---
title: 'The New Way to Win on Social Media in 2026'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=ImzoNTrgvFg'
video_id: 'ImzoNTrgvFg'
date: 2026-08-05
duration_sec: 1454
---

# The New Way to Win on Social Media in 2026

> Source: [The New Way to Win on Social Media in 2026](https://youtube.com/watch?v=ImzoNTrgvFg)

## Summary

The video discusses three major shifts in social media that creators and brands can leverage in 2026: AI-enabled creativity, the monetization era (social commerce 3.0), and the importance of premium storytelling. The creator shares practical workflows and predicts significant increases in the value of attention-generation skills.

### Key Points

- **The Pace of Change in Social Media** [00:01] — Social media is changing faster than ever, with AI agents and live stream clip farms making it harder to figure out the perfect marketing strategy. However, massive change resets the game, giving smaller players huge advantages.
- **AI-Enabled Creativity** [00:56] — The first trend is using AI to eliminate boring tasks, freeing up time for creativity. This is called 'AI-enabled creativity' – AI clears space so you can be more creative, not replace creative thinking.
- **AI Workflow for Topic Research** [02:04] — A workflow using Sandcastles.ai and Claude to analyze top videos in a niche, extract high-performing topics, and generate hooks. This saves time on research, allowing more time for creative reactions.
- **Monetization Era (Social Commerce 3.0)** [08:13] — The second trend is the shift to a monetization era where the value of attention-generation skills will 5-10x. Four tailwinds: Instagram Shop, agentic social commerce, lower costs of building products, and AI visual recognition for click-to-buy.
- **Storytelling as the Key Differentiator** [19:03] — The third trend is the rise of premium storytelling. Creators who prioritize narrative-driven, cinematic content are winning long-term. Five pillars: characters, pacing, narrative arcs, world-building, and tension.

### Conclusion

The video emphasizes that by leveraging AI for efficiency, capitalizing on new monetization rails, and mastering storytelling, creators can thrive in the evolving social media landscape. The key is to focus on the skill of generating attention, which will become increasingly valuable.

