The NEW Rules of Social Media in the Age of AI

0:00Social media is going to look completely different in the age of AI. For brands, for creators, for anyone that's using content to build a business. We are entering the next generation of personal branding and audience building, and the rules are being completely rewritten. Now, the good news is this shift is creating a bunch of new ways to win that just weren't possible before. I know this because I spend all day on the cutting edge of content, marketing, and distribution. I have a million followers, I've done billions of views, and I'm starting to see trends and patterns that are not obvious to the average person, but are going to create

0:30massive opportunities over the next 12 months. So, in this video, I'm going to walk through the six biggest social media shifts and really rules that are being rewritten as content changes because of AI. And like always, for each one, I'll break down the strategy and the exact tactics for how you can shift your content to take advantage. All right, the first big social media shift that I'm seeing is what I call flashbang brain. And this one is really important to understand. If you spent any time on social media recently and you've watched short-form videos, you'll know exactly what I'm about to say. People's short-term memory and their ability to

1:02retain what they just watched is absolutely shot. For example, can you name even one short-form video that you saw in the last day on Instagram, TikTok, or any other platform? Probably not. I call this phenomenon flashbang brain. It's literally as if after every video you watch, a flashbang goes off and clears your memory completely. Now, I'm not here in this video to talk about if social media is good or bad for society. That's not my department. Is social media the greatest marketing vehicle ever invented? Yes. Is social media the greatest opportunity for someone with zero advantages to be able

1:35to reach millions of people for free? Yes. So, whether you care about the flashbangification of society or not, I'm just here to play the ball as it lies and figure out how to win based on the conditions in the field in front of me. And to me, winning is figuring out how to use content to grow a personal brand or business. So, the question is, knowing that this is happening and the people literally cannot remember what they watched 5 minutes ago, How do you take advantage of this flashbangification effect that's going on? Here's how I think about it. There are only two buckets of memories that

2:05people have when they watch stuff on social media. They have super short-term micro memories. Literally, I can remember the last 30 seconds of what I saw while I'm on that same video, and then super long-term facial recognition. Over the long term, your brain builds this like facial mosaic, where if I've seen dozens of your videos, I can kind of piece together your face even if I don't remember your name. Everything in the middle, assume zero memory and zero recall. So, to me, this means a few things. For one, you have to assume every new viewer has never seen you before. They have no context on you, no

2:37context on your niche, your business, no priors, nothing. And so, you have to approach storytelling as if this one video is the first and last time they might ever come across your stuff. Now, second, and this is a big one, you want to be a lot more conscious at trying to convert a viewer down your funnel and into a CTA for some lead magnet on every single video. And this doesn't mean selling on every single video, but it means using a lead magnet to capture their email and ramp them to another platform. Before, I was so focused on the medium term, like, how many videos could I get them to watch over a month

3:10on a single topic? And like, out of every 10, maybe one or two I would try to drive them to a lead magnet. But, I don't see it that way anymore because their medium-term memory is so shot. So, now for me, I view every video like an individual marketing agent. Overall, of course I want to accrue trust to the long-term mosaic, but my number one goal is to use each individual video to get as many people to give me their email in exchange for a lead magnet CTA or product that I can. Because I need to ramp them off this dopamine battlefield, the feeds, into a slower medium that I

3:43control more of, their email. You just can't count on them watching multiple episodes of a series. You can't even count on them remembering you from one video to the next. And if you think about it, this is actually kind of freeing because it means you can now approach every single video on its own as one entity around a topic with the goal of driving someone to a CTA. And you can measure how effectively that one video on its own performed. So, for example, let's say I have a product based around storytelling. I'm going to make a video on storytelling. I'm going to assume they don't know me, they don't

4:13know anything about storytelling, and my goal is to come up with something so good on storytelling, so tantalizing and captivating that they want to comment the word storytelling to get more of whatever I have to say. And that approach creates a much more elevated bar for how you attack your content to maximize content product alignment. Now, to be clear, and I want to say this again, nine times out of 10, or maybe even 99 times out of 100, when I say drive the video to conversion, I'm not talking about asking for a sale. I'm still giving them net additional information via lead magnet, but I'm trying to get as many emails in exchange

