7 Minutes of Social Media Advice For 2025

0:00Welcome back to another episode of the Gary Vee Audio Experience. I'm Mike from Team Gary V. In this episode, Gary dives into the importance of understanding the platforms, how to capture consumer attention, and the best social media strategy going into 2025. This is the perfect episode to listen to for a quick crash course on all things social. I really hope you all enjoy it. We all talk about AI, and meanwhile, the most important AI in the world is sitting right here. It's the AI that runs these algos, and we completely are dismissing it. How do you know which content works best for each platform?

0:31In my little tiny agency, I have 137 people whose full-time job is to look at the analytics, both quant and qual, of what the newsfeed is doing for all seven platforms. You know, how do we do it? We look at the quant and qual data. We analyze absolutely everything. If you look carefully at this post, it's a thumbnail first. We're literally looking at the colors of the word they. You then go into it. We're paying attention to what the first words are. Should we be using this new feature? Notes, right, is what it's called. then I'm looking at the actualized reach then I may look at something and say so this one right here image very clear this one I bet you did well sure enough the reason I did that is I know right now and my company knows that images are reaching a higher propensity of new users than videos we are doing this fully backwards brother we have the greatest tools of all time and we're treating it like you know it's like those outages of not knowing how to use a tool like we have we have a Lamborghini and we're using it as like a planting pot.

1:33Creative unlocking all the answers is an unheard of reality for the way we all grew up. And right now, almost everyone thinks social media is a lesser than medium and it's hurting them. Can you capture consumer attention in 2025? Social overall has a staggering amount of actual attention in the consumer landscape. Collectively, the seven most meaningful social networks have more actualized attention on them than any other medium and it's not even close. And then when you talk about advertising, the next biggest mediums, streaming services, television, podcast and radio, all of their ad formats are disruptive and it's potential reach, not actualized reach.

2:20But because of the way that social is structured, you don't know the ad's coming because it's the next piece of content. And if you have creative excellence in the thumbnail and the first three seconds of that creative, you have a shocking opportunity to capture actual consumer attention. First, capturing their attention, whether it's an 18-year-old on Snapchat, Spotlight, or TikTok, or a 69-year-old on LinkedIn, or Facebook, or YouTube Shorts, which is crushing with 40 to 70-year-olds, they're all kind of the same game and all very different. It's based on creative excellence, best practices of creative per platform.

3:01Big mistake so many brands in this portfolio are making is they're putting the same video on every platform because they view social as distribution, kind of like old media versus understanding that we're in a place now where organic social is the starting point for all marketing. Let the AI algorithms that the news feeds are run by give you creative testing and affirmation and then make decisions on media amplification or interpretation. So I think it's by being native. It's like anything else. If you ask me, how do you win on Super Bowl, which I think is the best ad in marketing, from an intention buying standpoint, you can't spend$8 million and get 130 million Americans to watch 30 seconds of a video and any other medium.

3:46So Super Bowl is the best ad in marketing. The problem is if your commercial stinks, you just wasted a shitload of money. So creative vulnerability is the biggest issue for everyone here. Organic social does creative testing at an advancement we've never seen before as an added value to the marketing you do on it. You know, the way you win is by actually being good at it. If this was a different context, you asked me, Gary, how do we all become better basketball players? The answer is to practice more and get better at it. The way we win here now is to win on relevance at scale. One of the big mistakes a lot of brands in this portfolio are making is they're choosing their consumers target instead of trying to win on relevance with every consumer because most of the brands actually have that permission.

4:31But everyone's stuck in how brands grow 1991 mentality and still acting as if television is the primary distribution channel and have completely misunderstood what's actually happening on social. This is why so many people lose elections. The many politicians continue to do outdoor and television and underinvest in social and get outflanked by their competitor. This is why we've seen more upsets in the last 12 years. People will be like, no, Gary, the social discourse has changed. I'm like, no, social media accelerated the social discourse change. We're overpaying for the upper funnel distribution.

5:04And the creative that we're supporting it with, brother, is vanilla. And it's trying to be everything to everybody, which means it's nothing to no one. Meanwhile, all the upper funnel activities that everyone's trying to achieve is actually happening in social. Prime energy drink, Beastables, you know, poppy, all these things that are happening. Upper funnel just means where's the attention. Television commercials is not where the attention is. People are like, what about sports, Gary? People watch sports. I'm like, they watch sports, but they don't watch sports commercials. The problem is, I actually believe half this room fully understands what I'm saying, but the internal reporting doesn't justify the behavior, and so they don't do it.

5:41What is today's social media strategy? For the ones that are most close to operating in social, I think you know that three years ago, everything changed. So the social media I grew up with was more like email marketing. Get as many people to follow you as possible and a certain percentage of them saw every single post. So I've been doing email marketing since 1996 for winelibrary.com. Anybody that buys wine, you have to check out this new thing, which you should probably replicate for your overall business. I have a new wine text thing that is insane. SMS marketing is starting to emerge. So check that out, learn from it.

6:14In 1997, I had 100 ,000 person email newsletter, which was massive at the time, that had 91 % open rates because marketers hadn't ruined email yet. What I just showed you with text is staggeringly working because we haven't fully ruined commerce SMS yet. That 90 % open rate email newsletter today is now 30 % and we're good at it. That's how social worked, right? Like everybody thought I had a headstart, which I did and it made it hard. Now, every single part of the reach of this individual post is based on the creative excellence of it. I have 15 million followers on TikTok. I've been doing this every single day for 18 years.

6:55I own the largest agency in the world that does it best. And anybody on here can literally, who've never been on TikTok or been followed in their life, could set up a TikTok after this, post something. they could get more views on that than anything I've done in my career. So we are now in a new dawn where the individual piece of creative creates the reach. So some of you know this on your social media personally, or on the business, if you're close enough to this, you may post something and it gets 5 ,000 views and the next one gets 180 ,000 and the next one gets 19 and the next one gets 49 and next one gets 8 ,000.

7:32This is going to lead to a nirvana of being able to measure creativity that we've all been looking for for 70 years. And if you really play it out, nobody should ever do an above the line campaign ever again without the validation of the creative in social, ever again. Sitting in a boardroom with cupcakes and markers and some magazines to crack it and come up with the idea is like taking a horse on the highway to get to your next location.