The BEST & WORST Advice for Growing on Social Media transcript

In 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 works, 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 horrible 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. If 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 to 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. And 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 virality 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.

Some 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. Most 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 you'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 out 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 allows 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 of 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 advice 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 you 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. The 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 emphasis 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 button. 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 press 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. And 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.

Happens 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 right, 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 winner 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 best 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 flair. 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. Without 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.

It'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 the 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. In 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. And 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 goal as someone who's smaller growing is to carve a new lane to justify why the buyer should pay attention to you, the smaller, new entrant, versus the bigger, better incumbent.

Copying does not create a new lane. It just creates a derivative in second, third, fourth, fifth place in a lane that's already occupied. But just to play this out, if you were to copy someone word for word 10 times in a row and all 10 went viral, what are you going to do next? If you actually got people to follow you for words that aren't yours, you don't have the skills or expertise or an offer to even serve them anything.

This is where imposter syndrome comes from, when you copy other people. And it's because you are an imposter. Literally by definition, you're an imposter of the original person you copied. And I don't say this to hate. I say this because there are a lot of people who don't know what to do that think the best approach is to just copy others' words and they'll grow. Do not do this. The better strategy is to share your authentic and original thoughts, real thoughts and ideas that you had on your own.

If some of those overlap with the exact same thing that someone bigger said, that's fine because sometimes the right answer is the right answer. But you should have your own tweak, your own delivery, and it should seem not the same. The nuance is that you want to use data to aim you to the topics and messages that matter and then use your own authentic creativity to execute differently. That's how they play together.

S tier for data, F tier for copying. All right, the next piece of advice is around niche selection. A lot of people will hear the advice that when you're trying to figure out where to make content, pick a niche where there's less competition. And this is D tier advice that you should not follow. The only reason you would pick a niche where nobody's paying attention is if you identified an emerging category earlier than everyone else.

Maybe it's something like robotics right now in 2026. And if you do that, and you're playing the category famous game, and you want to become the biggest person in robotics for brand deals, fine, that makes sense. Pick a niche where nobody's at. But in any other scenario, you want to pick the niche where you already have unique insight, unique expertise, and aligns with the offer that you're actually selling. And if you don't have an offer already, this is how I would decide which niche to play in.

First, don't start with the content, start with the skill. You want to pick a skill and become world-class at that skill first before you make content. Whatever that skill is, you're then going to make content around that skill, around that niche. Because once you have a skill, you will have non-obvious insights, experience, and expertise that you can share in the content that will be different from everyone else. If you don't have a skill, don't pick making content about making content because you obviously don't have the skill of content if you're starting from scratch.

Starting with an area where you already have skills is the best way to pick a niche because you have authentic perspective that is different from other people. And I'll say it again what I said in the last point. If you were to lie and pretend you have expertise and copy someone's stuff and you're able to get it to go viral, what do you do then? You'd have 50,000 people following you for a topic where you have no expertise or skills.

So, it's very hard to actually turn those views into dollars. It's much easier to make content around an area where you have expertise and perspective already. And if you don't have expertise and perspective, go get that before you make content. Most people think if they just make content it's this cheat code for wealth. It's not. Content is just the vehicle to amplify your expertise so that you can monetize around it.

If you don't have expertise it's going to be hard to build authority. All right, this next piece of advice is very important for people trying to drive conversion. A lot of people will say don't include CTAs in your videos because it will ruin the flow and it will seem too salesy. This is F tier advice. Do not listen to that. And this is something I've changed my mind on significantly in the last 6 months. When I made tech and AI content, I would never include CTAs because I didn't want to interrupt the flow.

I wanted someone to watch, get sucked in, hypnotized by the story, and then re-loop it back again. And that made sense because I wasn't trying to convert people on those videos. Well, the truth is if you want to drive the conversions and you're trying to turn these views into dollars on your own offers, you want to ramp as many people as possible from social media down to the platforms that you own, email, community, or even straight to your landing page.

Because of this, you want to include a CTA on literally every video. So, anyone saying don't put CTAs in the videos do not understand how funnels work. If you look at my latest Instagram page, the Callaway marketing one, I've gone from like zero to 80k in 4 months, 30 to 40,000 emails collected, 100,000 in revenue. Every single video has a CTA, every one. And if you want to use CTAs without ruining authority and making it seem salesy, this is how you do it.

