The BEST & WORST Advice for Growing on Social Media – Transcript

00:00In this video, I'm going to break down the best and worst advice for growing on social media. Cuz the truth is, there have never been more people that are sharing horrible content advice that is completely backwards, and it's destroying a lot of the channels that I see. Now, if you don't know me, my name's Callaway. I've 2 million followers, I've done billions of views, and I've helped hundreds of business owners dominate with content in their category. I spend literally every hour on content strategy and growth. So, I've taken all the best stuff that I know

00:26works, mixed with the worst stuff that I keep hearing people say, and I've packaged it together for this video. And this is not going to be the basic stuff. These are the things that most people get wrong that really prevents them from growing their channel. For each one, we will rank it on the tier list, and then I'll break down exactly what you should be doing differently if you want to grow way faster. All right, the first piece of advice you always hear, just go more viral and your business will grow faster. In other words, more views equals more dollars. This is D-tier

00:54horrible advice for most people watching this video. Now, there are certain situations where more views equals more dollars, but for almost everyone watching this, this is completely untrue and the wrong strategy. Most people should not be chasing virality. And that sounds counterintuitive, but it will be a relief once you hear me explain why.

01:11If you're going for a mainstream fame on social media, then yes, virality is the most important thing for you. But for most people watching this video, you either own a brand trying to sell products or you are trying to accrue authority to your personal brand so you can sell things like info, coaching, agency services, done-for-you, or consulting. In those cases, you don't just want any viewer. What you want is the highest density of the right viewer that'll actually turn into buyers of your products. What happens when you try

01:39to go more viral is that you often have to make your content very generic and expand the TAM. And doing this will increase the number of viewers, but it will also decrease your efficiency of the audience. You'll get tons of views and maybe even tons of followers, but your conversion and your lead gen will go way down. What you You to do instead is run a content strategy that is intentionally more narrow, so that you only attract the type of people that would buy your stuff and nobody else.

02:03And there's a way of doing that where you can get both channel growth, views and followers, but also extremely efficient lead gen. That's exactly what I've been doing on my Calliway Marketing channel. I went from zero to like 80,000 followers in 4 months, but I collected 30,000 emails and did 100,000 in revenue right from the beginning. And it's because I specifically targeted a certain type of viewer avatar using this strategy. The big takeaway, what this really means, is that total virality doesn't equal dollars. On-target

02:30virality equals dollars. And it turns out the more you stay on target with the actual viewers that turn into buyers, the better the algorithm gets over time at finding those people for you. Now, like I said, I have the full content strategy that business owners should be running that has the ideal content mix.

02:46Some broad, some narrow, but all designed to accrue trust and authority for you in your niche. If you want help installing that, I've got links below, but just understand views do not equal dollars. All right, the second piece of advice you often hear is to give everything away for free in your free content. And this is actually A-tier advice. It's very, very smart, but it does depend on the business and the business model you're running on the back end. So, let me explain the nuance.

03:09Most people are afraid to share their best stuff for free. And their logic is that if I share my best stuff for free, why would anybody pay me? And this makes sense on the surface, but it's actually the wrong way to think about it. If you want your content to build authority, you need people to trust you. Trust comes from hearing non-obvious things that make a lot of sense once you hear them. I like to think of it like a lightbulb moment. If you only share the generic bottom 80% of your stuff cuz you're holding back the top 20, what

03:37you're really doing is minimizing the amount of lightbulb moments a viewer has. If you want to build trust and authority fast, you need to increase the number of lightbulb moments, not decrease it. And usually that comes from sharing your best stuff, the top 10 to 20% where you really have non-obvious ideas. Now, the philosophy that I follow when it comes to this rule is to give everything away for free and sell the implementation. For sure, there are going to be 1 to 2% of people that can take all your free stuff and go figure

04:03out how to monetize on their own. And for those people, amazing. It's the other 98 to 99% who don't have the time or the awareness for how to implement that you're going to sell to. Now, I will admit, sharing your best stuff for free does only apply for certain types of business models. If you're an info-only business where you sell your info, well, obviously you can't give it all away or there's nothing to buy. If you're running a service-based business or an agency where you do stuff for the client, the best content strategy is to give away all your info for free. This

04:31allows you to demonstrate you know exactly what you're doing for free, and then the client will pay you to have those services done for them. Personally, in my program, Short Form Academy, in addition to the curriculum, I'm adding a lot of service layer on top so that it's not info-only. The info's world-class, but I'm also reviewing people's videos one-on-one, answering all their questions, helping them with strategy, doing one-on-one calls, all stuff that you could never get in these videos. Even if I was giving all the information away for free, the majority

04:58of the value comes from the service layer you apply on top of the base info. At this point in most niches, there are a ton of people that know what they're doing. So, even if you think you're going to hold back the information, they're not going to. So, if you don't share the info, someone else will. Might as well be you. By the way, to prove that I give everything away for free, if you go to shortformsytem.co, I've got my entire short form content system available for you for free. It covers ideas, systems, hooks, monetization, literally everything there for you for free, my gift to you. All right, content

05:26advice number three that you typically hear, "Hooks are the most important thing to focus on." And this is B-tier advice. It's good advice. Obviously, hooks matter a ton, but hooks are not the thing, if you could only focus on one, that I would prioritize. As a side note, if you want to improve your hooks, just run the four S's. Subject, make sure the subject is clearly stated in the first sentence. Stakes, make sure there's a reason your ideal viewer wants to keep watching. Speed, say the hook as quickly as possible with as few words as

05:54you can. And super clear, make sure all the words you use are very clear so comprehension is high. So that's a easy little primer to improve your hooks. But the reason this is B tier advice is because the S tier is actually to focus on the idea, the topic and the angle.