## Transcript

territory for social media and the pace of change is only getting faster. From AI agents to live stream clip farms, it's never been harder to figure out the perfect marketing strategy for a specific business or personal brand.
Now, here's the good news. Whenever there's massive change, like with AI, the marketing game completely resets. The rules change, the strategies change, and most importantly, the smaller players can have huge advantages if they
a bunch of new ways to win on social media that just weren't possible before. time on the cutting edge of content marketing and distribution. I have a million followers, I've done billions of views. In the last 30 days, I did 30
million uniques alone on social media. I live and breathe this stuff. And I'm not obvious to the average person that are huge untapped opportunities if you I'm going to walk through the three biggest social media shifts happening
right now that you can take advantage of. All right, let's dive in. The first huge social media trend is obviously the emergence of AI. But, a lot of people are getting this wrong. When I say AI in content, I don't mean AI content. What I
mean is using AI to eliminate the boring tasks and free up more of your time for creativity. See, most people assume using AI means fully replacing creative thinking. That you have robotic, sanitized, soulless content over here
and then this amazing artistic, creative human content over here. But, that's kind of a lazy way of thinking about it. It's just not how I see it evolving. Making content, no matter how you do it, requires creative thinking and then also
a bunch of redundant transactional tasks that most of us don't want to spend time scripting and editing and captions. Nobody wants to do that stuff. So, the best creators and brands right now are using AI workflows to replace the boring
stuff to then free up more of their time for that creative thinking. I call this AI-enabled creativity. The AI is clearing space so you can be more creative. Now, until just a few weeks ago, this workflow that I'm about to
walk through was not possible because the AI tools were just not good enough. new models have launched, there are now ways to build AI content workflows that you exactly what I mean. One of the biggest time sucks in the content
workflow is figuring out the idea. And that's both the topic you talk about and then your unique take for what you say. Now, your unique take, that is the authenticity comes from. You don't want to outsource that to AI. But for topics,
the data shows us that in a niche, certain topics always outperform other topics. Like in social media marketing, for example, hooks, psychology, and storytelling typically outperform things like ideation, strategy, and editing.
just the data showing it. So, the dream for me as a creator that doesn't want to do all these redundant tasks is to just be handed a list of topics that I know are going to work and have the creative space to think and react and give my
authentic take on each of them. So, this is now what I can do with AI and I want open your eyes for what's possible. Here's exactly what I do. I start out in sandcastles.ai and I've got my list of channels. These are all the top creators
in my space that make videos that really crush. And I curated this list by hand know, you can just go to describe and type in the type of content you make and channels for you. So, you can just build your list this way. Now, once you have
this channel list built out, 10, 20, 30 channels, go to the videos tab, sort by outlier score, and then look for the last 3 months on the date range. This people in the last 3 months. And if you've used sandcastles before, this is
how it's always worked. But here's what's brand new. I can now press analyze on any of those videos. Let's say I'll do it for the top 100. And sandcastles now does a super deep analysis of every video. The transcript,
the topic, the idea, the seed, the exact hook, the hook format, the storytelling format, the visual format, plus all the stats, the views, engagement rate, outlier score, everything. What I can then do is go to export and export all
this data to a CSV for all the 100 videos I just analyzed. Now I go to co-work. You can only get access on the desktop app, not through the browser. co-work's way more powerful. And I upload that CSV into Claude. Basically,
all the data of the winning videos straight into the AI machine. And then I ask it this, "These are the top 100 videos from the top creators in my niche over the last 3 months. Can you analyze the transcripts and the topic data in
the file I attached and break out the top performing topics? First, bucket them as topic categories and rank them based on which ones have the most views. Then, within each topic bucket, break out each separate topic as a one-liner
level of granularity below the topic category. And also, include the original link from each video as you break out the separate topics. What I ultimately want is to have a list of the highest-performing topics and idea seeds
that I can just react to and give my own take for when I make my own version. And then I just run it. And it gives me exactly what I want. Just like that, I now have a hit list of all the best topics validated by data in just 2
minutes. Now I can take one at a time, react to it, and then run the rest of my process. So, from here, what I literally do is I take the first one, I open the link, I watch it, and then I think about what my own unique take would be. That's
the creativity layer that I don't want to outsource to AI. If you're letting AI do the thinking and the ideating, that's where your content gets stale and robotic. But if you use the data from AI and then creatively think, that's the
the camera lens right now your wheels are probably spinning. Just seeing that for the first time completely light bulbs everything because now you realize work. You can just go to Sand Castles, get the data, feed it into Claude, and