4:46for that lead magnet as I can. And like I said, I'm doing that because I want to get them from the chaos of the feed into the relative calmness of the email inbox. Now, this is the strategy I'm running on my Callaway Marketing account on Instagram right now, and it is absolutely crushing. I've gone from like 3,000 to 33,000 followers in like 50 days, millions of views, and most importantly, tens of thousands of emails. I literally only care about email conversion and getting someone from the video off to a platform that I own, and doing that as effectively and as efficiently as possible on every single video. If you want to learn

5:18exactly how I'm doing this, that system to drive to conversion, I've got links below. All right, social media rule number two, and this is really a macro mindset shift, is to become the gold standard. And let me explain what I mean by this. Everybody watching this wants to use social media to grow some personal brand or business. And a lot of people that I've talked to are starting to get afraid of what that might look like in the future as AI content starts proliferating through. To win with content, I view everything through one single principle, become the gold standard. The gold standard means you're putting out the absolute best content in

5:49your category. And by best, I mean the following things. Number one, you're talking about things that are extremely interesting and valuable for your core audience. Number two, you are sharing perspectives that are novel and non-obvious. Number three, you're delivering things in super clear language that everyone can understand. And number four, you are packaging the visuals and the format with as much polish as you possibly can. This doesn't mean crazy edits, it means you're executing as high of a level of quality as you can for whatever format you choose. In a sea of infinite supply, the only people that will cut through consistently over time are the ones that

6:22set the standard for their category. My only goal when I make content across any of my three channels, my tech short-form, my marketing short-form, or my marketing long-form, is that I want to be the gold standard in that category. I want to be the absolute best with every video I make. The best information, the best quality, the best clarity, the best visuals, everything the best. The aim, mindset-wise, is to be so much better than the competition that when a viewer sees your video, they can't help but actually lock in and wipe that memory problem away and really focus. That's how good your content needs to be. Now, to get there, I have

6:55to hold myself to an insanely high standard every single day and show up trying to improve and get a little bit better with each rep. That is what it takes to set the standard. Now, if you approach the content game with this mindset, it's kind of like the saying of shooting for the stars and hitting for the moon. You pretty much can't lose when you're reaching for that level of quality. Now, of course, if you're a beginner hearing me say this, and you're looking at the skill gap between where you are today and where the standard should be, you're probably thinking, "Bro, just give me something tactile I

7:22can actually use. Like, this is way too theoretical." But just remember, even I started at zero. Here are some of the earliest videos I posted. Look at how bad these are. There was a day where I didn't know any of this. So, this is the really important part. Aiming to be the gold standard is more of a mindset than a destination. You just want to train yourself to believe that you can attack the content with such a high standard for quality that you're not willing to accept anything less. And when you do that, your content will get a lot better, a lot faster. Most people's mindset is, I want to do the least to

7:54get the most. And that can work once you have established credibility and traction and systems built, but in a sea of abundant supply, doing the least to get the most will not work anymore. I prefer the mindset of, I want to be the best to get the most. And so, if you can shift your mind in to try to be the gold standard in your micro niche, you're going to have a lot of success. Now, one point on the micro niches term that I

8:16keep saying, let me just explain that. The goal with anyone using content to grow a business is that you want to own the minimum sized category that would align with the offer you're selling. Content, audience, product alignment is the key. The targeting with these algorithms is getting so good that it will be able to find whoever you want it to find over a long enough time horizon if you stay consistent. So, your focus should not be to try to get a huge amount of views, and instead, to stay super specifically relevant from a topic perspective for the niche you're trying

8:46to target. And this means the following. First, ask yourself, what product or offer am I trying to sell? Second, what is the outcome my buyer wants most? Ideally, the product you're selling helps them get towards that outcome. And third, every time you make a piece of content, ask yourself, will this, if they watch it, help them get one step closer toward achieving the outcome they want? If yes, make it. And if no, don't make it. This should be the filtering you use to help decide what you talk

