How to Master Social Media in 2025 [COMPLETE GUIDE]

Transcript

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Social media is the biggest opportunity of the decade, but most people fail at it because they follow outdated strategies. I've built an audience of millions of followers across multiple different platforms.

And today, I'm giving you the exact blueprint I'd use

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if I had to start growing from scratch in 2025. Let's dive in.

Most people think social media is oversaturated, but the truth is, it's actually never been easier to grow if you know what you're doing. Here's the cool thing that no one's talking about.

With platforms like

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Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube, they're actually prioritizing new creators more than ever. And here's a prime example of this.

Have you noticed that people just go viral on these social channels when they have little to no followers? It's because social media is now

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democratized. See, there was this guy one day whose car broke down and he had to go to work.

He didn't have any choices. So, what did he do?

He busted out his skateboard and he decided that he was going to get thirsty on the way to work. So, he decided to drink a big bottle of cranberry juice at the same

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time. How did this new creator with barely any followers get hundreds and millions of views over all these social platforms?

Well, the way their algorithms work now, and it didn't work this way in the past, is that even if you only have a 100 followers, and let's say you post a video, they may not show

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it to all 100 followers, but if they show it to 10 of them, and all 10 watch the whole entire video each and every single second, it tells these platforms, hey, people really love this content. We should actually go and show it to a,000 and then 10,000.

And if all of those

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people engage and they watch the majority of the video, it then tells the platform, "People love this content. Show it to everyone on YouTube or Tik Tok or Facebook that may be interested in it, even if those followers don't actually follow the creator." That in

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essence is how social media works today. All they care about is your view length.

Are people sticking around for the majority, if not the whole video? If you can get that done, your video will go viral.

One of the big keys to doing well on social media today is knowing what

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these platforms push and what they prefer versus what they actually don't care for. So, what I want you to do is go to answerthepub.com.

On answer the public, you can actually type in different queries related to your industry and see what's popular on different social

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platforms like YouTube or Instagram or even Tik Tok. This will help you determine what kind of content you should create for that platform.

Because if Answer the Public tells you, hey, these topics are popular on this platform, creating more of them is more

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likely to get you more views. Then focusing on the topics that aren't that popular on that platform.

Because if it's not that popular and you create content around it, you're not going to garner that many views. Even if you have zero followers, you can get millions of views if you follow this strategy.

But

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one key element that you need to also include in this strategy is a hook. What can you do to not just get people's attention, but also keep them there?

Microsoft Canada did a study and they found that humans actually have a shorter attention span than a goldfish.

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So, you want to make sure that you're using a peeling hook at the start of the video. This way, you're not really drawing people in, but it also helps convince them to watch the rest of the video.

Now, throughout the video, when you're discussing other subtopics, I want you to also think about what hooks

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you can use throughout the video to keep people engaged and help keep their interest so they watch the rest of the video. And on top of this, other dramatic shifts with social media means it's becoming even easier to grow from zero followers.

If you've noticed with

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all these social platforms, whether it's Tik Tok or YouTube or Facebook, they're all talking about how they're using AI, this AI technology that they've built analyzes a lot of your past data to figure out what you're going to want to watch next before you even realize it.

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So, that makes it even easier to generate more views, even if you have little to no followers. In essence, this just means engagement is king.

If you can get someone to watch all of your content, you're going to crush it and do well. But the key to that is to make

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sure that you keep people engaged through sub hooks. Sub hooks keep them wanting more.

Think of them as titles of a chapter in a book or subheadings of a section. This way, they know what they're going to anticipate.

That's going to leave them on the edge of their

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seat wanting more. The way recommendations work on these platforms is they look for patterns.

Imagine there's a million people using YouTube and you yourself also use YouTube. You watch videos on it each and every single day and so do these other million people and you guys watch actually similar

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types of content. But out of that million, there's a subset of a 100,000 people that watch the same exact content as you.

Not similar, but the same exact content. So what they'll start doing is looking at all the people in that 100,000 group.

what are all the videos

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that people watch and what are the videos that some of them have watched that others haven't. They'll start showing people all the videos that they miss because they know you're just like each and every single one of those 100,000 other people.

And they'll show you those videos because they know

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you're so likely to watch that video, which creates more engagement on their platform. And in your head, you're like, "Wow, how they realize this is the exact video I wanted to watch right now during this time." It's because they're analyzing patterns.

