[00:01] media in 2026, I'm going to show you exactly how to do it. I've grown my personal social channels to over a million followers and done billions of views. Instagram, Tik Tok, LinkedIn, YouTube. I've cracked them all. That
[00:13] audience has done millions in revenue and built me top personal brands in two different categories. But I did all that in 2024 and 2025 when the social media game was completely different. So, if I had to start over from scratch today and
[00:27] win on social media as a business owner, I would take a completely different path up the mountain. And that path is not as obvious as you might think. So, in this four-step playbook that I would take today to win social media in 2026. And
[00:41] this is the blueprint for any business owner that wants to build a content machine that turns views into dollars. All right, step number one is extremely important. Most people get this wrong and they end up regretting it big time.
[00:53] have to make sure you're playing the right social media game. It turns out there are actually five different content games being played across social has a different strategy, different
[01:06] models, and most importantly, a different way to win. So, let's go content games and decide which type of business owner should play each one. All right, game number one is called mainstream cult fandom. They want peak
[01:20] fame and broad awareness as wide as they can go. Now, some examples of people playing this game would be Charlie D'Amilio, Bartool Sports, Dude Perfect, Alex Cooper, Steven Bartlett, Chloe Shu. These are media businesses that mostly
[01:35] Now, it's important to note in this game, you're not really trying to ramp viewers from the social platforms somewhere else. For the most part, you are the product and your main goal is to create as dieh hard of a personal brand
[01:48] or media brand business as possible to ratchet up the views, which inflates ad revenue. All right, game number two is called category cult fandom. The goal here is category fame and awareness. These people want to be super deep. They
[02:01] than that. Now, some examples of these people would be my friend Dad Social in the parenting niche, Cleo Abram in the tech niche, RPN in the tech niche, Ryan 2 in the creator marketing niche, Riley Brown in the AI vibe coding niche, Kids
[02:17] Take Over in the Music hiphop niche, Orin Meets World in the marketing brand niche, by Maximize in the life and productivity niche, me personally on my goal of game number two is to juice your views, followers, and engagement as high
[02:31] as possible, as consistently as possible, while still staying in the types of people also make money primarily through CPMs and brand deals. product. All right, game number three is called intuitive products. Now, when I
[02:46] say intuitive product, what I mean is a product that doesn't require educating the buyer on how it works or what it does. It is intuitive or implied. Think of like a CPG food brand, clothing, furniture. When you see a sofa, you know
[02:59] what a sofa is. You don't have to be educated on how the sofa works. Now, category and the people that play game three are going to be consumer products. Examples of accounts playing this game really well. LC Sign Tony, he's classic
[03:13] for neon signs. Lwood, which is a clothing brand. Wants and Needs, which is a clothing brand. Represent is a clothing brand. Midday Squares is kind of snackable chocolate. Late Checkout is a clothing brand. Oakley is a sunglasses
[03:26] and lifestyle brand. All of these are brands or creators where the product is obvious and implied. Now, the primary goal of game number three is to drive as many possible conversions of that intuitive product. That conversion can
[03:38] watch a video, they click a link, and they buy immediately. Or multi-touch attribution. They watch a video, they see 10 more, they maybe Google it, and start to differ because in game number three, the way you make money is product
[03:52] companies. Despite what people say, they don't make money via media. Maybe a monetization goal is conversion. All right, game number four is called explanatory products. Now, when I say explanatory product, this is now a
[04:06] product that requires an explanation. The user needs to watch something to learn how the product works to then be educated on why they should buy it. These could be things like creatine gummies, peptide shampoo, standing
[04:18] know it's standing. You need to be educated on that. You look at a shampoo what peptide means. You need to be educated. These are explanatory explained. Now, the products that fall into this category could be BTOC or B2B,
[04:32] but typically they're things that can be converted in a single session. Examples explanatory products game could be like AG1, Create, which is a creatine gummy company, Higsfield AI, which does AI image and video, Meta Ray-B band
[04:46] glasses, or Figma, the design tool. These are all things that if a random it, they wouldn't know what it is until explained. Now, the primary goal in game to drive as many possible product conversions as you can. Again, via
[05:01] direct attribution or multi-touch. The creators and brands that play this game revenue. They're not playing the content game to get media revenue. It's all to last game, game number five, is called authority building. This is a creator or
[05:15] brand that's making videos to try to get deep trust and authority or expertise in a given category. Where the goal of game number two is breadth and awareness across the niche, the goal of game number five is extreme depth and narrow
[05:27] focus. You could have cult fandom in both two and five, but only five positions you as an expert in a way that the buyer trusts you to transact. Now, category could be someone like Ror on the genai side, Xander Whitehurst on the
[05:41] design side, Ganon Meyer on the content automation side, Ava on the social media growth side, Max Sturdivant on the email writing side, Shelby Sap on the sales don't have cult personal brands. two and five. You can both have cults, but these
[05:57] people are building trust and expertise in a way that can facilitate sales off five are playing a completely different game. The goal of game number five is to drive as many possible conversions to email or to a low ticket product as
