Transcription
Social media is entering a brand new era. It's the beginning of a new era with regards to social media, and it's just something that we have to adapt to and accept.
But the good news is there are a bunch of new ways to win that weren't possible before. I know this because I spend all day on the cutting edge of content marketing and distribution, and I practice what I preach. In the last 28 days, I generated 88 million views, and I'm starting to see things that are not obvious to the average person—massive, massive opportunities.
So in this video, I'm going to walk through the six biggest social media trends for the coming years that I see as massive gold mines. Trust me when I say this is where all the money is going to be made. You're going to want to pay attention.
All right, so the first one is the biggest. The biggest shift that I see in social media is the change from variety shows to TV networks. This impacts every channel, every platform, everybody on social media. Let me explain what I mean.
From 2008 to 2021, social platforms worked on a follower graph. That means you mostly saw content from people you followed. Because of this, creators could make content about really any topic they wanted and know that the majority of people were there because of them. It was personality-driven, akin to something like an old-school variety show where they do a lot of different skits about a lot of different things, but you're there because of the characters.
But in 2021, everything changed with the ascension of TikTok and the invention of For You algorithms. Very quickly, all social platforms adopted a completely different engagement model. For You means that you're not necessarily shown stuff from people you follow; it's mostly based on topics that you like.
Now, this has many downstream ramifications. This is the biggest change to happen to social media in the last two decades. But the biggest one is that variety shows no longer work. The reason they no longer work—the reason creators cannot just make any topic willy-nilly and still grow—is because the algorithms are now optimized for audience matching.
Here's a tactical example: if you make a video about science one day and then shopping the next day, that science-loving audience is not going to love the shopping topic and vice versa. What happens is the algorithm is designed to try to match audiences from one day to the next. So if you do that, it will throttle both videos.
The reason the algorithm rewards consistency of topic is because its only job is to risk finding content that people want. Now, the reason this is such a big opportunity—the reason this is number one on my list—is because if you recognize this shift, you recognize the change in algorithms. You can adjust your content strategy and grow so much faster.
Tactically, this means if you're a creator, making content for a single topic for a single audience across maybe one to two different formats is the best way to grow. This sounds obvious, but this contradicts what people have spent the last two decades doing.
The last two decades were about creativity, inspiration, and innovation—coming up with all these different content ideas to keep your followers entertained. That's not what works anymore. What works is that you pick one topic and hammer it over and over and over.
I understand if you're listening to this, this might not sound as fun as social media used to be. This might feel like it's sucking the creativity out of it. Look, I'm not here to promote creativity or not. What I'm telling you is this is how it works now.
So you either adapt and take advantage of the opportunity or keep doing what you're doing. But that explains why you're not growing.
Now, for brands, I think what you're going to see happen—and this is a massive opportunity—is creating networks of pages across social platforms. This is why I said variety show to TV network. A TV network is basically just an umbrella of shows. You don't actually have any affiliation to CBS or ABC or NBC or TNT. You don't really care what the network is. Those networks own certain shows, and it's the shows that you care about.
When you go to watch The Office, you watch one episode. When you click on the second episode, you are looking forward to the same characters in more or less the same scene doing something slightly different. That is a TV show— the same type of episode over and over and over.
What I think brands are going to start doing is creating separate social channels that are more like TV shows, and the collective as a brand will be a TV network. The reason this works is because people will follow a specific channel because they like the format.
If you do interviews on the street, only do interviews on the street about that topic in that format on that channel. If you want to do another channel that's a vlog about the behind-the-scenes of your company, do it on a separate channel. You can connect those with collab posting and link connection, and that will create this web, this network effect.
That's where social media is going. The single hero channel with multiple different content types does not work anymore. In general, the line between social media, YouTube, and TV is all beginning to blur.
So taking concepts from the way people approach traditional TV viewing and streaming and now infusing that into social media makes sense. That's why the shift is happening.
The most critical takeaway from this idea is you must understand what I call audience content fit for the one profile, one archetype audience. I'm looking for what is the content that best suits them. Once I find that outlier, hammer it over and over and over.
Now, before I go to number two, I just want to mention if you make content but you're struggling to get the reach you want, I've been there. I've gone through this whole process of trying to crack how do I drive virality, how do I drive growth.
If you need more views, you need more leads, you want more engagement, more followers, you want to grow, I've spent two years cracking this viral formula. So I actually put together a free 5-day series that walks through the full formula—all the variables that matter and exactly for each one how you should approach it to go viral more often.
If you want that, it's completely free. It's in the description: viralityblueprint.com. It's like a little 5-day ebook you can check that out.
