THE Strategy for Social Media Success in 2025

0:00This is the GaryVee Audio Experience.

0:30Yeah, well, I'm just launching a project that is powered by AI for hotels and resorts. I just wanted to know what's your opinion on where is the best way to spend my ads on? I think you've got to live on LinkedIn. Anything that is B2B is LinkedIn. And so not only should you do organic content on LinkedIn and run ads against employees of the organizations you're trying to work with on LinkedIn, but even cold outreach, a respectful, strategic, smart message on LinkedIn as a LinkedIn message, connecting with people and then messaging them, I think is a very realistic thing because the reality is all you need is three or four or five hotels to say yes and then you've got the momentum of them using it to get your next clients.

1:18In fact, all you need is one yes. And so for me, it's disproportionately LinkedIn and it's also Google, meaning searching resorts executive crew on Google finding out who the decision maker is in each hotel group and then sending them an email not just a LinkedIn message so I think it's organic content about why hotel groups should be using chat assistants and bots and it's ads against the content that does well organically on LinkedIn and then it is messaging and phone calls it might even be letters it might might even be a clever package in the mail. When you're doing business development, it's not just marketing, it's sales.

2:04So for example, if I knew all 25 individuals at the 25 different hotels that make the decision that I'm looking for, I may send them a book and a bottle of wine in a package, a book around AI and a bottle of wine and a handwritten note that says, hey Dominic, make sure you pop this nice Rioja and really dig into this book because after you're done, you're gonna realize you need to work with my company. Again, only one of those 25 people that get that package have to say yes for you to get your first customer. That then becomes your leverage to get your second customer. Okay, cool. And what type of content would you produce on LinkedIn?

2:45I would produce content that look like why every hotel group needs an AI bot and then go into it. Three things hotel groups or hotels or resorts are missing out on by not having an AI bot, right? So you title it to get them intrigued or understanding, and then the quality of the video of you talking about why becomes the punchline. Okay. All right, my friend? Great. Good luck. Yo, man, so I'm an electrotronic artist releasing music, man. You haven't had an artist on in a while, so I really wanted to come on here. I've been making music for like 10 years now. I've been following you for about the same amount of time.

3:24I started a new artist project this year and just been going really hard on content and everything with music. And I was just wondering what your strategy would be for 2025 on socials for artists and how you would manage the music promotion to the, I guess, personality driven content with music being the bottom of the funnel and trying to build a community around that. Let me get to the second part because I understood your question there. I think most artists and most business people in general are too one-dimensional with their content. They're like, I want to be about music and the only content they make is music.

4:00Meanwhile, what people really want is they want to know people. A lot of people, right now I'm watching people buy packs of trading cards right now on the show and the reason some of them are buying it is not because necessarily they collect Pokemon or comic books or into Star Wars or anime. Like the things that my world's about, some of them are buying it just because they want to support me. And why do they want to support me? maybe because they like the New York Jets like I do or maybe they're into wine like I do or maybe they like the business advice or the garage sale videos. So what you need to do is go out and make people fall in love with you and your music, not or your music.

4:38You might make a video around fishing or around the fact that you love sake and eat sushi in good restaurants in Sydney and that might be the one video that most explodes but then in your profile they're like, wait a minute, you may get four million views on a video around sushi, but then 10 ,000 of those people happen to be into Deep House or ADM or things of that nature, then they realize, they look at your profile and realize you're that. Chat, how many of you discovered me through content that wasn't business, but you've stayed because you like the business content? You saw the Blueberry video, you saw me talking to someone.

5:14Look at all the me's in here, Patrick. Almost everybody discovered me. That's crazy, yeah. I think what you need to focus on is, yes, you should be putting out unlimited, to the most of your ability, music content. You working on music, you putting out music quotes, you talking about your music, but you have to put out content about your life. As much as you can, because you never know what creative, what people are not taking advantage of is how powerful the algorithms are. Everybody wants their grid to look right. They're trying to posture and look cool. They're insecure if something only gets seven views when they're accustomed to getting 500 views without realizing that them not putting out the kind of content that gets seven views is stopping them from getting something that gets seven million views.

