Full Social Media Strategy for Business Growth in 2026

0:00You do know that you could go from 2 to 8 million in sales in a year based on one organic TikTok post As I scroll to my TikTok, this video right here got 1.9 million views. Here's the most remarkable part. The next post, which crushed for me on Instagram, different content, different platform, big part of the thesis, 5 ,834 views. So the social media I grew up with, that you all grew up with, was as many followers you've had, was an indicator to the general range every post would get. All those best practices got completely annihilated when TikTok hit the scene and made it about the individual piece of content.

0:35And I think it's going to continue to get more extreme because it benefits the platforms. This is the Gary Vee Audio Experience. Before you go to the podcast, I've got a big announcement. I know several years ago, a lot of you bought 12 books of 12 and a half to get the NFT, the Book Games NFT. I also know that a lot of people have dropped off on their journey with VFriends, which is a massive mistake because what we're doing on Burn Island and what we're doing on base with Book Games is remarkable. So you need to go to VEEFriends, VFriends.com slash old books. Go to VFriends.com slash old books with an S.

1:14You will go to that landing page and we will help you explain if you are trying to figure out where your NFTs are, how to bring them over to the website, and how to start activating them so that you can start using them for all the incredible exchanges and draws and raffles and experiences that we're doing for people that actually own the book games. So please go to vfriends.com slash old books where you can start your journey on reactivating your book games journey. Look, TikTok has the most virality chance. I wasn't kidding what I said about 8 million for them. It doesn't fit everyone here. Good news, every platform's going through the TikTok thing.

1:49LinkedIn, same thing. One video I have, 4 ,000. Next one, 400 ,000. YouTube short, same shit. First video, 1 ,000. Next one, 250 ,000. So they're all about to go through it. because it's the right thing for all of us. It's the right for the platform, it's the right for us. This is why I wrote the book. This is why I'm yelling from the loudest way I can that organic social is important, but you have to get good at the craft. Like the first three seconds, the thumbnail, all of it. Until you're great at the craft of the video or the picture or the written words in social, everything will be hard.

2:20I promise you. Because everything else is getting more expensive because they're all losing market share to this machine. Newspaper ads are more expensive than they were five years ago. The number one goal you should all care about is views achieved organically. There's people on my team that are fast, there's people on my team that are slower. But if player one got me three videos a day and those three videos got me 100 ,000 views, but player two was slower but she fucking made badass shit and only made me one and that video got four million views, which one do I like better? That's simple. But when people play, well, but Gary, my shit's good, I'm like, no it's not.

2:56you took a day and your video got 8 ,000 views. And over here, they got me three videos at 8 ,000 apiece and that got me 24 ,000 views. When you make views achieved gross and per post as a North Star, it's gonna help you answer a lot of these tough questions. The first question I think is how to balance personal branding versus business branding, especially from a social media perspective. And then also across multiple brands if you're trying to do more than one company like you did? There's so much to that. First of all, I think that we out academia ourselves a lot of times. So we sit in this room and think about the strategy of personal brand versus the business versus multiple businesses when the consumer on the other side doesn't care about what we're doing in a boardroom.

3:50That's always been the case. it's now been compounded by how social media now works. The reason I wrote the latest book is social media's really changed in the last two, three years. So best practices on how many handles do you need? What's personal? All those best practices got completely annihilated when TikTok hit the scene and made it about the individual piece of content. And I think it's going to continue to get more extreme because it benefits the platforms. The more we stay on it, the more money they make. the more you see things you want to see the more you will stay the more you see things you don't want to see a lot of you follow me but you may not want the wine content or the crying about the Jets content you might want the business content you might want the silly content I don't know but as you all know I do a lot of different stuff compared to most people I would say good news my friend it doesn't fucking matter that's right so if you decide to go one platform under your name and do half of the content about the business and half yours and another business, that individual piece of content is going to find the audience.