All right, idea number two—and this is really the future of business, the future of internet business. If you don't want to be a creator, that's completely fine. But what I'm about to say is a massive, massive opportunity.
The future of business and company building is actually really, really simple. It's just three components: traffic, funnel, product. That's all that matters.
So where's the opportunity? Every business, whether it's started or going to start, is going to need a traffic person. That's somebody that can bring eyeballs from the outside onto that business.
The trend is that brands are going to start being founded with a creator in the center from the beginning. This is because when it comes to marketing, winning with organic content—the content that you make that you don't have to pay for—when you win with that, you grow the company fast.
That is the most important thing in marketing right now: winning with organic content. Because the best paid ads come from organic content that's already been validated. If you have a video that went viral and you put paid spend behind it, the chances are that paid spend is going to have a pretty good return on investment.
On the other hand, if you make a random piece of creative and you don't know if it's going to do well, you're kind of gambling with that paid money because you're not sure if the creative is validated.
Now, this is the opportunity. The best creators that will have these opportunities are both good at content—they bring their own audience, they've proven they can make content—and they're good at strategy in understanding how distribution works.
So that they can activate other creators or other sources as well. They will own both. That is the massive opportunity. You will be able to get paid $500,000 a year or more at a company if you can straddle both things.
That skill set is going to be rewarded more and more over time. Because the truth is, the way I see it, most other corporate roles—legal, sales, HR, accounting—those roles will be needed less and less over time. They will be AI'd away.
And I don't say that to hate. I have a bunch of friends in those roles. I'm just commenting on the truth. We are entering an era where distribution becomes the most important thing.
AI will be able to do all of the workflow tasks, print products for anyone at any time, and distribution and clarity of communication to get eyes onto the product will become a premium.
So if you can serve as that role—the creator in-house that can both make content on your own channels but, more importantly, advise the brand strategically on where to go to get more distribution outside of your own—you will be super valued.
You want to skate where the puck is going, and where the puck is going is hiring creators in-house. That's opportunity number two.
All right, opportunity number three is that big influencers are in trouble. If you're just starting out making content, you're going to love this one. Of course, if you're a big influencer with a huge audience, I'm sorry.
Now, the reason big influencers are ruined—and I'm not saying they're all ruined, but the majority of big influencers that had this moat around their following, that are kind of approaching it lazily, or they bought their followers—they bought their followers, they don't want to say that, but they did.
You look at their engagement; it's low, and you can tell they bought their followers. Those influencers are in trouble. Their years of getting $50,000 brand deals are running low.
That's because of the shift to For You content. In the For You content era, followers don't really matter. Followers are really just a proxy to show how you made content and how bio-optimized you are. But followers don't matter.
Brands will stop rewarding based on followers and start paying based on views and engagement. Because what really matters in the For You era is depth of audience and reach per unit effort.
That's if I spend one hour making content or I spend four hours making a video, how much reach am I getting in that four hours? Content efficiency—that's what really matters in this era. Existing following as a moat does not matter.
So the big opportunity for brands is that the best ROI is in micro and nano influencers. These are people between two and 25,000 followers that have posted over a hundred times.
You're probably saying, "Wait, I thought you said followers don't matter." Followers are a great proxy metric to reference how big or small someone is and how optimized they have been. But that's not why brands will pay.
But the good news is if you're just starting out, I mean, this is music to your ears. Because there's never been a better time to start. In the previous era, you were up against people with existing followings where the follower moat mattered so much more.
Now, the follower moat matters less and less. You can go viral on your first video. You can grow on your first video. So it's a golden opportunity to start making content today.
The truth is the field has been completely equalized, completely neutralized. It's actually surprising how easy it is to get paid from brands if you know what you're doing.
It doesn't really matter how big you are if you just know how to make content and the strategy behind how content works. It's surprisingly easy to get paid.
I know this because two years ago, I was working a corporate job that I did not like, and I wanted to get out so bad. Just two years later, I'm making tens of thousands a month, and I've had a billion views on my videos.
That's how quickly you can learn if you know what you're doing. Honestly, the biggest question I get from my friends who are entrepreneurial but don't know how to get started with content is they're begging me to put together something that I can show them.
I've made these YouTube videos, but I don't really have one cohesive thing that can take you from start to finish. So I'm actually putting it together now, and it's only going to be for entrepreneurial-minded people who want to make money with content.
That's kind of how I approached it, and I've cracked this formula. So I'm going to compress all that wandering, all that work that I had to go through for those two years. I'm going to shortcut all of that.
If you're interested in that, it's not launched yet. I'm kind of putting it together. I want to make sure it's really good, so the link will be in the description if you want to check that out.
