The 3-Second Rule to Captivate Audiences

0:00You're listening to The Vault Unlocked, where the real secrets of success are revealed. Every episode, one founder, one confession, one strategy that created income scale and unstoppable growth. Forget the hype. This is unlocking the code they swore they would never release. The playbook is revealed. The vault is unlocked. And we are back. We are here with Keith. And I'm excited because Keith and his company, somehow, I have no idea how he even got here, but they created the largest TikTok dance-off at sea. Welcome to the episode, Keith. Yeah, thank you for having me. And I'm excited to share my story.

0:39Oh, I'm excited. Just for those that don't know who you are, kind of what you do, in a short kind of nutshell, kind of tell us, what is it you do? Yeah, so I run one of the largest social media agencies in the nation. We help some of the world's greatest brands with their social strategy, content production, and like you said earlier, which we'll get into the details of, producing things like the largest TikTok dance at sea. So we're a social media agency. we help brands with their social media strategy. And where did that come from? Before you were the largest social media agency working with some of the top brands, who was Keith before that?

1:14Tell us a little bit about that story. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I've always been an entrepreneur. So that's really, I don't know anything besides business and I've always done business. But yeah, one day because I was in marketing before socially in one of my friends reached out, He has a couple of restaurants and he said, Hey, Keith, can you run my marketing for me? And I said, yeah, absolutely. Let's do it. And then we started running their marketing. It was one restaurant. Now they have 16. Started in college and now we're a team of 50 full-time people. So it's grown a lot in the past 14 years.

1:48Wow. There's a lot to unpack there. We're probably going to come back there, but I'm really excited because I really want to hear. How did you, like, you know, first and foremost, running a digital agency for some of the top businesses, you know, in the country is a huge, you know, huge honor. How did you get to that level? How did it get to the point where you get in rooms with those types of people and start having those conversations? Yeah. I mean, it didn't happen overnight, but, you know, the cliche answer is a lot of hustle, but it's the truth, right? Like trying to invest every additional dollar we have into our marketing, taking as low as a salary that I can get so we can put more money into marketing.

2:27And then over time, just stacking and stacking and stacking. And then finally, you know, 10 years later, SEO starts to pay off. So it's literally just hustle, hustle, stack, pay myself as little as possible so we can move that money into marketing, trying to increase marketing budgets over time. And now a lot of people in the industry know the socially in name because we sponsor events, we host events, we have a much larger marketing budget. But yeah, man, it was like double tripling down on marketing and trying to find every dollar we can put so people know who we are. And we at least get an app back.

2:59The hustle, the everyday hustle that most people won't do. I love it. So that hustle leads to now you're in a room. How do we get to you being in our room to the idea of let's get the biggest TikTok dance at sea. Tell us. Yeah. So I can't, I can't claim credit for that idea. That was our creative director, our art director, and then the entirety of the account that the team on the account. Um, but we've been working with carnival for a couple of years now. And, you know, we wanted to do something drastic. Uh, the TikTok award show was coming up. So we were like, Hey, what can we submit? That's like going to blow it out of the water.

3:35And the team came up with the largest TikTok dance at sea. It was a huge coordination, as you can imagine. There's guests on the ships. There's seven different ships that we have to coordinate at the same time. So a lot of coordination, a lot of effort from both teams, Carnival team, my team. How did that, I mean, I can only imagine, but let's, you know, just high level a little bit. How did you even get Carnival to buy in, to bring seven, not one, not two, not three, seven. And I'm going to assume some of their largest ships all in the same, I'm going to say the same area in the middle of the ocean.

4:14I'm just thinking that's also a massive liability. Huge liability. And like I said, a big effort on everyone's side, not just the marketing team, but also legal, also the ship captains, also the staff who we had to let know. They had to also learned quote unquote the dance that was happening so a lot of coordination across the board but how do we get to that point i would say we pitched well over like 20 25 different ideas like big campaign ideas like this one uh and then we ended up landing on this one so i mean there was other like really grand novel ideas that would have taken equally if not more effort to pull off from a production standpoint but were you did you get to go on one of those ships where you get to be there live or i wasn't there live but a bunch of our team members were there yeah so I'm sure they told you.

5:01I just want to understand, what did it look like? What did it see? Seven ships coming together in the middle of the ocean and then getting everybody onto the same. It's fascinating. So big Jumbotron turns on at the same time. The model that we hired to do the dance to teach everyone on the ship comes on. Everyone's lively. All of the staff, the people who are working on the ship, they're excited. And then the tutorial comes on and everyone's like, what's going on here and you can kind of see it in the video the final video we produce people like confuse what's happening and then the explanation happens and everyone gets into it and then it turns into a big party and then and then yeah i'm not a huge party i mean that'd be a fun party for sure i and then i'm assuming you just shot up the drones up there and just got it that's right and we had people on the ship so we had videographers across all of the ships we had people who were going live during the event so it was a huge production effort a lot of people on all seven ships.

