If I Started Social Media From Scratch in 2026, I’d Do This

0:00If you want to actually win on social media in 2026, I'm going to show you exactly how to do it. I've grown my personal social channels to over a million followers and done billions of views. Instagram, Tik Tok, LinkedIn, YouTube. I've cracked them all. That audience has done millions in revenue and built me top personal brands in two different categories. But I did all that in 2024 and 2025 when the social media game was completely different. So, if I had to start over from scratch today and win on social media as a business owner, I would take a completely different path up the mountain. And that path is not as

0:33obvious as you might think. So, in this video, I'm going to break down the exact four-step playbook that I would take today to win social media in 2026. And this is the blueprint for any business owner that wants to build a content machine that turns views into dollars. All right, step number one is extremely important. Most people get this wrong

0:51and they end up regretting it big time. Before you start making content, you have to make sure you're playing the right social media game. It turns out there are actually five different content games being played across social media at the same time. Now, each game has a different strategy, different competitors, different monetization models, and most importantly, a different way to win. So, let's go through each of the five different content games and decide which type of business owner should play each one. All right, game number one is called mainstream cult fandom. They want peak fame and broad awareness as wide as they can go. Now, some examples of people

1:24playing this game would be Charlie D'Amilio, Bartool Sports, Dude Perfect, Alex Cooper, Steven Bartlett, Chloe Shu. These are media businesses that mostly make their money through advertising. Now, it's important to note in this game, you're not really trying to ramp viewers from the social platforms somewhere else. For the most part, you are the product and your main goal is to create as dieh hard of a personal brand or media brand business as possible to ratchet up the views, which inflates ad revenue. All right, game number two is called category cult fandom. The goal

1:56here is category fame and awareness. These people want to be super deep. They want to own the category, but no wider than that. Now, some examples of these people would be my friend Dad Social in the parenting niche, Cleo Abram in the tech niche, RPN in the tech niche, Ryan 2 in the creator marketing niche, Riley Brown in the AI vibe coding niche, Kids Take Over in the Music hiphop niche, Orin Meets World in the marketing brand niche, by Maximize in the life and productivity niche, me personally on my tech channels in the tech niche. The goal of game number two is to juice your views, followers, and engagement as high

2:31as possible, as consistently as possible, while still staying in the guard rails of your category. Now, these types of people also make money primarily through CPMs and brand deals. Again, game number two, you are the product. All right, game number three is called intuitive products. Now, when I say intuitive product, what I mean is a product that doesn't require educating the buyer on how it works or what it does. It is intuitive or implied. Think of like a CPG food brand, clothing, furniture. When you see a sofa, you know what a sofa is. You don't have to be educated on how the sofa works. Now, typically the stuff that falls into this

3:05category and the people that play game three are going to be consumer products. Examples of accounts playing this game really well. LC Sign Tony, he's classic for neon signs. Lwood, which is a clothing brand. Wants and Needs, which is a clothing brand. Represent is a clothing brand. Midday Squares is kind of snackable chocolate. Late Checkout is a clothing brand. Oakley is a sunglasses and lifestyle brand. All of these are brands or creators where the product is obvious and implied. Now, the primary goal of game number three is to drive as many possible conversions of that intuitive product. That conversion can come through direct attribution. They watch a video, they click a link, and

3:41they buy immediately. Or multi-touch attribution. They watch a video, they see 10 more, they maybe Google it, and they buy. Now, this is where the games start to differ because in game number three, the way you make money is product conversion. These are not media companies. Despite what people say, they don't make money via media. Maybe a little bit, but their primary monetization goal is conversion. All right, game number four is called explanatory products. Now, when I say explanatory product, this is now a

4:06product that requires an explanation. The user needs to watch something to learn how the product works to then be educated on why they should buy it. These could be things like creatine gummies, peptide shampoo, standing desks. You look at a desk and you don't know it's standing. You need to be educated on that. You look at a shampoo and it has a peptide. You don't know what peptide means. You need to be educated. These are explanatory products, products that need to be explained. Now, the products that fall into this category could be BTOC or B2B, but typically they're things that can be converted in a single session. Examples