And with AI, it's

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even easier than it was before. Now, if you don't believe me that you can go viral with very little to no followers, I want you to think about all the people that have gone viral in the last year that you've seen online from people like that girl who said that she was looking

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for a man in finance who was 6'5 with blue eyes or the person who said Hawkua or the person who was drinking cranberry juice on that skateboard. These are all examples of people that none of us really knew but went viral because of

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their content, not because of their follower count. Finally, you'll need to understand that different social media platforms can help you grow faster and in different ways.

Different social platforms have different strengths depending on your goals. For example, LinkedIn is great for B2B.

YouTube is

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great for evergreen content. See, YouTube isn't really the social network that most people think it is.

It's more so a platform for streaming where people can go to get advice or learn about something at any given time, even if a topic was talked about 3, four, 5 years

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ago. Instagram and Tik Tok are great for what's happening right now.

And Facebook is great if you want to appeal to an older audience. See, each of these platforms have different strengths and weaknesses.

What you want to do is adjust your content based on their strengths. That way, you can maximize

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your reach based on the platform. If I started social media today, I would focus on these platforms.

My favorite platforms today are X, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts because they're prioritizing discovery over followers. There's a lot of options out there, but

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what you want to do is focus on the platforms that will give you reach even if you have no followers. Now, once you've figured out what platforms that you're going to post on, a mistake I see most people make is they start posting content the wrong way.

See, the way most social algorithms work, if you just keep

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posting content randomly and it gets little to no engagement, what it tells that social platform is, "Hey, Neil or John or Becky, post mediocre content that no one really cares to engage with. And then when you post a really amazing piece of content that you know everyone's going to love, it won't do

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that well." Why? Because these platforms have been taught that you tend to post mediocre content.

Sure, you'll get more views than your average mediocre post, but you won't get the amount of views that you deserve. Now, the real key to making sure that these platforms don't hate you is to first test your content

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on X. X is a very different type of platform than all the other social platforms.

If you keep posting on X multiple times, even if it's junk or mediocre content, it doesn't penalize you if your next post is amazing or terrible. They look at each one

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independently. Now, the other social networks, yes, do look at each piece independently as well, but your previous posting history does affect from what we've tested your future reach.

And you can retrain those other platforms, but it takes a while. X, on the other hand,

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you can just post as much as you want. It could just be word vomit.

Literally, just post different types of textbased content or video- based content and you'll see quickly what is getting tons of engagement on X. You then take your winners from X, the ones that did really well, that top 10% or 20%, you then

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repost those on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Tik Tok. When you do that, what you'll find is the content you're posting on the other platforms are much more likely to get tons of engagement and potentially even go

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viral. And if you look at what I do on my own social accounts, if you look at the Neil Patel handle, I post on X first.

Why? It's my testing bed.

It's the strategy that works. This is how I've accumulated more than a million followers when you add up all the

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networks. Heck, on YouTube alone, I have over a million followers.

Even on Facebook, I have over a million followers. That's how effective the strategy is.

But this isn't the only way to consistently go viral when you post. I don't usually tell people about this, but there's a strategy to consistently go viral on social media that most

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people aren't using. When you think about Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube, they all have search algorithms.

When you look at the younger generation, Gen Z, they actually turn to Tik Tok and Instagram to perform a search before they turn to Google. So, if you optimize

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for keywords on Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube, and all the other social platforms, you can actually keep getting more and more traffic over time. The way you do this is you head over to answer the public.

You look at the social network that you're optimizing for. You

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type in keywords related to your video. It'll tell you all the popular keywords based on search traffic.

You then want to take those videos, use it for either the title of the video or mention that keyword within the video because all these platforms can transcribe and they know what you're talking about during

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the video without you even uploading a transcript. And you want to consider using some of those keywords within the description.

When you do that, you'll find that you'll start ranking for those keywords when people type them in and perform a search on these social platforms. Best of all, that continually

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drives traffic each and every single month over time, even if your video is 6 months or even a year old. This is how you keep getting more and more reach from your old content.

The reason you need to optimize for these social search

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platforms is because they command a lot of searches. Did you know there's roughly 45 billion searches each and every single day?

6.5 billion of them exist just on Instagram. That's each and every single day.

Pinterest even has 2 billion. All these social platforms have

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billions and billions of searches when you add it all up. Most people think that Google controls the search market share.

Google has roughly 8.5 billion searches out of that 45 number. That's roughly 18%.

That means the majority of searches that happen on a daily basis actually happen on the social web if you

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combine all the platforms. In addition to these two growth methods, there's one more tactic I use all the time to consistently go viral on social media.

Copy others, but it's not what you think. The problem with just copying others is that it's not really innovative.

If you do exactly what

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someone else did, you're not going to get as many views. It's played out.

They already did it. When everyone decided to jump on a longboard and drink cranberry juice, they never got the same amount of views as the original person.