6:00And did it turn into like one awesome video posted on TikTok or like can people see this? Yep. People saw it. It was one post video. There was multiple times where we were going live. There were stories involved. I mean, it was a whole campaign. So leading up to the event, the people who were guests on the ship, they knew it was going to happen. It was part of their email campaign. Like, hey, welcome aboard. So it was a whole campaign. And, um, yeah, there was one final production at the end of it. That's awesome. That's, that's, I mean, that, that, that seems like a fun time. So there's a lot of things that get to that.

6:33Right. And, uh, you know, going back to what you're saying is working, you know, as a college kid. Yeah. Do you know, do marketing? Yep. I do marketing. Yeah. Do you do sales? Yep. I do sales. Whatever it is, you figure it out. You turn it into, I think you said eight, eight different restaurants. Um, yeah, now he has 16. Now he's 16 restaurants. Yeah. And, you know, he continued all the way from back to college to now doing mass production that see what is there's that one thing that you see that worked or the one, you know, the aha moment or they just the secret code. Was there anything in when you look back that really sticks out for you there?

7:13A hundred percent. So, I mean, there's really two things. One is the fact that we have doubled down on organic social, right? Organic social for any business owner listening is where it is right now. That's what's happening and what's working. And then truly what we did, Unique, was hire really good people. We have a team of 50 full-time people. They all live and breathe social media. They're all constantly learning actively, not forcefully. So, I mean, the biggest difference, like even the idea of the largest TikTok dance at sea, we did Samsung New Business Week. I mean, we do a lot is because of the ideas of the people that we employ.

7:51So like two things we did really well, organic social and hire the best people in social media. And have a passion, have a true passion for social media. 100%. You got a lot of social media. Let's start there. Let's talk into something I think is really important. And you just said it is organic. Organic social. So where do you see organic social? Where is organic social today? Why is it so important today? And where do you see it going as an expert into the future? Yeah, so organic social is just going to get bigger. And when I say bigger, there's going to be more eyeballs that come onto the platforms, right?

8:23Naturally, platforms are just growing. A lot shifted in the past two years, right? So organic social was dead. Now it's not dead. You see less content of people that you actually follow now. So organic social is growing. And the way to win at organic social is the more at bats that you get, right? Like I like to call it the more at bats, AKA the more that you're able to post, the more opportunity you have for the algorithm to show you love. You know, and it now is the best time, right? Like you could have a million followers and I could have a thousand followers. My post could still potentially get more views than yours because of what's happening within the algorithm.

9:04So, okay. So let's talk about what is going on with the algorithms today. Because the algorithms are always changing, constantly changing. Always changing. Yeah. So they're transferred to an interest-based media, right? So social media equals I follow you. You try to get as many followers as possible. And then you hope that your followers see the content. Now it has switched to interest-based. So I don't always see my followers' content like the people I follow. I see content that I'm interested in, or at least the algorithm thinks I'm interested in. Yeah. Okay. So I. I got that. That's let's talk about that because that's that's important even for the one thing there is.

9:43So before the idea was I would go on and I would follow people on social media. And then when I would show up on my feed, it would be all the people that I follow. That's right. Today, it's change and I'm going and I'm going on my feed. And I've noticed that because I'm like, there's so many people that I don't follow that keep showing up on my feed. And it's because it's based off my interests. Yeah. And we even believe in the near future, there's going to be two feeds. One will be of your followers and then one will be of the interest that you have for discovery. So if you're a business owner, you know, and I know a lot of business owners are scared to even go on to social.

10:24I would even say some of them might not even know what organic is. They're going, what's different between organic and is there another one? How many types of social are there? A bunch of types, but there's organic, there's paid, there's influencers. Influencers kind of falls in the realm of paid. But organic is where it's at in terms of it's low effort. It's not going to cost you any money outside of your time to create the content. And maybe if you have like zero skills, you'll have to hire a producer or someone. But organic is the easiest lift. It's the lowest hanging fruit. And to answer your question directly, there's a bunch of other platforms, a bunch of other types of social media influencers like that.

11:03Like I said, going live is another one. So yeah. In terms of organic, does it matter if the production value is high or just the content is - We prefer low production actually. That's another misconception people have is like, hey, if I'm going to be on social, the quality of content has to be like really highly done. Where we've actually seen the numbers show low-fi production is what works, right? Like get in front of an iPhone, get in front of a camera, and just start talking. Because it's more relatable. It's more relatable. It feels real. And it feels more real. I can see that. And if there was business owners sitting there thinking like, oh, man, like the social content, organic social, what would you say to them knowing what you know, knowing the power of social?