do the same thing for hooks with that exact same data set. So then I would just go down below at the bottom of the conversation and prompt again. Now I specifically for hooks. I want you to broadly bucket the hooks into types and
then again cluster by the actual hook format and rank them so I can see which hook formats perform the best. Then I want you to make a list of the top 10 performing hooks and any topic where I give you my take, I want you to take
those formats and write new hooks for me. So for each video I should have 10 fresh hooks in the formats validated by the data. And boom, just like that it we also have all the hook formats, it will cluster them, it will give you the
top hooks, and then it will save that as a skill for you to just run over and now possible with the new version of Sand Castles.ai and that wasn't possible the world that can do content research like this this fast. Now as you can see,
that AI workflow I walked through, it doesn't just print content automatically the way that all of these AI gurus are saying. I purposely left in the human in the loop step of me seeing the topic and reacting to give my perspective because
that's where the sauce layer really lives. But what this little AI sample workflow does is it abstracts all the time for the research and the topic mining away so more of my day can be spent on that creative reacting. That's
Essentially it supercharges my time. This is why I call it AI enabled creativity. The AI is enabling me to be more creative. Now in this video I'm this Claude plus Sand Castles combination can do. That is really going
content research. Now that little example was for topic research, but I also use the same data for deep dive research on specific topics where I don't know the background, for scripting, for hook writing. I kind of
demoed that one a little bit, for captions, for analytics, for strategy. I've all these different Claude workflows built out using this data. So, video completely on this where I just go all the way down and show you my entire
end-to-end workflow using Claude plus Sandcastles, just comment something like put that little chef emoji with the mustache, and then that will tell me I next. All right, let's switch gears to something else. The second major trend
or shift that I'm seeing in social media is around monetization. And this is a you're going to love this. I believe it's about to get a lot easier to monetize attention on social media if you know what you're doing. This
take, so definitely pay attention to this. Now, let me just set the stage for how we got here in the era of social platforms and why right now, this moment, is such a big opportunity. We
all know the social platforms started out in the social era. Between like 2005 and 2020, it was mostly social first. It was about connecting with people. A lot of people call this social media 1.0 or the 1.0 era. Now, during this era, there
really weren't that many proven playbooks for monetizing a following or personal brand on social media outside of mainstream celebrities or these massive influencers that were just Gen Pop popular. You occasionally had the
marketing guru that was able to figure weren't many creator brands or businesses that were built off the back of social media. Then in 2020, we moved into the second era. We went from social
to for you or interest media. This is social media 2.0. And this was when social media shifted from showing you content from the people you followed to showing you content from any stranger as long as you like the topic. The great
TikTok vacation of social media, essentially. And that was about from 2020 to just a few months ago, 2025, early 2026. Now, during this era, the monetization of attention and the monetization of social media got a lot
better through the invention of things like ManyChat, TikTok Shop, whitelisted brand ads, clickable story links on Instagram stories, things like this. We also saw a lot more creator-led brands actually scale. Things like Feastables,
Prime, Chamberlain Coffee, Happy Dad from Nelk, Sour Strips. There's a lot of these now. And this was both because of the maturation of those creators platforms over a decade, as well as the way distribution changed from the For
You feeds. Essentially, the monetizability of content went way up over the last 5 to 6 years. Well, I believe we are now shifting into a third era, what I call the monetization era or social commerce 3.0, where the value of
the skill of generating attention will 5 to 10x and the monetization rails will calling this era social commerce. I don't know if someone's come up with Now, the reason I believe this is that there are four major tailwinds that have
just come or are coming to social platforms over the next 6 to 12 months. walk through them, is that if you know how to make content and generate attention at will, the value of that skill is going to 5 to 10x. Not the
value of your existing following, the value of the skill of being able to generate attention, the distribution ability. I predict we will see a lot of people start making 500k to a million a year relatively easily just off the back
of knowing this skill. And I'll even go a step further. I believe that as a lot of smart white-collar people get laid off as companies adopt AI, there will be a great retraining towards this distribution bucket where those people
learn how to become creators or creator adjacent and make a ton of money. That's are the four tailwinds that are coming and why I believe this. The first one is just happened in the last couple weeks. Now, TikTok Shop was an insane
innovation when it came out in 2023. And the reason why is because it essentially made it permissionless and super easy for any person to promote any product and then get paid an affiliate commission instantly. There was no
coordination, no asking for permission. You just saw the product, got a sample, in, you could monetize it. Now, depending on who you are or what brand you run, you may think TikTok Shop is this silly little thing. Well, last
year, 2025, 64 billion with a B dollars of revenue flowed through TikTok Shop globally. It's 2 years old. This thing is a massive channel. Now, Instagram waited and launched their version of this instant affiliate mechanic, their