[06:10] typically from direct attribution. A viewer watches the video, takes some action, gets into some funnel. Okay, so those are the five content games. Those games are all being played on social media at the same time. Now, here's the
[06:23] owners making six figures, seven figures, eight figures, and nine figures in each of those five games. Not one person across all five, but each five success levels. So, you can win at any size in any game, but you cannot win all
[06:39] games at once from the same channel because every one of them has a objective that requires different content formats. The way you play the game differs considerably depending on what you're going for. So, if I'm a
[06:51] business owner and I had to start social media from scratch in 2026, the very first thing I would do is figure out which of the five games I'm playing so way. Now, if it's helpful for you, I actually put a dock together linked
[07:04] below breaking down all five of the games in more detail. And not only do I specifically what type of content you should make for each one and how to win strategically. If you guys want that is linked below. And for what it's worth, I
[07:16] business playing game number two on the tech side. I tried to build a category broad reach media play on the tech side, but now I'm building all new channels never heard this five content game framework, that's because it's coming
[07:31] from me. I was a strategy consultant, then a creator, then a business owner. So, I can look at any business owner's social strategy and pretty much decide what game they should be playing and how to win in like 15 minutes. If you want
[07:43] ways you can work with me below. All right, let's zoom back out. That was step one of four of my playbook for how to crack social media in 2026. Now, I'm playing, I'm moving to the next step, step number two, and that is to
[07:58] build my content data system. And this is all before I make even a single piece of content. Measure twice, cut once. This is how you do it. The easiest way to win on social media is to reverse engineer what has already won in your
[08:10] niche, in your game. You've probably heard that before. This is the Instead of picking a game and just guessing, you can actually look at the players playing the game winning ahead of you and reverse engineer what they're
[08:22] non-obvious things you might not realize you should do in that reverse walk through right now. For example, it turns out you actually shouldn't study the biggest competitors in your niche in your game. And this might sound
[08:36] counterintuitive to what most of the gurus say. So, let me explain. Let's say I wanted to try to chase down Hormosi in the general business niche in game number two. he owns that category. Let's just say I wanted to figure out if there
[08:48] beat him. The way to beat him in general business in game two is not to study what he's doing. And that's because he personally is beyond what I call the escape velocity line. His channels are already so big that you actually can't
[09:03] extract the ideas and core components for what is working and use that on your own small channels. And this is because even if he posts a dud video that is a because there's so many people that already love and trust him. Essentially,
[09:18] what this means is that his performance is being compressed. His highs are not breaking out as high, they're lower, but his lows are not as low, they're higher. He's compressing the performance into a narrower band. This is what happens when
[09:31] compression of performance at the high levels, turns out to be true for every niche. So the bigger the creator is, the less you should be studying what they're doing. Let's call that Callaway's paradox. Because of Callaway's paradox,
[09:44] you want to ignore anybody that is above a million followers in your niche, in curate the smaller channels in your niche that have not yet fully broken out. Now, these can be micro channels between 10 to 50,000 followers, small
[09:59] channels between 50 and 250, or medium channels between 250 and up to a million max. And to be fair, followers don't really matter just for this exercise. They're a good proxy for how mature the account is. Once you've identified these
[10:12] channels, you're then going to ingest all their videos and deeply study the they've outperformed. This is called finding and analyzing the outliers. And this is so important to eat my own dog food on this. I built sandcastles.ai,
[10:25] which is the best tool in the social media world for doing this research process automatically. If you want to learn how I do that with Sandcastle, down the full process. Now, once you find outliers from these small channels,
[10:38] you want to make your own versions as close to them as you possibly can. And it's not that you want to copy them word for word because you're lazy. It's that when you're a beginner, your execution on every area, ideas, research,
[10:50] scripting, editing, your execution, your skills are all over the place. It's like easier to trace or use a stencil than it would be to draw freehand when you're a beginner. It's the same thing here. You want to use the outliers as models when
[11:04] skills. I'm not saying copy word for word. I'm not saying copy pixel for the idea is if you can use those as references for your first 30 to 50 videos and bring your skill floor up, then as you get better, you can start
[11:18] finding your own lane. That's how you use outliers to influence your early videos. Now, as you can probably tell, there is a whole databacked process for running this from the beginning till you hit scale. And I have pretty much dialed
[11:30] it into a science for short form video. This whole data driven system is the core of what I help install for business owners in short form academy. I don't have time to cover it all now. So, if you want me to make a video going deeper
[11:42] for, how I do it, showing you a live example, just comment something like, "Give me the data chef" with like that little chef emoji with the mustache and step one was to pick the content game. And now step two was to build the
[11:56] step three, which is to build your content experimentation lab. And you can lab just a cool name. I'll show you how to do that from your desk. Once I'm already worked from players in my niche, I'm now ready to start ripping videos.