What you want to do is aggravate a pain point in the video and then make a CTA that offers the solution to that pain point or more information to get to the solve. This is called a native embed CTA. You're natively embedding the solution in a way that doesn't feel like an ask, more like you're doing a favor for the viewer. And the beauty of doing this a lot is that when you use CTAs, you can look at the performance and use that testing to drive messaging and other angles on your landing page copy or even paid ads.

All right, the next piece of advice is to jump on trending formats as soon as you see them. And this is actually C tier advice. I thought it was going to be F-tier, but I thought about it again, and I think there is some benefit in doing this. Formats are just a fancy way of saying how you sequence your points and how you lay out the visuals. A trending format means that somebody figured out a new way of sequencing their points or a new way of laying out their visuals that works really well.

If you notice a trending format that works in your niche and it could be applied to your topic in a way that benefits your explanation, you should use it. But to be clear, you're not making the format to make a format. You're picking a format because it's the best way to structure your points or lay out your visuals so that the comprehension is the highest. It sits in C-tier because certain formats would be good for you and certain ones wouldn't.

For example, when the Kumar video started popping, everybody made the Kumar method format. But the reality is this was just a way of editing the visuals that didn't actually help accrue trust for almost anyone. So that format is one you shouldn't have made. On the flip side, somebody came up with the S-tier ranking format like this and it worked really well. And this is a great way to sequence your points in a tiered list.

So as soon as you see that, you make that and you have disproportionate return. So when it comes to formats, you always want to ask yourself, "What is the best way I can structure my points or show the visuals so that the viewer actually understands what I'm saying?" Whatever that answer is, that's the format you should make. If you want to see our full database of the best examples for the top 22 short-form formats, we actually built that inside of Sandcastle's in the collections tab.

For each one you can click in, you see five to 10 examples, you can look at the transcripts and see all the detailed information for them. This is a really great way to model your videos on a specific format style if you're not sure how to make it. I'll link one of the collections below if you want to click through and see it. The reality is the best way to make something new is to model off of it, so these examples are super helpful.

All right, the next one is kind of interesting, and the advice is spending more time making your videos will always lead to better performance. This is C-tier advice. It's actually a little counterintuitive. Typically, when you apply more time and effort to something, the performance will go up. But with content, I noticed the return on time is actually more like a bell curve. If you spend no time on the video at all, it'll probably flop.

And if you spend a ton of time, like 20 hours on the video, it might do well, but the return on that time will not have been worth it. The sweet spot is actually in the middle, where you spend a moderate of time on each rep, but no more than is required. And here's why this is the case. Viewers can't actually tell how much time you spent on the video. If you're a business owner, your job is a time allocator. You're trying to allocate your time as efficiently as possible.

If you spent 20 minutes on a video, what are the chances that spending 2 hours would get the video to do six times better? Well, maybe. I could see the argument for that. But if you spent 20 hours on a video, is that video going to do 60 times better than 20 minutes? Probably not. And so what you want to find is the perfect efficiency per rep. What is the right amount of time per video, where you can get the best return on your time, not the best total views.

And this is where the principle of creative constraints really comes into play. Creative constraints are extremely helpful in limiting the effort you spend per video. If you can find ways to constrain yourself to just making a few formats, or just recording in a few ways, or just only making videos on a few topics, those constraints limit the amount of decisions you have to make to go from idea to post. So, it's not that more time doesn't make the videos better.

It's that more time isn't always worth it when you're a business owner. For me right now, I spend 4 hours per week on my marketing channel, and we're posting seven videos per week. So, I'm about at 30 to 45 minutes of my time all in per rep. And I find that right now to be a sweet spot where I can do some damage on the originality, but I'm not wasting so much time per video. What most coaches won't say is that efficiency per rep is actually the most important thing for a business owner.

A lot of the strategies and systems that I build, they're obsessive on trying to reduce the amount of time you spend per rep, while still getting a huge amount of performance out. All right, the next piece of advice is my absolute favorite one. I had to bury it in the video, and that is you are the niche. This is D-tier advice. Do not follow this. If you listen to this channel for a while, you know I've hammered this and why it's so bad.