06:08The topic must be relevant and matter to your ideal viewer. And the angle, what you share on the topic, must be new, non-obvious and interesting to them. That is the S tier thing to focus on in content. Hooks are second or maybe third on the list. If you have a great hook with a weak topic, the video will be mid. If you have a great topic with an average hook, you have a chance of going viral still. You can immediately tell how good or bad a content coach or agency is based on how much effort and

06:34emphasis they put on the idea in the workflow. If you're working with someone that does not prioritize the ideation, they just kind of speedrun through it, stop working with them immediately. And if you want to see the workflow that I use for ideas, I've actually linked it below. We use Claude and Sang Castles for it. All right, the next piece of advice, number four, is a huge one. This is probably the biggest mistake I see from the business owners that come into SFA. And that advice is, to grow faster on social media, you should boost your best performing videos via the boost

07:01button. You just pay a little bit and you boost your winners. This is F tier advice. Do not do this, it will nuke your channel. The reason I'm so staunch on this, I've seen dozens and dozens of channels, literally, that have come in and been like, I used to get a ton of views, now I'm not growing. Why isn't it happening? This first thing I say is, have you boosted your videos? And immediately, without fail, that's always the case. Now here's what happens when you pay to boost, either paying for views or followers. I'm going to explain what happens, it'll be super clear. If you make a video on Instagram and you

07:26press boost, basically what you're doing is paying to have people who don't want to be there, be there. And so what happens is, on your next video, the organic push, it'll sample, let's say two to 300 people, a mix of followers and non-followers. And if that video doesn't get good data back from that first sample group, it will nuke it and it won't break out. So, what happens is that sample group is now full of followers who didn't want to be there.

07:52And so, when they see your next video, they don't engage. They don't watch it. They don't like it. They don't share it. That lack of engagement nukes the sample data and your organic videos stall out. This is why if you've run a bunch of follower boosting and you grew the page pretty quick, when you go back to organic, the views fall off a cliff.

08:07Happens every single time. You can, of course, run paid ads through the Ads Manager your best videos and drive them to click to the website or have some activation, but you never want to click boost and buy fake views or followers. That is the worst thing for your channel. If you've already done this a lot, your channel may be nuked because imagine if you have 50,000 followers and 30,000 were paid to be there, it's going to take you a lot of actual organic growth to unwind that bad data. So, it might be easier to start over. All

08:34right, the next piece of content advice, very common, is to use data to guide your content strategy. And this is the most S-tier piece of advice you could possibly hear. If you're new to this channel, I am all in on data-driven content strategies. And let me explain why this matters. If you were to run paid ads, you would test 10 to 100 different ad creatives with the goal of figuring out which one makes you the most money. Based on that data, you would double down the spend on the

09:01winner and you would try to make your next ads closer to the one that worked. To do anything other than that would be financially irresponsible for your brand. Well, organic content works the exact same way. Organic content is just paid ads that you don't have to pay for and you have unlimited upside. So, just like paid ads, you can take the data from what already worked in your niche, replicate your own version, see what works, and then double or triple down on your own best winners. Ironically, everyone accepts that data-driven is the

09:30best way for paid, but then all of a sudden when it comes to using data for organic, people don't use it. If you can use data, you 100% should. Now again, just like paid ads, it doesn't mean that using data means you have zero creativity and you don't come up with anything outside the box. What you want to do for organic, just like with paid ads, is what I call data-enabled creativity. You use the data to tell you what topics and messages are resonating, and then you innovate with new formats, new angles, new approaches, and your own

09:57flair. Essentially, it's just fishing where the fish are. Why would you go fishing in a pond where you know there are no fish? You want to fish where the fish are, and you can try all new types of hooks and rods, but you want to go where the fish are. Now, the reason why it's so important to use data is because there are certain topics and messages in each niche that always outperform everything else. And the reason is because the viewer psychology believes certain things matter more than others.

10:22Without data, you're just guessing blindly to try to find what those magic pockets are. It would be like if you ran 20 paid ads blind across 20 different messaging angles with no clue. Maybe you start that way, but as soon as you know what messaging resonates, you're going to triple down immediately. That's why using data in organic works as well.

10:40It's the exact same logic. That it would enable you to use data on organic content, you want to use the sandcastles.ai MCP inside of Claude or ChatGPT. Sandcastles is like the bridge that gets all the social media data deep analyzed for you into Claude or ChatGPT, and then you can process all of those videos across your channels, competitor channels, any channels outside your niche, you can process all of them inside of those AI platforms. This is

11:07the only thing that I use on topics and research to tell me what to make next. And by doing these analyses, I literally get a breakdown of the topics, the formats, the hooks, and the script writing tactics that are working best across any altitude I want, my channel, niche, or broader. It's super helpful.

11:23In Sandcastles, there's also a dashboard that shows all of your performance, and then below, this shows on a 7-day cadence literally what's working on your channel updated every week. If you want to see the full data-driven workflow that I've put together using this combo, I put a link below. You can watch this video where I explain how to set it up and exactly how I'm using it. All right, now the next piece of advice is kind of like the yang to the yin of using data.

11:46And this advice is that you should copy what's working for other people word for word. And this is F-tier advice. But let me actually explain the nuance of using data, but not copying other people and why copying is actually the worst thing that you could do. When you copy other people, you are a derivative of their original thinking. In no scenario, if you say the same words, would someone prefer to watch you, the smaller, less validated person, over the person who is bigger, better, and more validated? Your