6:03And that's I think the opposite for me right now. I'm putting out too much music and not enough vlog stuff. Correct. Yeah, my original thing was like, I don't want people to follow me for not music and then they don't listen to my music. but yeah, that makes so much sense. Patrick, I think you're thinking about it wrong, brother. Deciding, having an ideology on how people fall in love with you so that they listen to your music is the wrong strategy. If I told you, it's very simple. Let me ask you a simple question. If I said to you, you're gonna put out a video about you eating lobster and you hating to dump lobster into butter, that that's the wrong way to eat lobster because you and your friends are laughing and you made a video and you posted it.

6:47And that video gets 11 million views on TikTok. And of those 11 million people, that gets 200 ,000 Spotify listens because you have the URL to your latest project in your TikTok. Would you be upset about those 200 ,000 listens? No, you're so right. You're so right. Not be upset about it, you know? And I think like the people that will stay will stay. That's all I got, my brother. Too many people are bringing the old ideologies of marketing and brand building to a new world. The world is different. So true, man. So true. Good luck, brother. Love you. I don't know if you remember, but I was on Tea with Gary Vee before.

7:33I actually live in Oklahoma now. I used to live in Portland, Oregon. But yeah. I do recall. It's great to see you again. It's been a few years. It has. So I've kind of switched directions a little bit over the years. I used to be heavy into my art. But one thing I kept coming back to is I'm really passionate about business and trying to learn as much as I can about building better businesses. And obviously, I learned a lot from you. So I wanted to ask you, what are three tactical pieces of advice that you could give me to try to help me from starting from scratch in what kind of seems like an oversaturated market at times.

8:17Yeah, a couple things. First of all, let's break this down. There is no such thing as an oversaturated market. People really talk about that a lot because they're spending, the number one thing when it comes to business is not letting yourself pay any attention to the competitive landscape. You need to keep an eye on it to be knowledgeable to make sure you're not off kilter but way too many people use the term oversaturated market because they're worried about other people that are doing the same thing because they're in scarcity mindset they don't realize that i mean think about how many restaurants there are think about how many graphic designers there are think about do you know how many people do what i do for a living to talk about marketing and do content and like there there is no such thing as oversaturation the reality is is you need to focus on the value proposition that you're giving to the end consumer so if nothing else out of this call please promise me that you don't think about that stuff because that really does fuck people up it really does like worrying about somebody else who if you're like oh i see somebody else doing this too or they caught my favorite one they copied me there's no copying there's execution i promise whatever the fuck anyone who's watching right now thinks somebody copied them on something, you copied someone else.

9:31So I don't need that. Everyone's different. Yeah. So what are you trying to do? Well, I'm trying to help people to build their businesses and I also want to get into buying businesses and making them better. So let me ask you a question. Why would somebody listen to you or pay you to build their business? Have you ever built a business? Well, I've been working on businesses for a long time. I've tried to help other people better their businesses. I've done a lot of - That's not the question. In a world where there's so many people that are trying to sell people on helping them build a business, you can imagine with a world that has options, they're going to be more likely to pick someone that has actually built businesses to help them build a business than someone who hasn't, right?

10:21What would you tell someone who's just starting out? I mean, how would I get that? Because I mean, right now I've been just trying to help people for free, I just want to try to provide value where I can. That I love. I love that you're giving away free advice, that's good. I also think you should be giving away free advice in the form of content on social media, exactly what I do. Right, literally the single reason we're on right now together on this is because I want more people that are watching right now or that will see this clip to do social media live shopping next year because i think live shopping is going to be a monster a monster right and so i i highly recommend you putting out content on all platforms around your business advice the biggest thing that anybody who starts a business has to figure out is is it a viable option for them do you feel like you can build a business where you get paid consulting to help people build other businesses.

11:24And I think I want to make sure that you have that challenging conversation with yourself. I'm not trying to talk you out of it. Really, I'm not. I'm trying to talk you into what I know the consumer is thinking about it when they get the proposition from you. Are you having a tough time even getting people to take the free consulting? I've gotten a few people. I've been trying to do lives every day. I've been going heavy on Instagram, posting a lot, posting on TikTok. What about on LinkedIn? I post on LinkedIn all the time. Good. And I've gotten a lot of messages and impressions from people. So that seems to be picking up, which has been really good.