4:55If you want to have seven different accounts, I'm like even thinking about new strategies for clients. Like if they're a cereal brand, let's just use Cheerios, they're not a client. If we get Cheerios, should I create another account called At Morning Breakfast so that I can just post on it with Cheerios content just so they don't have to deal with the policy? It's so crazy what happened and all of you should take advantage of this. You should no longer be paralyzed by any of the ridiculous things we think about for strategy, including even the name of the handle. It's like all out the window.

5:28It's now the individual piece of content. Whether you post on your account, your account or the company's account, the individual piece of T-Porn content is gonna be the punchline. We have this T-shirt, T-Porn. There you go. So that's the answer to that, Christian. I don't think you need to cripple yourselves the three of you on this issue. One account, five accounts, one for each of you. What you need to do is be fucking psychotic about the individual piece of content. Hey everybody, I hope you're enjoying the podcast right now. Make sure you follow the podcast. That's why I'm interrupting. Let's keep going on this show, but follow the podcast.

6:07It'll make my mom super happy. So my questions may be really specific to financial companies. Is there anything you're seeing either good, bad, or otherwise that companies like ours are focused on helping people better their financial lives? Is there anything you're seeing out there? Yeah, of course, but let's break this down a little bit. So what would you like them to do after they've been affected by your good content to make their financial lives better? Like a nonprofit would just like it to be good. A profit, like what do you want them to do? What is your business KPI? What would you like them to buy from you?

6:47Oh, mostly we sell life insurance. Just like sophisticated life insurance based strategies. How much LinkedIn content do you put out a day? One post a day. What kind? Mostly video. Mostly video. A clip from the podcast? Sometimes. And other times original. It's just like a short that I've done. We have had like outside FMOs, third party FMOs doing most of it for the last couple years. and so we've mostly done what they said until more recently where I'm like I gotta own this more that part's good how has it been going slow not very well not very well I would say because it's challenging to get views on it or because you're challenged to come up with ideas to make content for I think more challenging to get views I mean like you know when I put out a short I get like Like, you know, sometimes a short as in like a YouTube short.

7:42What about LinkedIn? OK, sorry. Back to LinkedIn. Please. I would say every once in a while I'll get like a good post that has like, you know, 10 ,000 views. But for the most part, it's, you know, I'm getting like a few hundred impressions on it. And that's per day, one a day. Yes. Or you're being kind or that's what we're doing. Five a week. Five a week. We are dedicated at least to that at this point. We're understood. have you thought about where are you based? Salt Lake but we are totally virtual understood so we and the consumers that you're trying to reach can be national? Yep that's been a huge advantage for us because we started doing that 10 years ago I think a couple things if I was to join the business the first thing I would do is pitch the idea of hosting a dinner within Salt Lake running ads on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn on a 10 to 15 mile radius of our office where the video was an invitation to fill out a form to join this dinner in a private room in one of Salt Lake's nice restaurants where you would send them to a Google form to fill out who they are.

8:57What you're gonna talk about is overall entrepreneurship and business, a little bit of like Salt Lake local entrepreneur and business and Salt Lake life because that's obviously such a tight knit community I know it pretty well and for this lovely dinner we're all going to have you're going to have to bear with us we have a five minute halftime show commercial for what we do for a living but the general thing is I Christian we would like to be more part of the community and the business community and the growth of the city and the energy of everything that's going on we have a hockey team now we would like you know again I don't know like you know whether it's steak dinner whether it's alcohol no alcohol whatever the dynamics are we're going to do this nice dinner there's only 12 seats what we're just running this ad within 20 months this is literally the video we are running this ad for like minded ambitious people footnote we're also doing this for our social media content so this dinner is going to be filmed you don't need to be in it it's for my content so your face can be blurred, it can be back of your head.

10:01By the way, you can be in it and can get a nice little plug for your local business. I believe what you're doing in that scenario is a couple things. One, I think it would explode your local business. Hey everybody, I hope you're enjoying the podcast right now. Make sure you follow the podcast. That's why I'm interrupting. Let's keep going on this show but follow the podcast. It'll make my mom super happy. I think scaling, this is for everyone, I think scaling the unscalable is the move right now in a world of AI. so like a monthly dinner with 12 to 20 prospects who don't forget filled out a form that you're gonna ask the questions you wanna know answers to are you happy with your insurance provider yes okay you're not invited you know like you could you could do whatever the hell you want in that form but you will create an engine for your content my team as John may know like yeah literally yes as many of you may know if you follow me closely yesterday I did Tea with Gary V I brought it back It was a show I did a lot during COVID.