All right, opportunity number four. Trend number four is the rise of private communities. I just alluded to what I'm doing before; this proves that this is a trend worth paying attention to.
We are shifting from a world of fully public content to a bunch of little private islands. This is really happening for three reasons.
For one, there is just way too much noise in the public-facing content. There's way too much noise. People can't discern what's actually valuable and what's nonsense—what's been ripped from someone else, remixed by some media publication with zero informational value on top of it.
People can't tell. There's so much noise. So what's happening is people are creating these little gated private communities where there's only signal.
The truth is the rise of AI-generated content makes this a hundred times worse. Because as you're scrolling, you're starting to see AI videos. You don't even know they're AI videos; it's just noise.
They're a remix on a remix on a remix on a remix of one original idea. The more you see this noise, the less fun it will be to consume on public feeds.
So the prediction is I think a lot of people are going to go gated. There's going to be a lot more social networks that get built for specific groups. A lot are pay-to-play, a lot of information behind paywalls or behind some activity wall so that they can screen out all of that noise.
You're already seeing this with all these faceless pages, all these faceless communities that people are pushing to try to churn all this revenue. You're seeing how bad the AI content will be when it mixes in with all the original stuff. It's so noisy.
You're going to see people retreat back to these personalities they love in gated communities. The truth is social media stopped being social in 2021. Now it's just media—it's the new TV.
But people are craving community, and that's why these private—I call it a member club—but these private communities are going to pop up. Because in addition to having a signal-heavy stream of information, you're going to get a community of like-minded people around a specific topic.
I feel like that's super missing right now. Platforms like Patreon, Circle, and WAP are really well positioned to take advantage of this trend.
So the big opportunity is if you have expert knowledge in a thing and you're getting drowned out by all the public AI nonsense, go private. Take your information and put it in a group that's organized and let people that really want it join the group. That builds community and helps facilitate a clear path to transformation.
This is where I think things are headed.
All right, number five: big opportunity—the age of AI. You hear AI everywhere, and I already talked about it before. I think a lot more content is going to be made with AI without a human in the loop, and it's going to create a lot of noise online.
But here's where it gets kind of crazy. It's possible that in 5 to 10 years, everything you see is personalized for you, driven by AI. Meaning you will watch a video that somebody else—if they had the same kind of video, it'll be different. Different characters, different plot, different story—customized for them, for what they like.
There's a world potentially where AI creates one-of-one social experience—one-of-one content experience, I should say. Now, I don't love this future for one specific reason—actually, many reasons.
But the biggest one, I think, is humans love shared experience. When I watch a movie and you watch the same movie, we can talk about that movie. We can relate to the characters; we can talk about scenes afterwards.
There's like a whole subculture on top of content when you watch shared—when you all watch the same thing. If AI creates these hyper-personalized things, like it prints a movie for me and it prints a different movie for you, that's such a lonely world.
So that's not something I'm looking forward to, but it's a prediction for where the future might head. And how is that going to impact social media? That's where the opportunity is.
I think we're going to see an anti-AI shift. We're going to see a shift to human-made—it's like the Etsy version of content. You're going to have handcrafted, human-only.
I bet users are going to protest against Instagram, TikTok, Twitter. They're going to make them create feeds or tabs in the feed that are human-only, with extremely restrictive bot guidelines.
Or you could see the emergence of new social platforms that are human-only. This is probably the only time in the last five years where there was an open window for a new social platform to be created, and it's human-only.
So there's a huge opportunity to pay attention to this. If you're an engineer that's interested in social, you could build this. But if you're a creator and you're trying to lean into this human side, look out for this.
Because as soon as that platform gets created, you can jump on it. And as we know, wherever there are arbitrages in new platforms—like I talked about with LinkedIn in the last video, you should check that out—wherever there are arbitrages, you want to be there early if you're going to make content.
Because that's where all the return is.
Now, here's the interesting thing. The common critique of AI content is like, "Oh, it's pretty general; it's not really great." AI will never have taste, and I don't know about that. I hope not.
But I think if people with taste feed enough to AI, the AI will learn how to have taste like those people. And if AI has taste like those people, it has taste.
But what it will never have is those weird, wacky things on the edge that arguably are so far ahead of their time that they aren't in vogue. That's where culture really comes from.
People do something crazy; everyone thinks they're a weirdo. Five years later, that person is cool—that person is ahead of the curve. AI will never be able to predict those things.
So I always think there will be this really interesting ahead-of-the-curve group—the early pioneers of culture, 0.1%—that are coming up with such wacky, crazy, individualistic stuff that AI could never replicate.
Now, that is where the opportunity is in the future for culture. Because if AI develops taste because it's trained on so many people that have taste in the kind of the middle of the bell curve, the only salvation is going to be that early, early, early, early wacky stuff.