12:01I just want to know that I'm doing it in the best way possible to try to build this up in the right way. Cause I don't want to kind of steer in the wrong direction. Well, what's the wrong direction? What do you mean by that? Well, I just, I want people to understand that I'm just genuinely trying to help and I'm not trying to be like, you know, sales mini or like I just want to take their money or anything like that. Well then, then just genuinely help. Yeah. Like, that is not something that you should be worried about because if you're not genuinely doing the wrong thing, then that's not what people long-term will believe.

12:44Too many people live their life based on short term judgment. Too many people live their life on short term judgment. A lot of people can have, almost everybody in the world has first impressions that end up being wrong. There's people that fucking married somebody and they're happily married right now that they had a wrong first impression about. You're on live for four hours. You've given three hours and 52 minutes of your best advice and your energy. and then you spend two minutes asking people to email you if they'd like to work with your services. If somebody just tuned in in that moment and all they heard from you was selling even though you've been giving, you've been jabbing for four hours and now you've given one right hook but that's the only thing that they've heard then that's gonna be their impression potentially but if you do it every day eventually they're gonna realize that that's not what you're doing.

13:38so do not over worry about people's first impressions worry about the truth right and as far as like when I make content because some people when I talk with them they don't want to be recorded or things like that how would I go like should I just do content for just me um and not record our conversations I think you should ask people for the audio rights you don't have to show their face but the audio rights I think most people will be okay with if it's generic if it's generic obviously if they're like using the name of their company and they don't want it so I think you need to be a little more aggressive on the ask right but you also can replicate what I'm doing right now you can do a live Q &A show and let people on and be like if you have a question come on so again I think that there's a lot of ways to hack it what I'm sensing from you and what I want to instill in you is you can persevere through anything there's patience to this but you really are one post away one post away from everything you want to happen starting to happen right I just keep hammering it keep hammering it that's what I've been trying to do keep hammering it how long have you been doing it aggressively with value and social I've been doing it aggressively for the last three months now, I want to say.

15:05I did content for two years before anybody gave a shit. Two years every day. Yeah.

15:13Got it? All right. Good. You're just starting. Good luck. Love you. Next question. Hi, what's your name? What's up, Gary? Good to see you. Good to see you as well. So honored to be here. My name is Maya Monet. I am a multimedia business owner based out of Florida. up. And I'm also an educator. So I see myself pivoting a lot to educating my audience. So I want to know how could I continuously educate my audience, but still build a brand that is going to monetize in the long run. By realizing giving away all your best advice for free actually leads to business, not the reverse. Awesome. Okay. And when - Baby, listen to me.

15:54Listen to me. this is the number one thing that people have twisted never listen to somebody who says don't give away that shit for free on social you have to sell it they don't know what the fuck they're talking about yeah I promise you understand yeah there's people that sell business advice who've only made their money by selling advice to others that are trying to build a business but have never built the business in their life with audience. My entire career has only built business with audience. Selling wine, selling books, selling services. Like, do not listen to people who've never done it.

16:38Anybody who tells you, the answer to your question is give away your best advice every day for free on the internet, on the seven social networks that exist. Awesome. When it comes to, do, do, do, do, do, said that one, And how do I, I guess you could say leverage whatnot. So got on and I'm like, man, this is amazing. How can I leverage that, but still kind of stay true to my brand or do I create two separate avenues? What would you recommend? Do you feel like you can sell on live? I definitely can. I just don't know. I have like a whole bunch of like random household gadgets that we kind of collect and unopened boxes.

17:19So I'm just like - Sell them. Okay. Yeah. You going on whatnot and selling random shit like it's a garage sale isn't gonna fuck you up on your other thing. I literally go garage selling and millions of people see it. I literally do that. And then companies pay my company tens of millions of dollars in consulting fees. They're not thrown off because I'm buying a fucking stuffed animal for a dollar and selling it for three or buying a fucking mug, mug life, and then selling it for a dollar after buying it for a quarter. It's not fucking up my game. You're not gonna get fucked up because you're popping off on whatnot, selling random ass shit, and then people won't take you serious somewhere else.