[12:13] phase because I am open to trying anything that the data says. I'm not married to pillars. I'm not married to topics. Whatever the data says has already worked is what I'm going to try. The goal is to rapidly test and daily
[12:26] iterate with as much quality volume as you possibly can. I've come around on answer is both. You want as much possible quantity at an 8 out of 10 quality. And you can scale this in batches pretty effectively with one
[12:40] content operator for every three editors. One editor can make five videos per week. Three editors can be managed by one content operator. So, at the max, doing 15 videos a week. Now, I like to
[12:52] batches of 10 videos. So, depending on if you're doing five videos a week, 10 weeks to get to the answer, one week to get to the answer, or 3 days. You can add more bodies to get more speed, or
[13:04] day. Now, the goal in this phase, phase three, is to quite literally build an experimentation lab. Every day you're in the trenches, you're coming in, you put formats, using the data, you're iterating live, you're trying
[13:18] everything, trying to get a winner, trying to find a 10x plus outlier that use the data is because it helps guide us into where the outliers are going to for word is going to work. You keep experimenting with all the different
[13:32] combinations until you find the first outlier. It will likely take you one to three batches of 10 videos, so 10 to 30 videos if you know what you're doing to channel. If you've got someone over your shoulder who's guiding you, this can be
[13:46] could be slower. Now, at some point, combination of components or Lego bricks, as I call them, that crushes and glorious day for you. You'll be very proud. This will then graduate you from
[14:00] step three in the playbook to step four, which is to make the content factory. the full factory. Think of your content factory like an assembly line that never turns off. The goal really from a systems perspective is that you
[14:14] experiment in the lab relentlessly until you find a winner. That winner graduates just churns out slight iterations of that winner until it stops working. Once you have three to four of these winner templates, you can just rotate between
[14:28] those in the factory and just keep going until they stop working. If you want to experimentation lab on and continue testing new trials against those winners. If you want to be lazy, you ramp the experimentation down. You just
[14:41] If one falls, you ramp it back up. You pretty much dial between the experimentation lab and the factory over and over. The goal over time is the more scaling up the content pods. one operator for every three editors and you
[14:55] scale that to infinity. This is actually how you build a content system as a business owner that just churns leads forever. But I will say the important thing here if you're a business owner is to make sure you are judging outliers
[15:09] gets this wrong. If you're playing games number one or two and you want cult fandom, either broad or categorical, you're going to want to look at views, the outliers. So that means when you
[15:22] analyze your batch of 10, are there any that have 10x higher views, followers, most about, that's going to be the core KPI that graduate something from the experimentation phase to the factory. But if you're playing games three, four,
[15:35] or five, which is for most business owners, you're not going to use views or followers to judge outliers. Instead, you're going to try to use dollar per view or conversion per view. What does that mean? If you're going for sales,
[15:48] explanatory product, or you're trying to get somebody in the funnel to buy later, what you really want to know is which videos drove the most sales so that we can make more of those videos. That's what you want to know. Views does not
[16:00] tell you that. Dollar per view, dollars divided by views is the best apples to it's kind of hard to build that system to track the attribution on a pervide basis. This is part of what I do when I help install these systems for business
[16:13] below, but that's what you need to do. Your core KPI metric for judging outliers should not be views or followers if you're playing games 3, all we've got for this video. That was the four-step playbook that I would use
[16:27] to speedrun social media in 2026 as a business owner. Number one, are you five games. Make sure you're playing the right one. Number two, based on that game, based on your niche, based on your offer, build your content data system to
[16:41] track the small and medium-sized creators in that pocket to figure out what's working. Step three, build your experimentation lab to try everything outlier and make sure you're measuring those outliers based on the right metric
[16:54] four, when you get the experimentation lab to print an outlier, graduate it up to the factory and then continue making iterations like that. run the the same time. Keep finding the winners. Keep bringing them over and run that
[17:08] forever. That is the four-step playbook. That's how you systematize social media. are not telling you to do that, you're wasting your money. Now, to put my money exactly where my mouth is, I'm going to be running this exact playbook on my
[17:21] Callaway Marketing channels on Instagram, Tik Tok, and my main along or you just love this topic and you want to see what I do on short form can follow me there. I'll link those below. This is what I'm running and I
[17:35] guarantee it will build a mega engine that turns views into leads for my business. As always guys, I'm trying my absolute best to give you sauce, sauce that you do not get everywhere
[17:48] talk about content. There's a lot of people trying to talk about business. Nobody's talking about business owners doing content to drive leads like me. point you have and you want to future proof your business in the AI world and
[18:02] you know what to do. Subscribe, reach out. I've got so much free stuff below. we will see you guys on the next one. Peace.