10:58I did it for two reasons. One, it's one of my best format shows. People like it the most for me because I'm providing real depth. It's what this is at some level. And two, I really believe in social media shopping and I wanted to do it on whatnot to show people that you can do it on these platforms. There's a lot of, I'll definitely get into it with them. But here's the punchline why I'm telling you that story. Because I put myself in my best position to make good content. We made a piece of content. like I made a piece of content in reaction to the question. My team clipped it yesterday. We normally go into testing.

11:33We test under different accounts how well the content does and then do it on my main channel. I felt so good about it intuitively. We ran it last night. It was the one where I ranted about like nobody gives a fuck about you. Humility's the key. Right. That video, that is the first video that wasn't tested that got over a million views in years. and the reason I think it did that because the other 50 I've done that way I thought were going to hit but this morning when I woke up I was like it's I put myself in a position to make that video right like I'm putting myself for an hour in my best spot I get most excited when I talk to a human and I'm just trying to break through to them and that gets me to a different place I think you in that setting has the chance to make better content yeah so you're gonna get local and by the way you're gonna run ads on meta and LinkedIn to the tune of about $200 in media spend because when you're in a very confined area of a 10 mile radius you don't need a lot of dollars yeah that's what I would do very cool thank you I think you'll get the right kind of content and by the way your production day is gonna be a sales pitch you see what's happening for the low low cost of like listen I don't underestimate covering 12 people dinner like I view that you know a couple like I think you're gonna win I think you get a I think it's gonna work I like this non-scalable local physical to film to then scale got it putting all of you have to put yourself in a position to make the best possible content good stuff thank you you got it yeah so I think we're here because we are growing really really fast and we want to like make sure we have the right plan.

13:20Is it all direct to consumer? Yes. Shopify? Yeah, all Shopify. And then I'd say like 75 % through Shopify, 25 % through Instagram and Facebook. Okay. Direct buying. Direct within it, right? Like you're doing it by hand or are you using shop or what's happening? Yes. Is it like DM if you want to buy and you're like kind of hand holding it? Honestly, just through the meta ads we're running, like meta will give them the option to either buy through our website or buy just in platform. Right, so the buying in platform, it's passing on to your Shopify. Yeah, exactly. And they're taking a rake. Yeah.

13:51And so we basically, just for context, like we did 250 ,000 in sales last year. And I think we're on track to do 2 million in November. Amazing. And we're growing 30 to 50 % month over month. And most of it is on just meta ad spend. Of course. And it's been really profitable too. So that's good. that means you have a product that's fit the market against the attention who's running those ads, you? yes, all me and how good do you feel about your capability in that? well like if you had a self guess because you probably don't have a lot of I have a thousand social media buyers literally in this company so I can assess like Ronnie versus Sally I'm aware that you don't have a context point but what's your gut tell you?

14:38so I'm 100 % self taught which is good yeah I think Advantage Plus ads have made me feel a lot smarter this year than in the past. So like basically all we're doing is we're testing a bunch of creatives, but we're like 100 % of our ad spend is in Advantage Plus campaigns, which has been working for us. How much organic social are you doing? Hopefully two posts a day on Instagram. Just Instagram? On TikTok, but TikTok's just not going very well, but we're still. Well, it's not going well because you look at all of this as like conversion funnels, right? Yes. So you live in CAC and LTV life and that's your rendering.

15:16Back to what I just showed you. You do know that you could go from two to eight million in sales in a year based on one organic TikTok post.

