30 Minutes To Improve Your Social Media Game | #3 of 2024 Top Podcasts

0:00Hey everyone, we're counting down to 2025 with our top episodes of 2024. for. Here's episode number three. For you today, what would be the top three platforms to be on, because there are so many, and what would you do on each of them? If you were starting now, what would you do on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook? Yeah, so I think, again, back to the earlier point of self-awareness, if you're selling B2B, all of a sudden LinkedIn is number one, right? If you're selling, if you're a SaaS, if you started a SaaS business, if you're listening right now and you want to, or you sell to lawyers, you have a service that sells to lawyers then LinkedIn's gonna be number one globally for sure with YouTube shorts probably being number two because YouTube is a search engine and a lot of people search there so that would also be good if you were into SaaS and then probably in that scenario I would then say if you're selling a B2B service after those two probably Facebook grounded in a Facebook group with then Twitter X being probably fourth If you're selling SaaS, Instagram's probably a distant fifth.

1:06Snapchat, Pinterest, they're super far away in that scenario. If you're selling t-shirts to 15 to 25-year-olds, all of a sudden TikTok becomes number one. Instagram probably becomes number two in that scenario, and YouTube Shorts is number three. So I think for a lot of people, that's that reality. For broader markets, I think that if you're really trying to sell something, like to the broad consumer, call it for everybody who's 25 to 55. Well, now you start getting into Facebook still being an incredibly powerful platform for selling. I do think that organic TikTok for branding is exciting. Instagram, again, becomes a stronger selling platform, but both of those scenarios require ads more than organic reach.

1:58Whereas TikTok, you can win on organic reach and kind of capture lightning in a bottle. So, you know, I hope everybody appreciates the answer. It is contextual, but I think as far as the answer to what you would do inside of it, obviously there's a lot of science and math of what time do you post, how long is the copy, I think a couple things to look out for. Number one, the best YouTubers in the world, starting with MrBeastDown, spend more time and more money on their thumbnail than you could ever imagine. so number one for everybody who's gonna do video and again that's a whole nother conversation because for some people it should be written word some people should be doing audio some people should be doing video but I think I think the thumbnail on video is incredibly important I think the first three seconds thing that Dustin and I were talking about on our trip this week is do we need the hook from the thumbnail to be delivered on in the first two or three or four seconds and we really believe we do.

3:01We believe that if my hook says, you know, 30 to 40 year olds, you should be thinking about LinkedIn and if my opening line is like, before we get into that, you know, like you might in two seconds, you may lose that audience and so I think a lot of science around the art. I think a couple of other things. There's a lot of ways to do it. Let me encourage some people. One thing that I've been noticing is on Instagram, you could just take a photo of something, right? You were here with your friend this weekend in New York. You could take a photo of like a nice picture that caught your eye in New York, take a photo.

3:35But if you then wrote three paragraphs, really great ones, because you're a great writer, about the concept of enjoying the weekends to reset, of the concept of busyness and chaos, and controlled chaos is an effective way to be an entrepreneur. You could write the, you know, curiosity. I've been to New York seven times, but I've never gone down this street. Like you could take a photo of anything, a banana, a car, a tree, a bird, your backyard. You really could take a photo of almost anything and then write three or four paragraphs that are very thoughtful about a point you're trying to make. Now all of a sudden you don't need a video and editing team.

4:22you could do it all by yourself and for a lot of people listening they're not great on camera they're not great with their words but they're incredible writers and so it's around self-awareness of the style the content and then there's strategy around the distribution depending on your business and so that's one main theme to keep getting very nerdy and deep on your question the other thing to always look for is underpriced attention The thing that I know you know about me over these last seven, eight years is that I have a very strong skillset in understanding where there's more organic reach against consumption and when to do it hard than most people and that's been a big part of my success.

5:08You were there when I was yelling about Musical.ly and TikTok when that seemed crazy to almost everyone. You weren't there but people that have been following me all the way back to 2005, six and seven, there was an incredible amount of content and passion I had around YouTube and Twitter and Facebook. I mean, I wrote Crush in 2008. Came out in 09, but I wrote it in 2008. That's 15 years ago. Long time. So I think that I constantly look for the underpriced attention. It's always most exciting when it comes up in a new platform, but new platforms only come around every three, four, seven, nine years.