11:46What would you say to them sitting there saying it's time to to open up? Like, let's get going. Yeah. So if you decide that it's time to get going, one of the things to think about is going to be your hook. right? Like the first three seconds of the video is going to either lose the attention or capture the attention. So if you're thinking about that, you're off to a good start. And then consistency is the most important, right? The more at-bats you get, the more consistent you are, the more opportunity is that you're going to win on the platform. So when is too much? Because I have clients that post once a day and then I have clients that post six times a day.

12:22Yeah. So six times might be a little overkill, but the beauty about it is there is not too much now, right? Like certain platforms like TikTok, there are more eyeballs than content on the platform. Like there's more people watching than there is actual content to consume, which is why, you know, you might be with a friend and say, oh, yeah, I saw that TikTok too, right? Like that's because there's not enough content there. You guys are seeing the same thing. Wow. This is interesting. in a world where I almost think there was so much, we're inundated with content. And you're now saying on a, specifically you're saying on a platform like a TikTok, there's actually more eyeballs than there is actual pieces of content.

13:03So would that, safe to say like there's massive opportunities still to be on TikTok? A hundred percent. And which is why you see these platforms having massive incentives for creators, right? Like Facebook, TikTok, Snap, they pay creators. tons and tons of money to make content for the platform because they want to keep the eyeballs on the platform. Where do you see AI coming in now with all this social AI? You don't know what's real. You don't know what's fake. You're going to have social accounts that are not even real. Yeah, man. I mean, that's going to be tough, right? Even to this day, it's tough to determine if it was an AI or was it real.

13:39So I hope the platforms ultimately make the decision of having some sort of marker to help the user understand like, is this AI or not? But AI is playing a big role already, right? Like it's optimizing ad campaigns automatically. AI runs in the background to decide what type of content to show you. There's generative AI now, right? So a lot of your content as a small business owner, you can make within ChatGPT and Canva to be able to post, right? You're like, damn, I don't know what to post. Well, just go to ChatGPT and it can actually the post for you. There's really no excuse. If you put a little bit of creativity in there, you can win.

14:16But yeah, AI is going to play a big role, man. I think what it's not going to replace is not going to replace strategy at the end of the day. So AI won't replace strategy. And I would say, does it replace personality? And the answer is, well, I think it can. Yeah, for sure. So really the only thing you have is strategy to win on social media. Exactly. Where do you see it in five years, 10 years? Social media, AI. Social media and AI. I mean, where do you see the whole five years? I see it like fully being interest-based. I mean, we're, like I said, we're seeing that. I don't think followers are going to matter at all in five years.

14:52Okay. This is important. Followers won't matter. No. Five years. What's going to matter? What's going to matter is putting out good content that is going to resonate with anyone in the world, not just the people that are following you right now. Okay. So having a sound content strategy that is going to excite the person you want to, you want to speak to. Yeah. Um, so today is it about followers views is about comments, engagement. What's it about today? So right now it absolutely still is the same thing, right? Like engagement matters. Uh, the first three second matter, the amount of views you get absolutely matter.

15:30And that will never end, right? Like the amount of views you get will directly be correlated to how good your content actually is. Is it crappy? Is it good? Et cetera. Um, but right now what matters is engagement rate shares, the amount of views you get all of the things that you already know. And then there's this, there, I always, there's this argument I think I see out there. Um, at least I know I have it internally is, is it better to have 10 ,000 curated followers that know who you are and are like very much say your niche versus 2 million followers that are more general, but you have an opportunity to speak to a wider group of people.

16:11Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, it's going to depend on the business you're in. For us, we're a B2B business. We don't need 2 million followers, 10 ,000 really engaged followers versus 2 million non-engaged followers. I'll take that all day long. But if I was in the movie business and if I was in the entertainment in business, I probably take 2 ,000, 2 million, I'm sorry, unengaged followers than 10 ,000 people who really, really like me because we're in two different businesses. So it really kind of goes on the model of your business and what you're trying to achieve off social. Exactly right.

16:40But the bigger value will come from that 10 ,000 engaged users for sure. What are you seeing some of the biggest brands do now? I mean, you're working with some big fortune top 500. How are they thinking? How are they seeing the future? What are they saying behind the scenes? Yeah. So we're seeing an increase in organic spending. And when I say organic spending, I mean, creating the content, right? Like someone has to be in front of the camera, creating the content that you post. We're seeing a higher spend there. And we see that it's going to continue to uptick just because organic is not going anywhere.