17:56In fact, they're going to like you more because you're a regular person. It's actually going to be more attractive, not the reverse. Got you. Awesome. Got it. Yeah, appreciate it. Fam, how are you? Hi, Ari. How are you doing? Good, my friend. How are things? I'm good. I'm really excited. Where do you live? So I'm from Vietnam originally, but I'm here in Amagansi, so next to East Hampton, Long Island. Amazing. From the Philippines to the Hamptons, bougie fucking upgrade. Vietnam. Oh, Vietnam. Excuse me. From Vietnam to the fucking hamp. I like the bougie fucking execution, my guy. And it's actually all because of you.

18:36So basically, I live in like a strict Asian culture. And so like photography art is not a thing in my family. But like here listen to videos. And so when I have an internship here in the hamptons i'm like pursuing my career as a staffer in here in new york city as well so like a big time for you and congratulations yes i think i go and you have some advice so i just briefly in my situation right now so because that i also like got featured in like with a miss national tv because i run do a fundraiser in times where i got people i give people free photos and so they can donate for my country. I love that.

19:15Yes. And my parents really proud of that, so hopefully. And then so now like in the Vietnamese community, I like people like know who I am, like I'm a photographer, but like in New York or New York City, like where's my real target is they're not. So because of that, I also like post like contents about like making one million people days. Basically, I go out the street and take photos of people and then I print them out and get it for them. And so like my question is like now if you were in my position as like a new Vietnamese photographer in New York City, what you will do to like grow business and like get clients?

19:57At this moment, I get like three to four clients with my rate like$200 per hour. So should I continue the like giving the value content of like free photos or like starting to and ask to find customers. Understood. So, good news. I often daydream, what would I do if I was a Vietnamese photographer that was new to America? I think about that a lot. So I'm very prepared for this question. Really? No, not really. But thank you for believing me. So, look, I think there's a lot to go with here. One, what you're doing is going to continue to work. one thing that a lot of people don't realize is if they post photography on social networks sometimes posting it as a one second video instead of as a picture is gonna allow that content to reach new people that the picture before hasn't reached because of how the algorithms work.

20:57Do you understand? So when you're posting content on social and you're doing these photos are you posting it as a photo or as a video? So I post as a reel, as like a 30 second reels on like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. Yeah, understood. So I want you to do a bunch of different mixes. I want you to do that, but I want you to sometimes post photos. Sometimes I want you to post a one second video of the photo. Sometimes I want you to turn the camera and just talk to the camera while you're in Times Square and talk about your struggles or your good, you know, sometimes it's a good day, sometimes it's a bad day.

21:38So I want you to make content that lets people into your journey because content is the gateway drug to opportunity. So what would I do if I were you? I would take more photos, I would do more of it, and I would put out more social media content. Okay, and then like, I also like heard of you doing some of the tactics of fighting like KOLs and it's necessary to think it's work as well. Yeah, I always think it's a good idea to DM New York KOLs and see if they wanna meet you in Times Square for a free photo. You're gonna get 100 people that will never respond, but one person one day might wanna give you a chance, and that one photo, that one social media post might be meaningful to you.

22:21Oh, okay, and then now the second is like, like which platforms should I focus on? because I post on a lot of platforms. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter X, and YouTube Shorts for sure. You've got to be on all those for what you do. And then slightly tweak them a little bit different on every platform. Different copies, slight tweaks. Try little different tweaks. So yes, same video can go everywhere, but slightly little different tweaks, different copy to support it. Knowing your audience is different on every platform. On YouTube, you have to title it different, more for search because YouTube shorts is, do you have day trading attention?

23:01I haven't read that, but I will buy it today. You don't need to buy a team. Can you DM him and get his address in the Hamptons and send him a copy of day trading attention? Got it? Got it? Got it? All right, Tuan, I'll send you one, okay, buddy? Okay, thank you so much. What's your name, my man? Let's start with that. Brett. Brett B. Brett. From Milwaukee. Pleasure, bro. How are things? Great, great. I am a - Brett, can I ask you a question? Yeah. Why do the Milwaukee Bucks suck so bad? I have no comment on that. I may not survive if I say my opinion. Respect. All right, keep it going, bro. Sports is dangerous, man.