9:12about and who you talk about it for. Ironically, I think the more competitive things get, the more of these micro niches will open up because the algorithm targeting is getting so good that these new pockets of reaching 100,000 or 500,000 people become apparent that weren't before. So, all you have to do is really hone in on what outcome you're trying to drive with your product, and then stay super disciplined in making content that will add value for the buyer to get that outcome. And

9:39that will work even in the era of AI. All right, social trend number three is what I call the explosivity factor. If you spend time on social media in the last few weeks, you've probably seen this account, the Kumar method. Long story short, Kumar is an elderly retired Indian accountant who went from zero to a million followers in just five days off five videos, mostly because of the juxtaposition of what you thought he'd be like based on how he looks and how the videos actually are. It is an absolute masterclass for whoever his son or daughter that put this together behind the scenes, I'm assuming, maybe

10:09it was him. So, kudos to you if that was you, but whoever you have running the content, masterful job. Now, if you want to read my thoughts breaking down exactly why he was able to grow so fast and the principles that you could apply in any niche, I actually wrote a post about it in Content Department. I'll link it down below. But, the big takeaway for me here, and kind of like the new rule that this proves we're in for social media, is that we've entered this era of explosive growth or the era of explosivity. Where essentially the right content strategy, if engineered correctly, can literally reach hundreds

10:39of millions of people in just a week. There is no limit for how fast you can grow and how much attention you can get if you're able to engineer one of these moments. But, I will say the takeaway from this example is a very sharp double-edged sword. Because so many people see this and they get jealous, they get bummed out, they start comparing their slower growth, or even fast relatively, to nothing close to the five-day rocket ship that was Kumar. In this era, the outlier anomalies like

11:06Kumar are by definition very atypical. And you watching this are almost certainly not going to be able to unlock these types of results. And that is completely okay, but you have to accept it. The entire content game is just about compounding reps and increasing your durability over time. And truly, the only thing that makes you lose is when you stop posting. So, if you see someone like the Kumar method and you get inspired, awesome. But, if it makes you jealous or sad or bummed and you stop posting, then that is a huge loss that is causing you to fail. I like to think of personal brands through the

11:35lens of this thing called the Lindy effect. And this is a concept from business and science. It states that the life expectancy in the future of non-perishable things like ideas or books or businesses is proportional to their current age. More or less, if something has been alive for a long time, there's a higher probability that it will be alive or survive for a much longer time. So, for example, McDonald's, the food chain, has been around for 86 years. That has a higher probability of being around for the next 86 years than something like Dave's Hot Chicken, which is only 9 years old. Now, please, if you're a Dave's Hot Chicken

12:08fan, don't come for me in the comments. All legendary brands started somewhere, and so of course Dave's has the chance to go the distance. But this is just to say in principle, longevity and durability are a great predictor of future success. It's the same thing with content. You don't really want to burn so bright, so hot, so fast. Cuz chances are if this same thing happened to you like what happened to Kumar, you wouldn't have the ego discipline to be able to handle when things started reverting back to the average. And that would make you freak out, and then you would end up quitting. You also likely

12:37wouldn't have the offer stack or systems to even do anything with that traffic in the first place. So, as cool as it looks, it's actually not as great as it seems. So, just realize that these explosive moments in this era of infinite AI will keep happening at an increasing rate, but don't let those detract you from being motivated to keep going if you don't have the same results. These are the exception, not the rule, and so don't anchor your expectations to them. But of course, if you want to understand the exact ingredients that Kumar used and apply some of those for yourself, I've linked that newsletter below. All right, social

13:07media trend number four in the AI era is called the stealing economy. And this isn't so much a rule, more so an observation and what to do about it. We have clearly entered the stealing economy when it comes to social media. I don't know what happened, but all of a sudden all these little twerps will just rip your content word for word, the