17:13They're also very experimental these days. So like the largest TikTok dance at sea, that's a really experimental campaign for a brand to do. And we're seeing that across the board, even brands that are like legacy brands like Samsung are starting to do experimental things on social. So using AR filters, using the frames, I mean, all different types of things. So I think brands are opening up more and allowing more experimentation to happen on social. On social. I mean, the social I think is, like, I don't know what the numbers are. I haven't looked, but like from mainstream media to social, Who's winning now?

17:50Meta is hands down still winning. They have the longest watch time. They have the most monthly active users. They own multiple platforms. They own Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus. They own all these different platforms. So Meta is still huge. Up and coming is obviously TikTok. But one that gets slept on a lot is Snapchat. Snapchat has some of the highest engagement rates, meaning that when you post the highest amount of people watch your content, a lot of people sleep on Snapchat. And then, you know, the topic of conversation right now is Reddit because all of the LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, they train on Reddit data.

18:30Well, they train many data, pieces of data, but Reddit is one of the ways that they inform their answers. So businesses are now trying to figure out how can I get in on Reddit? So OpenAI recommends me next time someone searches for my solution. That's interesting. See, there we go. That's something interesting that people don't know. So how do businesses get on Reddit to make that happen? Very easily. You go to Reddit, you create your corporate Reddit account, right? Pretty simple, but you want to create your corporate Reddit account and you want to have your personal Reddit account. For me, my personal Reddit account is Keith Kikadia.

19:03It's branded. It tells you who I am. So now Keith can go and jump into conversations, but then socially in the corporate account can also go in and jump in on conversations. So I would start there simply as create your own personal account, create your business account, start jumping into conversations. There's some gold here, Reddit, because you don't really hear a lot about Reddit. You just hear about the Reddit people. You hear like they're, you know, all the Reddit people. The reviewers, the keyboard warriors. Very unique community. But yeah, all of the LLMs are training on Reddit data. So I'm hearing experimenting is key.

19:38I'm hearing organic, obviously organic social content is key. I'm hearing consistency is key. Making sure you have the hook for the first three seconds is key. We've gotten into a little bit of newer ideas. So Snapchat being one. And in forms of Snapchat, if someone's a business owner, they're not doing dances and teeny bopper things. Is that still working on Snapchat? Absolutely. So what you can do on Snapchat, if you're a small business owner, is what we call entertaining education. You can also create maybe a close group, right? So if you're a bookstore and you have a frequent customer list, you can add them to your Snapchat and maybe not your Instagram and they get exclusives.

20:23So there's a lot of different ways. I mean, if you're not on Meta, don't just go straight to Snapchat, right? That's like priority number three. but absolutely wouldn't. But it's growing. There could be, there's massive opportunity there. And then Reddit is the secret opportunity to tie into the LMs. Yeah. And there are tools out there. So there's tools like Profound, there's a bunch of them if you just Google AI visibility tool, and it shows you how you rank in ChatGPT, right? So if someone searches best social media agency, how often does SociallyIn come up? So business owners can use that and figure out like, am I even showing up in ChatGPT?

20:59And how do you get people to show up? If you're not, what do you do? Yeah. So you reverse engineer it, right? So you say, who's the best social media agency? It says socially and it says a bunch of competitors and it gives you the reference. It shows you how it got that answer. And you go to those places like Reddit and then you start to engage. If it's a blog that it's pulling from, reach out to the blog owner and say, hey, can I have an inclusion? Can I pay you to be included in this blog post that Chad GPT is referencing? I love it. It's just reverse engineer. It's not hard. It's very easy if you just ask the right questions and see.

21:33All right. Is there anything that that we haven't talked about that we must know about, you know, social media and how we go from a college kid to to, you know, 18 restaurants of marketing ideas to a full agency to the largest dance dance off at sea? Yeah. I mean, the big thing is, is people get too caught up. Like we talked about earlier in high production, they don't put out content because they're afraid. A big part of social media is to be social. You got to be yourself. So like a lot of the brands that we work with, we try to humanize them as much as possible. If you're a business owner, especially put yourself out there because people buy from people at the end of the day.

22:14So it's not just content about your products and it's not just promotional stuff like humanize it humanize it so being authentic be authentically you is what i'm saying that's awesome where can people find you uh all social channels and uh sociallyin.com my name keith kakadia socially in awesome thanks for being with us keith yeah thank you so much have a good day and that was another episode with the vault unlocked where proven builders, real strategies, and unstoppable growth happens. Subscribe now because the next unlock could be the one that rewires your business forever. This is where the playbook is revealed and the vault is unlocked.