15:27So that's a good thing for everyone to hear. Like you noticed, if you follow it along of how we were just talking, where they'll eventually go is eventually the math won't work. That's what happens to everybody. That might be six million, that might be 11 million, And I don't know, right? I'd have to like look under the hood. But by the way, if they're destined to do 20 million before the math doesn't work out, people are gonna watch them and figure it out and do the same thing. And then it's gonna slow that, like the copycat thing will happen very fast. And what I was gonna say is that's kind of where we're getting to the point where when I said two million in November, I mean the month of November, we think we'll do two million.

16:05And so we think like next year we could hit 20 million. Okay, I see. That's staggering. So you're not going from$250 ,000 to$2 million in revenue. You think you're going from$250 ,000 to$20 million. Yes. So a couple things real quick for the rest of the room. This is what's happening in social media when you do it right. Just like so everybody wraps their head around it. It's that real. But keep going. Yeah. So I'm just getting kind of nervous that like, okay, we've been riding this wave all year. I feel like we were pretty early on like the Advantage Plus ads, Power Bay AI, like getting really good targeting but now I feel like we kind of have experience with a couple other small businesses where we've run them you know up to like maybe five you know three to five million in annual sales getting to this point where we're like did you come from like that angle where you like servicing other businesses and started like when you say that why did that happen so like I owned a business with my dad and my brother selling like really niche horse related products awesome and so we've grown that business it does but it'll probably do about five or six million this year but that's kind of like the biggest business we've ever been involved with so and this one just the products hitting and the nature of how social is right the addressable market's bigger just given the nature of all women are in play but then just the way women are shopping like just the reality of the business okay so basically i'm coming to like okay we could we're on track to do two million in november i think it's really realistic we'll do 20 million so let's Let's go backwards.

17:36Instead of what you're going to do in November, because I've been through that rodeo, let's talk about what you did do in August. So, like sales-wise, I think we hit close to$600 ,000. And you're anticipating by just putting more dollars into the machine because you're reinvesting what you're making, that's how you see it, right? Yes. Because for everybody, the reason, when I said this is how it works, the reason not everyone does it is if your first$100 ,000 doesn't work because you weren't good at it, then you're out. if you only had 100 ,000 or 50 ,000 or 10 ,000. These are small bits, right?

18:09If you got 10 ,000 and you go and spend 10 ,000 on social ads and you don't convert, then the game's over. On the flip side, if it does convert, you see what's happening, right? If your 10 ,000 makes you 40 ,000, you take 20 ,000, and then all of a sudden you just see what he's doing, he's stacking. Got it? But this is why I want to talk about, this is why I wrote the book. This is why I'm yelling from the loudest way I can that organic social is important when people don't think it's important because they're in one of two places. One, they're advanced and paid. And so like, why guess? He's just fucking running it, right?

18:44You can see, think about being at 600 ,000 in August and sitting here and having confidence and I believe him, by the way, that he's gonna do 2 million in November. That's just like, okay, I know what works. But then things change too. And so that's why creative is the whole variable. The targeting's there. The people are on social. keep going so I guess my question is like going into next year and thinking like okay we could take this business to 20 million dollars it's just so open-ended I feel dumb almost asking it but like how would you be thinking about yeah I don't think it's dumb I think you're first of all you need to reconcile something you're in the sales business not in the brand and marketing business right notice what's happening it's all math so he's selling so the biggest fear I have brother Lexi is are you building a brand because if you're not you're gonna get copied out somebody's gonna buy something close enough from China and start pounding against your own the same audience for half the price we see it happening already that's right because people are watching everything got it so my number one recommendation in the way I hear everything is don't worry about 20 or 30 or 18 worry that you're in trouble unless you build a brand.

20:02Do you know how many people have social media agencies and want to be Gary Vee? Half the people on social media. But the brand is what allows me, I gotta back it up by being good and I gotta show up in this room and bring, but it's all brand. Everything is a commodity besides brand. Everything. So by far what's obvious to me is brand, brand, brand. What does that mean? You know, first off, I think the biggest asset you have is Lexi and her sister. So, like, to me, that's not replicatable. There's only, like, what's your sister's name? T 'Kel. T 'Kel and Lexi or T 'Kel and Lexi. There could be other sisters doing, like, but, like, they're them.