23:38Anyways, so I'm moving out of Milwaukee. I'm out like a city that's a little bit west of it. I'm transitioning from like a streetwear, fashion startup, idea, clothing brand. I'm actually going into my real passion, which is computers, technology, and like retro video games, consoles, modding hardware. I mean, if you look at my apartment, I look like the Unabomber was here, but these are all computer projects. I'm asking, how do you start a brand new Instagram account with like 50 followers when you have your main private fashion whatever account that you're not really trying to do anymore with like 2K people on there?

24:13And they have a lot of opinions, a lot of family members, a lot of friends on there. How do you kind of break away from your mental kind of like built up for that is associated with this online identity when that's not really like who I fully was in real life, to be honest with you? Do you want to be 90 and regret your whole life because your fucking auntie didn't like you being a computer nerd? No. Okay, so what would you like me to say to you? No, that's that's the obvious point. But I'm saying. Why can't the obvious point be the fucking point? Because starting over is hard for people, I think.

24:48Okay, so then don't start over and hate fucking life. Yeah, it's the, yeah, you're right, yeah. Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah. You know what I mean? Like, where are we going with this? Like, I understand why this is a fuck up. It's what fucks up everyone. I understand what's fucking you up. It's the fucking story of my life over the last 10 years trying to get all of you to not worry about it. I understand why your self-esteem or identity is wrapped up into that prior life and people's opinions carry weight. You're a young dude. You're living life. You might respect them. You might love them. They might be your hero.

25:28That makes sense to me. But to answer your question on what do you do, you just do. You just start over. The good news is you walked into the best time to start over. Social media has changed so much. It doesn't matter if you have 2K followers anymore. Your first fucking modded out contra fucking NES game video might get more views than fucking anything you've ever done in streetwear because it's about the individual piece of content now, not how many followers you have. So the good news is that's not a problem. The problem is what's holding you back is insecurity and a lack of self-esteem to say, fuck all of them, I'm going.

26:12Yep, yep. And I've been working through that basically over the course of a year. I just want to take a step back a little bit and speak on it. What kind of made me realize this was it took an online friend that's into the same kind of video game, building computer stuff. I build computers with used parts. Facebook Marketplace, I'm always on there. There's too many bots on my account trying to sell me graphics cards that don't exist. But my friend passed away from an overdose, rest his soul. But my mom passed away the same day, and this was a year ago. And it kind of took like that just brutal shock of, you know, a horrible family loss to really kind of re-look at my life.

26:48Like, am I really doing something that is going to even work for me? Is this even what I wanted? And kind of once I was able to realize that it's not necessarily that this isn't me. I love this music. I love clothes. That's my hobby. I always know that the computers were basically what I wanted to do. It's just I was ashamed of being a nerd as a kid so much. I was short. I was bad at sports. And now that I've made probably five or six full computer builds, roughly approximately$1 ,000 paid by the customer, everyone's been satisfied so far, and anyone who hasn't been has been refunded. So it's just really weird, like, stepping into a new market that I've never really experienced or, like, felt such a fast growth.

27:30I mean, it's only been two months that this account has been up, man. It's pretty cool. I just want to hear your perspective on changing lanes. My perspective on changing lanes is everybody should be doing it all the time if they're not happy. My perspective on everything that just came out of your mouth is a couple of things. First of all, you're a great fucking kid. And I'm really sorry that you had to deal with that loss a year ago. That's a lot to deal with. Number two, I appreciate your humility and transparency on like your height, your school grades. Like I love you for that. I also want to remind you that you got lucky.

28:08Unlike me, I turned 49 in a week. When I was growing up, computer kids were actually nerds. Like actually. You're growing up. Yeah, they were bullied. Yeah, you're actually growing up in an era where computer nerd culture is cool culture. That's so weird to me. It was never like that. And to my cousins, they're like, why is this like this? And I'm like playing Blackland Minecraft when I'm nine years old and they're outside playing football still. And it's just like, I mean, I just knew it was my thing. I just didn't know it was okay to say it yet, you know? Brother, I promise you, it's more than okay.