So again, that's an opportunity. If you're an artist, if you're a content creator and you make stuff that's really on the edge—like you're pushing the boundary—keep doing that because that's where the alpha will be.
A couple of other quick things about AI: I think we're going to move from the phone to AR glasses. It's an obvious transition. I've used the Meta Ray Bands; I'm blown away by them.
When that happens, there will be an entirely new paradigm. How will you consume content or media or entertainment on the glasses via the phone? A completely new thing—three-dimensional space instead of two-dimensional.
More real estate—horizontal instead of vertical. There are so many different things that will change. If you're a creator and you're looking for opportunities, if you're a business and you're looking for opportunities, you want to be on the edge.
And where the edge is going is a completely new hardware experience. So look out for that.
The other thing is voice-activated, voice-controlled. You're starting to see ChatGPT advance mode—these things with voice prompting. The smart glasses with the voice prompting is going to be a completely new paradigm that people are going to have to adapt to.
But voice—what could you make with voice instead of keys? What type of content experiences could you create with a voice-first user experience? There's a lot of opportunity there.
So I think AI, yes, it's scary. Yes, it may develop taste. But there are things that are huge opportunities that it enables.
The biggest thing is that it disrupts the legacy process. If there's one thing you take from this video, it's that anytime there is a disruption to the way things are, all of the money that was built into the way things are—it's like coins in Mario flying in the air—it becomes available to grab again.
We are going through the biggest restructuring, the biggest reshift in all of the way the legacy media stack was built. Phones are becoming TVs; glasses are becoming phones; content is becoming AI-generated.
Weird, wacky stuff on the edge will become normal. There are so many tailwinds right now for just getting in the game.
That's what I'm saying. If you follow my stuff, there are so many links below for free. Just get in the game with content because there's never been a better time to start creating.
You've never had a more fair opportunity to break out.
All right, the last thing—and this has kind of been all over the place—but hopefully, this is helpful to kind of hear my six trends or six buckets of things.
The last thing I'm going to go really tactical—it's what I call embedded affiliate programs. TikTok Shop was the first embedded affiliate program where it removed the need for a landing page. It removed the need for link in bio.
You see a piece of content; you see the buy button from TikTok Shop; you buy, you purchase. The user never left the social experience. I think that's going to come to Instagram.
It's already starting to come to YouTube with the YouTube shopping affiliate program. All of the Shopify brands are integrated into YouTube. You don't really see it that much now, but it's coming with Instagram.
They're going to crack it as well. You are going to start to see these embedded affiliate programs become the main way we shop.
What does that mean? That means link in bios don't matter; landing pages don't matter. All of the funneling outside doesn't matter. All that matters is your top-of-funnel traffic and your product.
That's all that matters. And so again, my point earlier: if you are the traffic person, if you're responsible for the traffic, if you understand the strategy of how to get the traffic going, it's a huge opportunity.
The biggest reason I brought this up is because you should be paying attention and growing on these short-form video platforms. I make a lot of short-form video. I'm making this video on YouTube; I'm doing long-form; I'm doing both because being a full-stack creator is important.
Most people discount short-form video. They say it's crack attention that doesn't convert. They say it's all junk food views, etc., etc., etc. People discount short-form video.
What happens when all of the commerce shifts away from landing pages and into embedded affiliate programs via short-form video? You're going to want to be there.
Now, following might not matter, so you can go from zero whenever you want. But having the skill of how to make short-form video and generate attention at will and be able to craft the messaging skillfully for that format— as soon as these embedded affiliate programs turn on—and I'm telling you they will turn on.
Instagram is going to figure out shopping. As soon as they turn on, the people that have built these huge short-form audiences are going to win.
Short-form is the biggest opportunity I think everybody's overlooking. I think short-form is the gas that makes the engine go. I'm trying to build as much as I can to help people with short-form because I think there's something massive coming, and short-form is in the best position to take advantage of it.
All right, this is a bit of a different video from me. This is more me giving you my raw thoughts and raw opinions about ideas and trends and themes.
If you like this video, drop in the comments and let me know. If you didn't and you just want me to go back to frameworks and showing you tutorials, I'll do that as well.
Hope you guys enjoyed it. Remember, there's so much free stuff that I give in the description. I've got a free school community where you can learn how to make short-form video.
I've got a free newsletter where I'm literally telling people what's coming on the cutting edge of content—that's content game. I have a 5-day series that literally breaks through my viral formula. I go viral 50% of the videos I make.
It breaks down everything, and I'm going to have this member community. So if you're interested in this stuff, check out the description.
We'll see you guys on the next one. Peace.