13:24thumbnail, the title, the script. Sometimes they even download the exact video with your face, re-upload it, credit you in the comments, and then just try to engagement farm on that. It's happened to me more times than I can honestly count. I actually keep a list personally of all the people that have ripped my stuff word for word. Special shout-out and his team for being the greatest re-purposers of my content. Appreciate you for your service. All jokes aside, the stealing economy is something that cannot be reversed and will only just keep happening. The truth is, it is very frustrating for people that spend all their time coming up with original ideas

13:56to just have their stuff stolen, 90% of that ripped from them with zero attribution. It happens, I get it, it's going to keep happening. So, what do we do about it? Here's my take. First off, this is just a creativity tax that you have to pay in order to play the game. To have the right to reach millions this freely and this easily, there are some

14:13costs and this is one of those taxes. You kind of just have to accept it's going to happen and move on. I will say though, and I'm speaking directly, if you're someone that just straight copies people's content, A, you're a scumbag and B, what do you really think is going to happen? Taking their content, getting millions of views, and then driving people to a service that you don't have the expertise to execute on? It's just

14:32going to be a Ponzi scheme to nowhere. So, if you're stealing people's content and you think that's the best way to grow, stop doing that. It won't be the best way to grow. Back to the people that are actually making the original ideas, here's the thing. Over time, as people steal more and more, you're going to have to find a way to make stuff that is harder and harder to steal. And that means these three things. Number one, more in real life content or sets that are just harder to replicate. Number two, more longer form videos that, even if someone wanted to steal and they wanted to replicate the full thing,

15:00regenerate with AI, it would just cost so many credits and so much time and compute that they'd be prohibited from doing that. Number three is more outside the box ideas based on your personal experience. You want to try to come up with these N of one concepts that people just can't rip and steal because it doesn't make sense for their background and their environment. Now, I will say there's a massive difference between studying what's working for people, extracting the principles and formats, and then fully remix and applying them for yourself. That is the gold standard for how to research and figure out what's working that is very different

15:32from straight-up stealing word-for-word the entire video, the entire script. I'll just say this, the dumbest thing to do in an era where anyone can copy and steal is for you to copy and steal. You'll just be a derivative of a derivative of a derivative. You don't want to do that. Maybe eventually there'll be some sort of cryptographic fingerprinting, some digital mark where we can automatically tie back ideas to the original creator. For now, it's the wild west and the best way to win is always going to be originality. All right, social media trend number five is how you actually differentiate your personal brand in this AI era. A lot of

16:04people ask, "How can I continue to differentiate as more and more supply comes online?" I actually made a video breaking this down. It's called the new era of personal branding. I'll link it below if you want to check it out. There are essentially three ways you can angle your personal brand to cut through in any category. Number one is with visual differentiation, number two is with more originality, and number three is by being more tactically implementable, or

16:25of course, a combination of all three. As we progress, there's just going to be more and more derivative clones as I just talked about and so you want to try to bias towards one of those three areas to try to be one of the best in your category. That's how you can differentiate. Now, the smartest thing you can start doing right now to try to improve tactically across those three categories is what I call transpositioning. There are lots of people that spend time studying the competitors in their own niche. But like I said, that's just going to create this gnarly culture where it's a race to the

16:53bottom. Everyone's saying the same thing about the same topic. The alpha and the better way is to remix inspiration from outside your niche and bring it back over. For example, if you're in the cooking niche, what are all the formats in the fitness niche that people are using that you could bring over and adapt to cooking? Or if you're in the beauty niche, how are all the top people in productivity explaining their

17:13concepts in a way that's resonating? Could you take some of those storytelling structures and apply it to beauty. Then we actually launched this pretty cool feature in Sand Castles called Collections where we're hand curating all the best examples of formats, visual hooks, signature series, and editing styles or visual layouts across every niche. So, these are like little hand-picked visual libraries that give you a bunch of exposure to different creators across other niches that you might not have seen. There are over 100 different collections on Sand Castles now and we're constantly updating and adding new stuff every week. If you're Sand Castles user, you get access to all those collections

