So the move now, guys, is if you are just watching an agent code, you're already behind, right? You should be spinning up multiple agents and directing them. And then at the end of the day, if you're working really hard, maybe your eyes hurt. Okay, I'm not recommending that by the way, but my eyes hurt at the end of the day. So the point of this method is not to learn to use AI to code faster. It's you are the product manager. The agents are your engineers and your job is to keep them running at all times. This doesn't just apply to engineers. It applies to people across the board in knowledge work.

13:03Eric Siu:And by the way, if you're an electrician, I might tell my kids today, if they're in high school, just go be an electrician.

13:08Neil Patel:Dude, electricians get paid an arm and a leg, especially in data centers right now. It's 260K, I think, starting or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting thing that happened to me is I met up with one of my daughter's teachers in our old school, so not the current school. What incentivized you to do that? You had to meet up with them because parent teachers and all that kind of stuff. But you said it's old school. In our old school. This is while she was at the old school. Okay, I see, I see, I see. Not current. So this wasn't recent. Well. And the teacher was complaining to me how people who pick up trash, like garbage people you know that drive the trucks and you know empty out the dustbins they get paid way more than teachers and that's not fair and i wasn't allowed to say this i was like but you could go be that and they're just like why would anyone want to be that job i'm like but that's why it gets paid more money because people don't want to do it and they

14:01Eric Siu:were like that job is beneath me and i was like that job's not beneath me i would just clean And you have done it before.

14:08Neil Patel:Yeah, I used to sweep up vomit. Literally every single day I was working, I would have to like clean up vomit. They paid me extra 25 cents an hour to sweep up the vomit. It was like$6.75, no,$5.75 an hour to sweep up vomit. That was a lot of money back then. Nothing was beneath me. I had to put expired dates.

14:26Eric Siu:I had to put dates over expired dates when I worked for a Chinese factory.

14:29Neil Patel:Wait, so the food was expired?