5:51Then when it's not a platform, it goes into the things we just talked about. The strategy within the platforms. I talked about recently, and it's already lost momentum in a month, but a month ago, I was incredibly excited about posting a meme and then a video on Instagram, a two post carousel. I saw that. And, you know, I see incredible opportunity in that. Again, almost talking to Dustin, I'm almost having my own meeting right now. One thing that continues to work for me is taking headlines that are happening in pop culture business and doing a green screen and talking over it. That model continues to work better than if I just looked in camera right now and talked about it.

6:35Even when the green screen video is not great quality, like it doesn't look good, but it works. Correct, to your point, my last one, which did really well, I was in the car and the light was hitting a different way and it wasn't like my, yeah, I was like distorted. That's right. But I think that that's, I think a great strength of mine that I would encourage people to consider is constantly trying new formats. You know, I'll use you as an example. We've talked in the past, whether on DM or Twitter, or in a VFriends Discord or like this, about like, hmm, I'd like to get more traction. I want more views on my videos.

7:16And something that I don't think I've given good advice on in the past to you or the hundreds of thousands of people that have asked me is, look, if you have the same exact format, format, not you're talking about different things, but it's camera to face and you post it as an Instagram reel and you're doing that 50, 100 times and you're not getting really the results you want after 100 times, you've got to change it. You've got to change your format. Maybe you bring on a guest. Maybe you go to green screen. Maybe you go to written word and picture. I think, you know, I always think about that concept of like, you know, the definition of insanity is like doing the same thing over and over and thinking you'll have a different outcome.

7:56so I do think I want to give permission to a lot of people out there like if you've done 100 I think that's the right thing if you've done 100 of the same format per se and you're really really getting nowhere and you're now six months in you know you should challenge yourself to try different formats not talk about something different just talk about the same thing in a different in a different you know like look I believe in 40 to 50 core things and then I like what's happening in the world at the time and new and different formats and platforms. And I think there's something there there. Now that's good advice.

8:36I'm gonna try it. Because I love doing reels, like I love doing the video. And some work, some don't. And then something that works on Instagram, then I put it on TikTok, it doesn't work over there. Yeah, TikTok's a whole different animal. It's so hard. Yeah, it's hard, it is hard. But I think, you know, I remind people like yourself, myself, I say this to myself all the time, if you're looking for something special to happen, it's supposed to be hard. You know? Yeah. Like, I hear, you know, right? Like even, right? Yeah, it's supposed to be hard. Yeah, like I was in this, I was, where was I? Oh, I was, Friday night, I was in a airport lounge in Dallas, and this gentleman, maybe like a 60 year old guy, you know, he was a real yappy guy.

9:16I was trying to get a little work done before my flight to LA, but he wanted to talk, and I'm about that, like, he didn't have no clue who I was or anything like that nature. We were just talking. and he got into something and he was like, it really seemed to me that this was a gentleman and I confirmed some of this through the conversation, you know, really, really came from rural America, really like came from nothing, nothing and made a life of himself and, you know, it was really nice and his son was getting married in Tennessee in a couple weeks, really enjoyed the conversation but he kind of talked about, you know, how hard he worked and then he was talking about what was hard for him now and I kind of had this fun moment where I was like hey brother you of all people know you didn't get to this point by accident you don't have to do the next thing but it's not going to happen without hard work and so I think people ask to be known to get compensated for being themselves to sell books, to speak, to sell things it should be hard because 99 % of the world works for someone else Yep.

10:22You've said it. So I've been fortunate enough to go viral continually with the kayaking business. We have over like 400 million views. Yeah, the content is obviously so conducive. If you were selling concrete, it wouldn't be as easy. Yeah. Part of the thought process, you know, in my daily work is like, how do I convert more of that to actual business? by taking the content that's gone viral and slightly tweaking it and making it the collateral that you advertise against. Okay. Let me say that one more time for everyone. The greatest thing about organic social right now is the algorithms are not based anymore on what they used to be, which is like your followers, it's now based on the content.

11:10So social for the first 15 years was more about like email marketing. Build a list, market to it, get a percentage of them to do stuff. Over the last two years, we are fully in the process of the TikTokification of all social. Kind of why I invested in Tumblr. I invested in Facebook and Twitter for the email thing. I invested in Tumblr for the content thing. Meaning the social graph used to be based on your social network. Now social media could actually be called interest media because it's based on the interest graph. The Shed could have 19 followers on LinkedIn tomorrow and decide it wants to go and the first post could get a million views if the post itself was good.