4:36of channels that are playing the explanatory products game could be like AG1, Create, which is a creatine gummy company, Higsfield AI, which does AI image and video, Meta Ray-B band glasses, or Figma, the design tool. These are all things that if a random person who's never heard of it looks at it, they wouldn't know what it is until explained. Now, the primary goal in game number four, just like number three, is to drive as many possible product conversions as you can. Again, via direct attribution or multi-touch. The creators and brands that play this game are not really concerned with media revenue. They're not playing the content

5:08game to get media revenue. It's all to get product conversion. All right, the last game, game number five, is called authority building. This is a creator or brand that's making videos to try to get deep trust and authority or expertise in a given category. Where the goal of game number two is breadth and awareness across the niche, the goal of game number five is extreme depth and narrow focus. You could have cult fandom in both two and five, but only five positions you as an expert in a way that the buyer trusts you to transact. Now, examples of people that fall into this category could be someone like Ror on

5:39the genai side, Xander Whitehurst on the design side, Ganon Meyer on the content automation side, Ava on the social media growth side, Max Sturdivant on the email writing side, Shelby Sap on the sales side. Now, it's not to say these people don't have cult personal brands. two and five. You can both have cults, but these people are building trust and expertise in a way that can facilitate sales off platform. It's very different. Two and five are playing a completely different game. The goal of game number five is to drive as many possible conversions to email or to a low ticket product as quickly as possible. And this is

6:11typically from direct attribution. A viewer watches the video, takes some action, gets into some funnel. Okay, so those are the five content games. Those games are all being played on social media at the same time. Now, here's the interesting part. There are business owners making six figures, seven figures, eight figures, and nine figures in each of those five games. Not one person across all five, but each five has players at every one of those success levels. So, you can win at any size in any game, but you cannot win all games at once from the same channel because every one of them has a different strategy with a different

6:44objective that requires different content formats. The way you play the game differs considerably depending on what you're going for. So, if I'm a business owner and I had to start social media from scratch in 2026, the very first thing I would do is figure out which of the five games I'm playing so that I can set my strategy the right way. Now, if it's helpful for you, I actually put a dock together linked below breaking down all five of the games in more detail. And not only do I go through what they are, but specifically what type of content you should make for each one and how to win

7:12strategically. If you guys want that is linked below. And for what it's worth, I personally built my first sevenfigure business playing game number two on the tech side. I tried to build a category broad reach media play on the tech side, but now I'm building all new channels playing game number five. Now, if you've never heard this five content game framework, that's because it's coming from me. I was a strategy consultant,

7:33then a creator, then a business owner. So, I can look at any business owner's social strategy and pretty much decide what game they should be playing and how to win in like 15 minutes. If you want to work with me directly to try to figure this out, I've got a bunch of ways you can work with me below. All right, let's zoom back out. That was step one of four of my playbook for how to crack social media in 2026. Now, after I figure out which content game I'm playing, I'm moving to the next step, step number two, and that is to build my content data system. And this

8:00is all before I make even a single piece of content. Measure twice, cut once. This is how you do it. The easiest way to win on social media is to reverse engineer what has already won in your niche, in your game. You've probably heard that before. This is the science-based way to win with content. Instead of picking a game and just guessing, you can actually look at the players playing the game winning ahead of you and reverse engineer what they're doing. But again, there are a lot of non-obvious things you might not realize you should do in that reverse engineering process that I'm going to walk through right now. For example, it

8:30turns out you actually shouldn't study the biggest competitors in your niche in your game. And this might sound counterintuitive to what most of the gurus say. So, let me explain. Let's say I wanted to try to chase down Hormosi in the general business niche in game number two. he owns that category. Let's just say I wanted to figure out if there was a way I could track him down and beat him. The way to beat him in general business in game two is not to study what he's doing. And that's because he personally is beyond what I call the escape velocity line. His channels are already so big that you actually can't

9:03extract the ideas and core components for what is working and use that on your own small channels. And this is because even if he posts a dud video that is a bad idea, it'll still do decently well because there's so many people that already love and trust him. Essentially, what this means is that his performance is being compressed. His highs are not breaking out as high, they're lower, but