Instagram Shop, just a couple weeks ago, and I expect this one thing to mint more on the internet in the next couple years. TikTok Shop was amazing, but it had pretty limited product selection, limited flexibility, and you could only
tag one product as a creator. Also, you had the China problem. It was a brilliant idea. It was just kind of like the dollar store in its execution. Some brands went from zero to 50 million in 3 years, so it obviously had success, but
it felt a little grungy or grimy in a way. Now, Instagram, on the other hand, is peak taste when it comes to social. It is the apex predator of this space. So, that means better brand selection, more premium, more access, more supply,
more creators, more money, more traffic, more everything. Like I said, where TikTok Shop only let you link one video, Instagram letting creators link up to 30 products per video. So, viewers just watch, click, tap, buy, Apple Pay, two
clicks, done. I wouldn't be shocked for Instagram to report that over 10 billion dollars of revenue flowed through Instagram Shops just in the rest of 2026 alone. That's how massive this coiled spring is. Basically, every piece of
become instantly shoppable in a way that it really wasn't before. And what that means for you tactically is that you could win as a brand owner supplying products on there as a creator making the content or as a third-party helping
to facilitate that relationship. So, that's monetization tailwind number one. That alone is reason enough to learn to become amazing at content. There's three more. The second big monetization tailwind is what I call agentic social
commerce. A couple months ago Meta very quietly acquired a company called Manifold for $2 billion. If you're in the AI space, it's not quiet, but most and never heard of this. Manifold is an AI agent platform, meaning it's kind of
something. It can connect to a bunch of tools and just do work for you. Now, been very hard at work integrating Manifold into Instagram and Facebook to give users access to this AI agentic power. And what this means is over the
start seeing these workflows and these toolkits roll out native inside of anything from better analytic attribution. So, when a viewer watches retarget them because it's tracking organically. It could be auto DM agentic
you just set up the automated conversation that's intelligent enough to have a conversation and sell them. It could mean automatic outreach via DM for between. There's so many little use cases around things that humans do in
the loop today in Instagram or Facebook that can be automated with smart AI. So, I think this whole category of agentic social commerce is going to be a big big 6 to 12 months. It's very very nascent right now. Now, as a proof point for
Manifold agent for Meta ads, where you can through Manifold just control and this. So, that's on the paid side. I think a lot of this is going to come organically as well. Now, the third big tailwind that I think will increase the
monetization GMV flow through Instagram is the fact that the cost of building stuff is going down to raw materials. The cost of physical goods are going to come down. The cost of software is going to zero. The cost of info is going to
zero. Because of AI labor replacement, it's going to get way easier for creators to spin up products and own their own brands to sell. So, if they're already using Instagram shop clickable links to sell products, if they can have
much more of the pie. Previously, creator brands were really tough to they took a ton of capital and required a really, really savage operating team to run it. Well, the capital needed to start businesses, especially digital
the operations side, you now have all these agentic workflows that can help a year or two is that you're going to see 100x to 10,000x more creator-led
brands. People that own distribution, that instead of funneling the traffic to support, they're going to funnel them to their own. So, that alone is a massive kind of like a future bucket. And I'll
give one example, but it is the tip of the spear for what the future of these AI content experiences could look like. I think very soon people are going to be able to click to buy on any video via AI visual recognition. Today, the way
Instagram shops works is if you tag products, they're just listed below in see a static photo, click on it and see the tag. But in a video, the products linked below. It's very possible that soon computer vision will allow for a
user, when they're watching a video, to literally click on a product in the video, and then that product, even if not tagged by the creator, the AI is smart enough to know what it is, find the link to that product page elsewhere,
and link it automatically. Meaning, if somebody's wearing a shirt like me in this video, and I don't tag this Represent shirt, you can click on me in the video with your cursor or finger, and it would just link directly to it. I
and this kind of thing is the final boss of affiliate marketing. Completely democratized affiliate marketing. Now, Now clear, that last bucket is not here today. But, the way I see the AI vision models trending, I think we're going to
be there in 12-ish months. If you zoom out, what all this means, all four of those, is that there is so much potential for monetization. The rails to go from view to dollar is going to be so smooth and so easy that all you need to
do is learn how to drive attention, and the opportunity is massive. And this is what I think people are missing. While the average creator makes 30 to 50k per year, and they really grind it out on these brand deals, I think that same
skill set is going to be worth 3 to 500k per year in just 1 to 2 more years because the pool of access and dollars is so big on the other side. Now, not game, obviously. If you're an operator or a product person and you want to
But, every business is going to have to have a content person. Every business is technically a media company, and most people are going to want to learn these fastest way for you to learn those skills is to just watch this channel. My