11:52So you have affirmation from the world that they like this video. Now, two things come to mind. One, does that equally mean that they want to buy? No. And then two, you've got to, that part you can't control. The part you can control is say, okay, this video got four million views organically on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, shorts. Let me now retake that video and make it much more hard hitting. I'm going to put a banner at the bottom that says order now, discount this, let me change the copy. So taking the viral creative and turning it into an ad. The viral creative is building brand. The ad is building performance.

12:32We call this brandformance. Right? Taking something that's gone well organically and turning it into a conversion, a ticket selling app. Ad, excuse me. Yeah, that makes sense. Jumping over to like the franchise side of it, the franchisor side of it, how would you go about selling franchises? By making content on LinkedIn at scale. Okay. You should be putting out three posts a day on LinkedIn saying the same seven things, 7 ,000 different ways of why they should work with you. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah, we put out a bunch of content on Instagram, Facebook. Instagram's impossible. Yeah. Right, like everything's about day trading attention.

13:192023 Instagram is not 2014 Instagram. Right, Instagram's impossible. Meaning all that these social networks are is supply and demand. The reason I'm always loud once every four years is something is starting to have a lot of demand that doesn't have enough supply yet. Enough of you have been in my circles of content consumption that all of you can probably remember four years ago I'm like tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. And I mean everyone across the board is sad that they didn't listen to me. Even if they did it, they didn't do it as, I didn't do it as hard as I thought I wanted to. Like as I wanted to.

13:56It's like this almost unachievable game. Every time, I remember promising myself after Instagram that the next Instagram, that I was gonna actually go 100%. Not 99, I was gonna stop, I was gonna let them all run the agency for a year. I am gonna go 100 % I literally see TikTok when it's musically when we were fucking in Park Avenue I'm like I got it and I went like 49 % so I know all of you went 12 % so it's because it's supply and demand I apologize it's like real estate like when TikTok popped that was like Malibu popping 100 years ago and like do you want to buy beachfront property because by the time you get to Instagram today is like buying you're not even in Malibu anymore.

14:44That's how far out it's so mature. What happens is more people. Today more content will be produced for Instagram than any day in the history of Instagram. However in the last four years 20 to 40 % of that attention has gone to TikTok. They've lost attention. Today more ads will be spent on Instagram than any day in the history of Instagram. Ads take up more attention. There's organic, there's ads, and there's attention. Very simple framework. So Instagram today is really hard. The only way you hack it is the stuff I talk about, best practices of the moment. If you watch, like look, I'm gonna leave in an hour.

15:28Please promise me to continue to watch what I'm doing even harder than ever before. Why am I doing a meme and then a video constantly over the last 60 days on Instagram? Why am I doing a two post carousel constantly where the first one is a meme and the second one is the video that you were accustomed to seeing me just post the video? Why am I doing that? I promise you it's not for kicks and giggles. It's what is now working of this moment. That can give you the most upside when it's, you know, it's like if you're the best player in your sixth grade football team, that's good. But when you get to high school, it gets harder to be the best player.

16:08and then there's college and then there's the pros. Instagram now is the pros. If you're gonna really go crazy, you gotta be the best. Whereas other platforms, you could still be sixth. You know what I mean? LinkedIn, first of all, don't forget who's on LinkedIn if they're, why they're on LinkedIn and what they're doing in there. They're looking for business opportunities. So your hard hitting join my franchise is gonna hit harder in LinkedIn than it's gonna hit even to the same person. If Zach and Jack are just in their phone on LinkedIn versus on TikTok, In one place, they're looking to be entertained or look at girls or I don't know, you know, the other place, they're doing business.

16:43You're the same person or a different person. So you gotta understand that. What is universally true for everyone in this room, regardless of where you are on the journey within this industry, is that the far majority of individuals, humans here, and companies are not taking advantage of what's happening in LinkedIn right now. So just from a pure practical standpoint, There's so many wants and dreams and hopes and things that you want to happen in this room and one of the most significant opportunities to make that thing happen is actually knowing how to make content for LinkedIn and actually posting it and actually reaping the benefits of it.