9:25his lows are not as low, they're higher. He's compressing the performance into a narrower band. This is what happens when you get bigger. Now, this effect, the compression of performance at the high levels, turns out to be true for every niche. So the bigger the creator is, the less you should be studying what they're doing. Let's call that Callaway's paradox. Because of Callaway's paradox, you want to ignore anybody that is above a million followers in your niche, in your game. And the real sauce is to curate the smaller channels in your niche that have not yet fully broken out. Now, these can be micro channels between 10 to 50,000 followers, small

9:59channels between 50 and 250, or medium channels between 250 and up to a million max. And to be fair, followers don't really matter just for this exercise. They're a good proxy for how mature the account is. Once you've identified these channels, you're then going to ingest all their videos and deeply study the patterns for what is working, where they've outperformed. This is called finding and analyzing the outliers. And this is so important to eat my own dog food on this. I built sandcastles.ai, which is the best tool in the social media world for doing this research process automatically. If you want to learn how I do that with Sandcastle,

10:33I've got a video linked below breaking down the full process. Now, once you find outliers from these small channels, you want to make your own versions as close to them as you possibly can. And it's not that you want to copy them word for word because you're lazy. It's that when you're a beginner, your execution on every area, ideas, research, scripting, editing, your execution, your skills are all over the place. It's like you're learning to draw. It'd be way easier to trace or use a stencil than it would be to draw freehand when you're a beginner. It's the same thing here. You want to use the outliers as models when

11:04you're early and you don't have the skills. I'm not saying copy word for word. I'm not saying copy pixel for pixel. I hate when people do that. But the idea is if you can use those as references for your first 30 to 50 videos and bring your skill floor up, then as you get better, you can start finding your own lane. That's how you use outliers to influence your early videos. Now, as you can probably tell, there is a whole databacked process for running this from the beginning till you hit scale. And I have pretty much dialed

11:30it into a science for short form video. This whole data driven system is the core of what I help install for business owners in short form academy. I don't have time to cover it all now. So, if you want me to make a video going deeper just on that data process, what I look for, how I do it, showing you a live example, just comment something like, "Give me the data chef" with like that little chef emoji with the mustache and I'll know what that means. All right, so

11:52step one was to pick the content game. And now step two was to build the content data system. Now we're on to step three, which is to build your content experimentation lab. And you can put the test tubes away. Experimentation lab just a cool name. I'll show you how to do that from your desk. Once I'm clear what the game is and what has already worked from players in my niche,

12:10I'm now ready to start ripping videos. And this is called the experimentation phase because I am open to trying anything that the data says. I'm not married to pillars. I'm not married to topics. Whatever the data says has already worked is what I'm going to try. The goal is to rapidly test and daily iterate with as much quality volume as you possibly can. I've come around on the quality versus quantity thing. The answer is both. You want as much possible quantity at an 8 out of 10 quality. And you can scale this in batches pretty effectively with one content operator for every three editors. One editor can make five videos

12:44per week. Three editors can be managed by one content operator. So, at the max, if you have a team of four, you could be doing 15 videos a week. Now, I like to run these experimentation pods in batches of 10 videos. So, depending on if you're doing five videos a week, 10 or 15, it's either going to take you two weeks to get to the answer, one week to get to the answer, or 3 days. You can add more bodies to get more speed, or you can slow it down and just do one per day. Now, the goal in this phase, phase three, is to quite literally build an

13:09experimentation lab. Every day you're in the trenches, you're coming in, you put the lab code on, you're testing ideas, formats, using the data, you're iterating live, you're trying everything, trying to get a winner, trying to find a 10x plus outlier that you make on your channel. The reason we use the data is because it helps guide us into where the outliers are going to be. But that doesn't mean copying word for word is going to work. You keep experimenting with all the different combinations until you find the first outlier. It will likely take you one to three batches of 10 videos, so 10 to 30 videos if you know what you're doing to