goal, as I've stated, is that I want a million people to make a million dollars via content. That's $1 trillion in market cap. If I can say I helped contribute $1 trillion by training and giving all this free information, I'll
you're watching this, and you even have distribution side, you're trying to learn those skills, I'm trying to give you the information to help you do that. Now, one thing I have for free that's
just like an instant banger, I put together my whole short-form content system, literally everything I do from ideas to research to hooks, all the way to monetization, the routes that I have to monetize, I put that all together for
short-form system. You can get it at shortformsystem.co, or the link in the description for free. All right. Now, the third and final to talk about right now is around storytelling. And this one is less of a
feature around social media, and more of just like a fundamental shift I'm noticing that massively impacts anyone creating content. For the last few years, a lot of creators and brands have gotten away with chasing trends.
any trending audio, all this overstimulating editing, literally trying to hijack the subconscious brain and central nervous system of the viewer to get them to watch. And look, for a while that actually worked because the
There were so many people that wanted to consume content and like nothing for them to watch. So, that whole approach worked in the previous era. But here's what's becoming really clear. The people and brands that are winning long-term,
that are really crushing like over the last 6 to 12 months, are the ones that have prioritized storytelling and figured out how to tell those stories in a visual package that represents their brand well. Not stories like, "Let me
talking about real stories, narrative-driven, taste, world-building, intentional pacing, real stories that make you bought in and want to watch. storytelling, when we just say, "Oh, storytelling's crushing," is that there
are different types of storytelling and ways to execute that work for different Garcia, for example, he works with really premium, high-taste consumer brands on producing social shows. He's the goat. He's been producing social
If you run a brand, you should definitely work with him. And what he's been saying is that the old playbook of like fast cuts and crazy editing and all really working anymore. It's also not what these premium brands want to put
digitally. What's working instead is intentionally paced, cinematic story-driven content. That's kind of the sweet spot for that category of company. social media, there are lots of other types of storytelling that are working
well. It's not one size fits all. Some people are doing raw, unfiltered yap produce, but it works well because they're good at telling stories. Some they're doing it episodically and in a different way. Some people are building
entire worlds around a single person or a persona, and that's working really different, the production level can be is the same for everybody that's winning right now. The content that's holding
attention and building real loyalty that turns viewers into buyers is all rooted in premium storytelling. Because more and more, as the ability of people to and more, as the ability of people to edit well goes up, the premium on great
this channel, I've made a lot of videos about storytelling in the past. It's people know me for. If you guys want, I will link a bunch of the videos I made description, so you could just go on a bender for an hour and then really
up-level. But the CLDR is this: If you really want to learn short-form storytelling in a way that is premium and kind of captures attention that turns into loyalty, there are five pillars or pockets of storytelling you
want to focus on: Characters, pacing, narrative arcs, world-building, and then tension. Those are kind of like the five components that make up a great story. go into in all those. I've got tactics,
frameworks for how I approach that. I don't have enough time in this video to to make another video, maybe even have Alex on and we can just do like a the storytelling sauce, Chef" and then
for me, one for him, so then we can see in the comments how many people want guys, that is all I've got for this video. As a recap, I covered three of what I think are the most important social media shifts or trends that are
happening right now that I think are big, big opportunities. Most people have The first one was breaking down AI workflows, and this was just a sampler. I just wanted to show you using Sandcastle's data into Claude can
augment a lot of the boring, repetitive stuff to then free up your time to spend And again, if you want the full AI workflow, just comment something around AI Chef and I'll know that. I try not to cover only AI stuff on this channel cuz
the most important thing that people ask for, so I'm happy to make a video diving monetization era. I haven't heard anybody talk about this. There are four increase the amount of money that's flowing through social, increase the
social commerce ability, and then really increase the value of distribution. The value of that skill is going to go up significantly because of the increase in GMV. And lastly, we talked about storytelling. In this next era, the
cream of the crop will be premium storytellers. The way to cut through noise is better storytelling. Those five core pillars, characters, world-building, pacing, narrative arcs, and tension, that's how you become a
great storyteller is mastering those pieces. Like I always say, if you're a learn content or you're trying to improve your skill around content to to be the best channel you could possibly watch. I'm trying to do my best
people just don't cover, delivered in a bite-sized way. So, if you like that, the love of God, check out the description. There's so much free stuff in there. I give more free stuff than almost anybody else gives in their paid
want help, there's a road map, there are breadcrumbs for you to upskill for free. see you guys on the next one. Peace. [music]