17:25LinkedIn right this second is acting like a social network more similar to what Facebook was in 2013 and 14 and the land grab for B2B companies and B2B2C companies that I've watched over the last two years grow and explode and really, I won't use the word exploit, but just so everybody understands, no ads, just taking advantage of best practices to create organic reach is disproportionately the underpriced attention, the underutilized move of this collective room. You can literally make videos and pictures and run$25 to$50,$100 on LinkedIn against employees of venture capital firms and reach them and not have to go to conferences and pray that you'll run into them in the hallway to pitch them your startup.

18:17And this is results tomorrow. LinkedIn content for your business. You can literally reach everyone. So many people's agendas here today is to do business development. You'll listen to my talk, but what you're worried about is what's gonna happen out there and what's gonna happen tonight. That's why you're here. That's the actual business. The fact that I know that scales 365 days a year if you spend the five or 10 hours to do research on how do I make good LinkedIn content. By the way, there's an incredible website that will tell you everything you should do. I know some of you are taking notes.

18:52I'll spell out the website for you. G-O-O-G. Thank you for doing that. That made my fucking morning. You can literally type in, how do I make LinkedIn content for an insurance SaaS company enter and get obnoxious amount of results with best practices? This isn't about when I talk about this stuff, they're like Gary, but how do I do it? That's like saying how do I get into shape? Everybody here knows how to get into shape. It's called stop eating shit and go to the gym. Doing it is hard. I promise you that if every person here leaves and does proper, because there's the right way to do pushups versus the wrong way, does proper LinkedIn content three times a day, that they would see miraculous results for their business a year later.

19:46The first six months will be terrible. A month in, you'll be like, why did I listen to that fucking guy? It won't happen, because you don't know what you're doing yet. It's like everything. You didn't know how to swim as good as you did later, ride a bike, your first kiss was a disaster. Right, you got better. And so, when I think about this talk, what can I universally talk about? I can universally talk about content. I can't encourage the startups looking for capital, the B2B2C players, the people that are, like literally, instead of cold calling or praying or business developing your way into getting to a third party to put your insurance into, right?

20:28Like when I check out on a website, do I want to buy that insurance? Those biz dev deals are big, I get it. I know how it works. I also know that almost everyone in that sector is not producing content for the e-commerce retailers to make them consider them. We're fully reliant on sales when marketing and brand always beats sales. I love sales, I'm a salesman. But let me explain to you what sales is. It's what you do when you don't know how to market and brand. I need everybody to hear that. And I'm very aware of how people look at sales and marketing. People love sales in this room. It's black and white.

21:08Johnny got the gig, he brought home the bacon. Yay, Johnny, even though he's a fucking asshole. We'll talk about culture in a minute. But what we don't understand, and we think marketing is a waste, What did that video do for us? What's the ROI? Everyone wants to be so last touch attribution. ROAS, CAC, it's fine. It allows marketing and brand to win. Almost every piece of clothes that everybody is wearing here is not because they sold you and called you on the phone. It's because they built a brand and you want to wear it. Marketing and brand works. There's a lot of big brands in this room. You see what they put out.

21:44You think they're making these silly commercials on TV for their health? You think it's not working? You think they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these videos to put out to the world and distributing them because it's funny? They like it? It's ha ha ha? I promise you it's not. It's called business. And I think for even the smallest people here, two founders who started their SaaS business today and are here hoping to stumble into a VC who will give them capital during a very hard market, even for that early stage company, all the way to the top five brands in the building that are billions of dollars in market cap, understanding how to be a contemporary marketer, AKA, how do you make content for this?

22:24This is the television. And not for long, by the way. All of you that like, hate that this is like, you hate that your kids are on social all day, wait till they sit in a pod on VR for the rest of their lives. You know what this is? This is the beeper. Remember the beeper? I know you do, you fuckers loved it. A lot of you didn't get a smartphone back in the early 2000s, because you were like, I don't want anyone calling me whenever they want. I got my beeper, they got my pager, they'll hit me up and I'll call when I want to talk to them, right? And then my favorite, let's talk about why people resist new technology.

23:02When this thing came out, I called my mom, who's the greatest, I called her and said, Mom, this thing is gonna change the world. And then I went out and I was speaking then and putting out content, and I would say, who's getting one of these? And too expensive, why? And you know why? Because you guys loved your fucking Blackberry. You know why you loved your Blackberry? You needed to touch the buttons because you knew how to type without looking. How many people here rocking a Blackberry with us right now? Nice, two. I gotta buy it from you and sell it on eBay as a fucking antique. I wanna go back to content because I wanna leave with tactical things before we get out of here.