13:41try to find your first outlier on a cold channel. If you've got someone over your shoulder who's guiding you, this can be faster. If you're doing it on your own, you don't know what you're doing, this could be slower. Now, at some point, you're going to stumble onto a combination of components or Lego bricks, as I call them, that crushes and gives you an outlier. And this will be a glorious day for you. You'll be very proud. This will then graduate you from step three in the playbook to step four,

14:02which is to make the content factory. You're going from experimentation lab to the full factory. Think of your content factory like an assembly line that never turns off. The goal really from a systems perspective is that you experiment in the lab relentlessly until you find a winner. That winner graduates to the factory and then that factory just churns out slight iterations of that winner until it stops working. Once you have three to four of these winner templates, you can just rotate between those in the factory and just keep going until they stop working. If you want to be forward thinking, you can keep the experimentation lab on and continue

14:35testing new trials against those winners. If you want to be lazy, you ramp the experimentation down. You just run the factory with the four winners. If one falls, you ramp it back up. You pretty much dial between the experimentation lab and the factory over and over. The goal over time is the more winning formats you find, you just keep scaling up the content pods. one operator for every three editors and you scale that to infinity. This is actually how you build a content system as a business owner that just churns leads forever. But I will say the important thing here if you're a business owner is

15:06to make sure you are judging outliers based on the right metric. Everybody gets this wrong. If you're playing games number one or two and you want cult fandom, either broad or categorical, you're going to want to look at views, followers, or engagement rate to judge the outliers. So that means when you analyze your batch of 10, are there any that have 10x higher views, followers, or engagement? Whichever one you care most about, that's going to be the core KPI that graduate something from the

15:31experimentation phase to the factory. But if you're playing games three, four, or five, which is for most business owners, you're not going to use views or followers to judge outliers. Instead, you're going to try to use dollar per view or conversion per view. What does that mean? If you're going for sales, either an intuitive product, an explanatory product, or you're trying to get somebody in the funnel to buy later, what you really want to know is which videos drove the most sales so that we can make more of those videos. That's what you want to know. Views does not tell you that. Dollar per view, dollars

16:03divided by views is the best apples to apples metric that tells you that. Now, it's kind of hard to build that system to track the attribution on a pervide basis. This is part of what I do when I help install these systems for business owners. If you want help, I've got links below, but that's what you need to do. Your core KPI metric for judging outliers should not be views or followers if you're playing games 3, four, or five. All right, guys. That is all we've got for this video. That was the four-step playbook that I would use to speedrun social media in 2026 as a

16:30business owner. Number one, are you playing the right content game? There's five games. Make sure you're playing the right one. Number two, based on that game, based on your niche, based on your offer, build your content data system to track the small and medium-sized creators in that pocket to figure out what's working. Step three, build your experimentation lab to try everything the data suggests to try to get an outlier and make sure you're measuring those outliers based on the right metric based on what game you're playing. Step four, when you get the experimentation lab to print an outlier, graduate it up to the factory and then continue making

17:01iterations like that. run the experimentation lab in the factory at the same time. Keep finding the winners. Keep bringing them over and run that forever. That is the four-step playbook. That's how you systematize social media. If you guys are listening to gurus that are not telling you to do that, you're wasting your money. Now, to put my money exactly where my mouth is, I'm going to be running this exact playbook on my Callaway Marketing channels on Instagram, Tik Tok, and my main LinkedIn. If you want to follow those along or you just love this topic and you want to see what I do on short form

17:30and watch me grow it in real time, you can follow me there. I'll link those below. This is what I'm running and I guarantee it will build a mega engine that turns views into leads for my business. As always guys, I'm trying my absolute best to give you sauce, differentiated, non-obvious, oneofone sauce that you do not get everywhere else. There's a lot of people trying to talk about content. There's a lot of

17:50people trying to talk about business. Nobody's talking about business owners doing content to drive leads like me. So, if that's you and that's a core pain point you have and you want to future proof your business in the AI world and figure out how to build these systems, you know what to do. Subscribe, reach

18:05out. I've got so much free stuff below. Check that out if you want. All right, we will see you guys on the next one. Peace.