20:43You know, I don't know you like that, Lex, but if you and T 'Kel are willing to go out in front, I think that is a very important part of the next step. You know, joint podcast, original content, showing them in the field. like you're gonna have what's the name of the brand? O 'Clem. O 'Clementine. O 'Clementine. You've got to make people give a fuck about that. That. Like jingle. Like this is some madman shit. Like what's the like O 'Clementine. Like there's like a song you should make. I'm being serious. Like I think you should make a jingle and that jingle should be an organic post and maybe the first three seconds of every video or at the end of every video the jingle should play.

21:23You know 1-877-CAR for kids. Like if you're from the Jersey, New York area like PC Richards, The Whistle. Like everything is a commodity except brand. So I think the biggest thing that's obvious to me is for you to go all in on organic and all in on ownable shit. But like I would give up a lot of money. If I ran the business, I would give up, instead of pouring, like what you're just gonna do is pouring it back in, pouring it back in. I would take some of that money and bring it to zero. I would level out your CAC. I'd pay more I'd take 100k of it to be awesome at organic to be awesome at brand building mostly investing that in like basically a team to help us yes do more that's right external or internal building at the best cost association against the results to get as many views organically with a complete lens on brand the other thing you're going to fall in love with and as great as the AI is for meta it's the same AI that gets an organic posts to a lot of views and then that one, that one on organic will outperform the AI generated testing.

22:33So there's double benefit from organic social. The organic ad, the organic post that gets 3 million views when you bring it back and slightly tweak it to make it a conversion ad. So it's just a video of the two gals walking down the street talking about something and just hit. You taking that video back and at the bottom put, you know, maybe they just tell a story about their I'm literally making shit up right now. Their pet dog, Carol, in the video. It gets 14 million views, 4 million. Now you run it again as an ad, but at the bottom, you take the bottom of the video and you put, at checkout, put code Carol to get free shipping because you know it's gonna emotionally hit.

23:14It may end up being your best cack ad. The thing that fucks up all the mathematicians in the game that I play is when I get an organic thing going viral and I convert it into performance, it outperforms all their best shit and they're like how the fuck did this happen? Because it's the fucking creative. Got it? Totally. Thank you. Napoleon Hill. Hey Gary. Hi. So Matt Higgins was the one who connected us. He's coaching me. He said that we're sitting on a very valuable asset having the rights to think and grow rich and Napoleon Hill. the first question I have is so we have the rights to use the name, the material, the content everything he's ever created, Napoleon Hill should we be going with Think and Grow Rich or Napoleon Hill?

24:07Both. Both. And. Both and. Okay. And. So much of the world we live in now life is about this but life business is about distribution. and we used to have to make choices because the internet and social didn't exist so like if you were going to open up stores in 1987 you had to pick one because it's fucking expensive to open up duplicate stores but when you're talking about what I'm talking about which is building brand in a modern social world the answer is ant because some people would like it goes to cohorts some people would resonate with Napoleon Hill some people would resonate with Thinker Rich plus if you go Napoleon's route you have unlimited upside.

24:52Do you have the rights to his image? Is it name, image, and language? His everything. Yeah, I mean, his is much bigger upside. Napoleon in AI form should be competing with me right now. And has a lot of leverage against me. It's all historic. Like, I think this will play out. Like, if you own the, so if you're sitting on the IP, you need to probably stand him up. So something a little far-fetched that I want everybody to hear is virtual influencers. One of the biggest conversations of the next decade is going to be influencers that aren't real people that you all own. Now they're sitting with gold.

25:32They're owning something that's real. You're gonna have to make up your third sister. That's right. Or the dog. Should that be the voice? That was our question too because we have the voice tone of like. You have his voice on record, right? No, I meant like the voice of our brand. Yeah, I mean, you're going to find with me in the audience, like, voice and tone become, it's subjective. Let me, like, okay, what's, I mean, I watch people on my team that have been with me for 10 years trying to capture my voice and send me stuff and I'm like, I would never say that. Yeah. So, like, you have to remember voice and tone, like brand talk.