23:39I wanna talk about the LinkedIn thing. I'm gonna bash it into your head one more time before I get out of here. This LinkedIn thing is crazy. This LinkedIn thing is crazy. Thinking about the people trying to raise capital, thinking about the people that are trying to get biz dev deals, thinking about all the people that have unlimited salespeople trying to get into organizations and get them to buy. I just couldn't push you harder to understand how big of a deal this is. Now, you have to be good at it, which is why I want you to do it for a while. but for anyone here, actually how many people here are posting every day on LinkedIn for their business?

24:18Raise your hand. 11. Good. That's good. I just really want, if I ever get lucky enough to come back here in two or three years, I just want 70, 80 % of this room to raise your hand. I promise you, if you happen to be sitting next to someone who raised their hand and you don't know them, I highly recommend you ask them what's going on. and I have no idea if they're good at it or not because it is a game of being good at it but if they're good at it, they will explain and give you a story of a direct correlation of them hiring a good employee from a competitor because of one post, a story of getting a new client because of one post, a story of getting asked to be on a podcast because of one post that then led to business.

25:03The world is changing. We all understand that but it's changing faster than people realize. All my content, and I do have a lot of followers like the intro said, and a lot of them are international. For the people that stood up earlier from all the countries around the world, all of my content in 2024 will be fully translated to their native language. So I have a huge page, I have a huge following in Arabic, I have a huge following in Portuguese in Brazil, I have a huge Spanish following, I have Gary V Espanol in Portuguese and all that, and all that content today is me talking and then subtitled.

25:43Every piece of that content in 2024 will be me speaking in that native tongue fully in my voice because of AI and AI to my lips so it doesn't even feel weird dubbed. It will be as I'm talking. We are really going into a new era. And so what I ask is this as I wrap up. If you came to this conference, you didn't have to. If you came to this conference, my belief system is that you're ambitious, that you're hungry, that you're still growing. I don't understand that you would be willing to schlep to Vegas for a conference for a couple of days, but you aren't willing to spend 10 hours of real research on every new trend.

26:32Instead of taking one headline you read about AI or one friend saying something and taking it as your own and your belief system, why not actually Google, how do I use AI in insurance tech, enter. How about 10 hours of research for every new thing? Whether you believe me or not on LinkedIn content can double your business if you become crazy about it. Why not spend 10 hours of research over a week or two or three and putting in how do I make content that works on LinkedIn, my industry. Again, a lot of you, VCs. VCs in this room. Good deals are competitive. Good deals are competitive. The reason I, for a decade, got access to all the best tech deals in Silicon Valley was because I had a personal brand.

27:25I didn't compete for them, they came to me. Sales versus marketing. Sales you have to go and ask. Marketing, it comes to you. Your personal content, and by the way, as I wrap up, not everybody has to do video. This whole notion, yes, video works. Video's a monster, we watch videos, it's what we do. But for the people in here saying, man, I wanna do it, but I feel self-conscious on video. Two things on that. One, once and for all, can we put this to bed? anyone here who's not posting because they're worried about judgment of others, strangers and friends, making fun of them, who do you think you are, somebody leaves a comment saying you're ugly or stupid or wrong.

28:05I just really need you to hear this. Forevermore, please remember this. If somebody comes to your profile on social media and takes the time to try to take you down, you shouldn't feel bad for yourself. You should feel bad for them. Do you know what kind of shit life it is to go around the internet and try to make other people hurt because you're so hurt inside? Once and for all, we've left middle school. You're all grown now. Don't let JohnnyPants97 leaving a negative comment stop you from growing your fucking business. Are you in? Please.

28:44Jesus, second point on that. You don't have to do video. Some of you are incredibly talented writers and in written form you can get across what you want to the industry much better than you can with Gift of Gab. Some of you are good with Gift of Gab but no matter how much I try to encourage you here, you still are self-conscious visually or things of that nature, then fine. Don't do a video, do audio. Record it on your phone and upload it as just audio with a title. My friends, the battleground for the world is happening out in social media content. For this industry, you have a gift. It's called LinkedIn.