When everyone started making videos on how they were looking for a guy in finance that was 6'5, they never got the same

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amount of views as the original video. It's not about just copying what they did exactly.

It's about learning from what they did that worked. When you take the concepts from the original video and understand what caused that video to do well, such as the catchy lyrics or the

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hook or the editing that they used to keep people's attention or what they did to make people laugh, you can take those elements and create a similar video but for your vertical. And what you'll find is it will do better when you start incorporating some of those elements that have done well on the social web,

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even if they're from other videos in different industries. A great example of this in my vertical, there's a lot of people that talking about how you can make money from just posting on social media.

Instead of just creating a video that's copying it and talking about the same ways on how you can make money by

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posting on social media, I decided to create a video on how you can make money from AI. And I broke different concepts for marketers, similar to how people can make money from social media cuz a lot of that would be for marketers.

So, with the AI video, I talked about how you can leverage AI agents, for example, to make

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more revenue. That video alone got over a 100,000 views in the first 48 hours, and that was just only on YouTube.

Fast forward to a week, well over 200,000 views. It all adds up over time.

The key is just learning from other people's

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success, figuring out what's helped them do well, and then taking that success and moving it over to your industry. Now, once you've figured out exactly what to post on and how to post it to go viral, you'll need to produce content at scale.

If you actually want to grow, you need to post lots of content. It doesn't

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matter how good you are at social media marketing or just marketing in general, you never truly know what's going to go viral and what's not. What I love doing to make things simple is testing out textbased content on X.

When you create textbased content, it doesn't take that

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much production work. The moment you know that text is a hit, you can turn it into a video.

And with that video, you can transcribe it into a podcast episode. Heck, you can even take that video and then have AI help you turn it into a blog post and go more in depth.

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Repurposing makes your life easier because you can create more content out of the same original piece in less time and with less effort. You can even use tools like Opus AI that uses artificial intelligence to take your long- form videos and automatically find the hot

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clips that they think social users would love. So that way you don't have to spend as much time.

If you also have a team and a workflow, it makes things easier as well. All these tools aren't perfect yet, but they are getting better and better over time.

So having a team,

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even if they're freelancers from Upwork, will help you out. But at what point should you hire a team to streamline your social media processes?

You need to hire a team to run your social media when you're at this point. Most people think they need a team when they're starting to get tons of followers and views.

That's not actually the right

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time to hire a team. Why?

Because a team is going to cost you money and it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to make more money. The right time to hire a team is when you actually start getting hit up by companies to start working with you.

If large corporations like Louis Vuitton or Chanel or Adobe or

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even car companies like Mitsubishi are hitting you up to work with you and they're willing to offer money, it's the time to hire a team. By hiring a team, you'll be able to scale and make money faster and you can focus more of your efforts on the monetization side.

And if you can't hire a team, but you need help

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in the short run, you can always get interns from your local college or you can hire very affordable people from platforms like Upwork. The type of people that you could be hiring are researchers, people who can come up with topic ideas and tell you what's going to be hot and what's not.

Script writers,

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people who can not just outline what you should be talking about, but making sure that it flows well in a cohesive way. You also want to hire potential editors.

If the editing quality of your videos are amazing, they're more likely to do well, especially if you're in the B2B realm, than if you don't have that. In

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the B TOC realm, editing is important, but it isn't as important as something that's super polished like it would be for the B2B realm. But when all is said and done and you have a killer content strategy, as well as an incredible team to back you up, the reality is that although social media is the greatest

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opportunity of the decade, it could also disappear overnight. When platforms change your algorithm, your content, your reach could disappear.

But when you build up an email list and you tell your social media followers to go to your website and download an ebook or just opt in for your email list, you can then

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leverage that email list to continue to sell products, services, or even promote your social content. For example, with YouTube, they love looking at the engagement of video in the first 24 hours.

If a video does really well, it's more likely to go viral. You can tell all the people in your email list to

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head over to YouTube and watch that video by doing something as simple as just sending out an email blast. And you can do that for free using tools like Mailchimp.

This will help ensure that not only does your social content do better, but it also ensures that even if the algorithm stop favoring you, you

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have some way to reach your audience and monetize. The best part about email list, it's that alternative secret weapon that's yours forever that people can't take away from you.

The easiest way to set one up is you go to mailchimp.com. It's free to sign up and they'll give you templates to collect

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emails and templates when even sending out emails. It literally doesn't take more than a few minutes to set up.

And if you want to learn more about digital marketing and how to use it to level up your business, watch this next video where I break down my 23 years of marketing experience into a 23inut

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