17:45included with your membership. And even if you're not a Sand Castles user, I've linked one of the collections below that you can check out for free. Also, we have another feature that this is really good called global search. If you go to the videos tab in the filters pane, you can click that little globe icon which lets you search across millions of the

18:00top videos that we have in the database. And what I like to do is search by keyword. So, you could take a format like ranking and literally search the word ranking and then set the time date for last 3 months, sort by views, and that'll give you the best examples across all different niches of ranking videos from the last 3 months. You could also do this by topics. You could search for a specific word like backpacking and then see how are all the people executing across different formats for backpacking, how could I apply that to my niche? So, this is just another way to get exposure to formats from other

18:30niches that you can transposition over without having to scroll. But the point is remixing formats from outside your niche is the highest ROI. That's where all the alpha is. If everybody's looking inside, you should start looking outside and bring it back in. All right, the last shift and new rule for social media is what I call formats and surfaces. It is super clear there's a bigger divergence happening, a split across social media platforms. Instagram is now very different from TikTok which is very different from LinkedIn which is very different from YouTube. They're all diverging. The highest value want to build on by far is Instagram. And that's

19:00both because of the maturity of the algorithm, but also the robust ManyChat comment to click ecosystem where you can actually get people from content to leads and sales pages. If you're going to build on only one platform, your home platform should be Instagram for most people. The second highest will be LinkedIn just based on the average value of the average user, but the video product is much newer and the link ecosystem does not work the same way as Instagram. I see almost no value in Tik Tok unless you're building a consumer commodity product or you're just yapping to a crew personal brand depth in whatever niche you're talking about. And

19:33YouTube is obviously amazing, but long form is very different from short form. I would say Facebook is up there with Instagram, but it of course depends on your demo. Not everybody is playing on Facebook. So when it comes to platforms, that's kind of how I see the social media world. Right now Instagram is king. Now on the content type side, the actual types of content you can make, this is how I see it playing out. AI is going to come like a wave across the lowest easiest replicate formats across from left to right across the screen. So starting from the left, short form text is most at risk. Then image, then short

20:02form entertainment videos, then short form education videos, then long form text, then medium form YouTube videos like this, then long form YouTube videos like podcasts, and then finally live streams. To be clear, you can still win with all of these right now. AI content is actually not as mature or far ahead as many people in the AI bubble would like you to believe. But it's pretty clear that the supply is going to continue to rise from left to right on the screen. And it's not that you're going to lose because you're out competed on quality, it's that you're going to lose because of dilution. The supply just drowns you out. So the goal,

20:32if you want staying power, is to try to be as far on the right of the spectrum as possible. YouTube with mid form and long form is by far the easiest to protect. Now I will say YouTube is incredibly hard to start from scratch. We had a pilot academy and it's clear that the people who have already spent a couple years on YouTube can really grow with the right information, but if you've never ever started on YouTube, it is a big bear to be your first content platform. So what I recommend for people is this. If you're starting with content, start with short form video and

20:59sprint for 3 to 6 months to build your content fundamentals. Then after 6 months, you can decide to add on YouTube or swap from shorts to longs, but now you have that content baseline, so it's a lot easier to tackle. This is the guidance I tell pretty much everyone in the content world. Shorts are by far easier, but YouTube is king by far for lead gen and sales. If you're interested in learning how I run my YouTube system, like how I run this whole channel, I actually put together a deep dive of the most non-obvious YouTube principles that nobody talks about. It's basically like a 45-minute Bible for the most important

21:29things to focus on on YouTube. I'll link it below if you're interested. All right, guys, that is all I've got for this video. As always, I'm try my absolute best to give you the non-obvious, most interesting stuff to help you grow your personal brand and eventually monetize, turn the views into leads and sales. If you're trying to do that, whether you're a business owner, marketer, or creator, you can probably tell this is going to be one of the most valuable channels you could possibly watch. So, please make sure to like, subscribe, and check out all the free stuff I have in the description. I'm just giving a lot of stuff away cuz I

21:54really want to help as many people grow as possible. All right, we will see you guys on the next one. Peace.