26:08The reason I've always pushed against brand talk is it's subjective. Like, what's a brief? I'm going to give you a brief. Oh, the brief is bad. A brief is a piece of paper with words on it and how you interpret it. Like you know what else is words on a piece of paper? The Constitution. I don't know if you've heard, half of America sees it one way, the other half sees it another way. So you know, voice and tone is subjective. You four ladies leave and four other people come in and they're gonna judge if it's on voice or on tone. Got it? You need to really reconcile that truth. okay so so as we we bring Napoleon back whether it's AI virtual that's what I would do if I was in this seat I would bring him fully back like actually he's the one like actually in a year I just want like and by the way it looks like he's alive I don't know if you guys have seen the AI yes we have we have created characters we talked to him on the phone we asked him a question we asked him a question he talked to me yesterday okay so now you know Think and Grow Rich is a heavy read and it's been thanked by many entrepreneurs so what we want to do is we want to launch an easier read called Think and Grow Rich 10 Minutes a Day.

27:23Okay. Make it more sexy more modern for younger crowd. What would you do with this?

27:32Meaning how would I get people to know about it? Yes. By making unlimited social media organic creative across the seven platforms that matter to society. To me, basically, let me take a step back that might help all of you. I believe your phone is the television and I believe that Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest to some degree are the seven channels on the platform. Just like your great-grandparents had six channels, three channels, you know, I'm 48, we were pretty poor so I was in the 13-channel world pre-cable. Some of you can stick around that and remember it.

28:12Those seven platforms, those six platforms, are the channels on the television. Unlike the way Hollywood worked, everybody here is allowed to make a show on the channels. If you were trying to be in everyone's home in 1984 or 1963 or 1949, and you could, why wouldn't you have a show on every channel? this channel choosing that so many of you are doing is that's a strategic nightmare to me not the tone of voice the not making content on all these platforms to not make content on linkedin youtube youtube shorts facebook instagram tiktok snapchat spotlight which acts like Instagram and I mean for you Snapchat spotlight could be the golden goose because no one's fucking there no one's even thinking about it you know who is there?

29:11a fuck load of 15 to 30 year olds so to not make content on every one of them just choosing the cliche Instagram and TikTok only Facebook's the most fertile opportunity how much damage do you guys do on Facebook? Facebook Yeah, I'd say of our meta ads, probably like 75 % plus is going through Facebook. Say it nice and slow for everyone in the back. 75 % of our ad spend is going to purchases through Facebook. And what he knows that I know, because we're in it, is I'm selling to 20 and 30 year olds on Facebook, not Facebook. book so you know i would say the strategy you need to do is bring him to life that book to life the mini 10 minute version book to life all of them to life on all six platforms we've never done an ad you don't need to do an ad you can do an ad just stay creative yeah organic and paid both work i i believe we're now in a world where you go organic first and when things do well then you go paid.

30:19That was done in platform for ad people before. Now, that nuance I showed him to ad is another element that affects the thing that they really need to worry about which is brand. You start with brand. You start with juice that none of us started with. You're sitting on brand. How do, do you have a nice question? To answer where you're about to go, you have to be, so I just told you that you should play basketball. Just so everybody knows, I just told everybody here you should become a professional basketball player. Why did I do that? Because out of all the major sports in the world, the way the new collective bargaining agreement for the NBA is and how big the media rights are, basketball only has 12 to 15 players.

30:58But the players are gonna get 50 % of all that money. So the money is so extreme, but unlike football where there's 53 players and you divide by 53, in basketball you divide by 12. So you're gonna hear from your buddies that are either you're into basketball or you're gonna hear from your buddies in basketball, I can't believe this player just got$400 million and they're not even good. And you're like, how is that possible? That's how. I just told you to be a basketball player. I've given you the answer to how everything in society is working. Those six platforms dictate everything. The presidential election, the temperament of our society, everything that is popular, what is famous, what sells.