Let me just explain it really quickly. You are the niche implies that you as the individual is the center of the channel. And what this really means is that you're allowing yourself to make videos about all types of topics, whatever's interesting to you at the time. This is bad advice because it puts you as the priority and not the viewer, which is kind of arrogant and just sub-optimal. Now, if you're trying to build mainstream fame, you as the niche is the strategy.

So, it's not that it can't work, it's that if you're watching this channel, you're probably not Logan Paul trying to build mainstream fame. You're probably a business owner trying to accrue a personal brand so you can grow your business. And in those cases, the topic as the niche is better. Let the niche be the niche. You don't need to be the niche. If I make videos about business, business is the niche. Callaway, me, is not the niche.

Now, with my business videos, to infuse as much personality and as much originality as I possibly can to get you to like me, but I'm still only making topics about business. The hard pill to swallow that most people don't want to admit is that viewers aren't watching the content for you. They're watching it for them. And that's why you are the niche is a broken strategy. Just remember, people that are pushing the you as the niche narrative, they're trying to sell you a course on teaching you how to be the niche.

So, just ignore it cuz it's not the best. All right, the next piece of advice is to hire an editor as soon as possible. And this is A-tier advice for anyone who's trying to build a real content operation. The number one thing that will limit your ability to increase posts is editing. It's the thing that takes the most time per rep. So, your goal, if you're serious about content, should be to hire an editor as soon as possible, even earlier than you can afford in some cases.

Now, when I was first learning how to make short-form video with the text stuff, I forced myself to do editing. The first 150 videos I edited myself. I didn't want to become a video editor, but I wanted to be world-class at the whole stack. I should have hired an editor much, much sooner. It was taking me four to five, sometimes six hours per edit every single day. And if you're a legit business owner, you don't have that time.

Editing was the thing that prevented me from expanding my operations sooner. Now, typically, good editing is going to cost you anywhere from $50 to $150 per video. And if you're paying anything less than that, you're probably getting significantly less quality, and so the taste embedded in the editor is just not there. Editing is one of those things where you get what you pay for. If you want to work with the same editors that work on my short-form channels, both the tech and AI stuff and the marketing stuff, I've got links below.

You can fill out the form. And I recommend you get somebody to edit your videos as soon as possible. All right, this last piece of advice is a classic. I had to end on this one. This is anything around settings optimizations, using hashtags, posting at certain times is the best, I can get the hacks on this, that, and the other. Guys, this is all fugazi. It's F-tier advice. All of us know deep down there is no click one button, and all of a sudden the thing does 4x better.

We all know that, because if that existed, we would all do it. It's not real. The people telling you all these little hacks and tricks that don't apply, they're just trying to sell you a beginner social media course. None of that stuff actually moves the needle. All that stuff is icing. What you really want to focus on is the cake. There only four things that make up the cake. Picking topics that your ideal viewer actually cares about, sharing non-obvious insight on those topics that they haven't heard before, giving them a way to tactically apply that insight so they can get a result on their own, and consistently doing that for a long period of time.

That is all that matters. If you just do those four things in every video, and you do not stop, you will win. Don't fall for the silly advice that doesn't actually matter. Spend all your time on those four things. All right, guys, that is all I've got for this video. Tried a little bit of a different one. I haven't actually done an S-tier ranking video. So, if you liked this one, let me know in the comments. If you didn't like this one, let me know as well, and I won't do it ever again.

If you're a business owner trying to grow your business with content, you can You tell this will be the best channel that you could possibly watch. I specifically focus on this channel on helping people build social media machines so they can turn views into leads and sales for their business. If that's you and you want to work with me directly, I've got links below for that. My goal is to help 1 million business owners generate at least 1 million dollars from content in their business.

That'd be a trillion dollars of market impact. If you want to be one of those million, make sure to comment below, let me know what you're struggling with, and also I have a ton of free stuff in the description. I got to give a lot away in order to get that many people to the bar. So, make sure you check the description and let me know if there's something not there that you need. All right, we will see you guys on the next one.

Peace.