What Everyone Gets Wrong Making Content in 2026

So there's a shift that's been happening for over a decade now in the world of social media, which radically affects, if not near totally determines, how well your content, your brand, and your business on social media is going to do. And that's the shift that I want to discuss in this video. And this also ties into some of the advice you will most commonly hear if you want to start posting on socials, whether for your personal brand or your business, and why that advice is pretty much dead wrong at this point. So that is going to be the video. Let's hear a word from the sponsor of today's video, and then we'll jump right into it. And now I want to show you something that, with AI, closes the gap completely between finding a product and going to market with. It's called Copify, and two parts of it matter, the shop AI and the AI analyst. Now, first, I want to show you how fast this actually is. So let's say you want to sell this product, and you can choose literally anything on a site like AliExpress. Then I'm just going to paste this link, select English, and click generate. And now this is real time. This is how fast it is generating the store. And our store is done. Now our images have been created. We can customize our shop. And then we can go ahead and publish. And that is two minutes to generate a complete Shopify store with a product page, checkout, and filled in copy and images that look really good. And the other half is the AI analyst, because building fast only actually matters if you know what to run forward. So I've pasted the same product link, and now I'll ask, what's the highest converting ad angle for this product right now, and who exactly are the buyers? And here's the advice for the highest converting angle and the exact target buyers, with no research required. Let's follow up and say, where's the positioning gap in this niche that I can exploit? And one thing I'll add, when you have a tool that's this fast, don't just build one store and pray. Build five stores at once, run ads on all of them, and then double and triple down on the one that convert the best. You test faster, you find a winner faster, and you're not betting the farm on a single product. So link is in the description. There's a free trial. Just try Shop.ai at a minimum. And if you build one store, you'll understand why this is such a great option for rapidly iterating through products to find winning concepts. So use this discount code on the screen, and the link's in the description. So social media has been around for a few decades now. And if you look at the early Facebook and Instagram and YouTube algorithms, they were much more deterministic. If a post hits these ratio thresholds for likes, for views, for engagement, then we're going to show it to all the people or a lot of the people who like to view content with this hashtag and so on from there. And those were the early versions of these social media algorithms, which now fast forward 20 years, and trillions of dollars in market cap for these companies later are much more complex, are not like they used to be. And we even get to see the behind the scenes on a lot of this when you have platforms like X completely open-sourced their algorithms. And so by looking at open-sourced algorithms like that, and also just hearing what these companies say, like what Mark Zuckerberg or the CEO of Instagram say about these platforms, we can start to understand the direction of those algorithmic shifts. And in pretty simple terms, they got better. They got better at identifying really good content and showing it to people who engage with it. And what does really good content at its core mean from an algorithmic perspective or from the perspective of these companies? It means content that people watch, content that they engage with, they spend their user seconds, minutes, hours on, and then will come back to over time to stay on the platform for longer, to make more ad dollars for the companies. And so that through line of these algorithms got much more complex, they got much better, and they did so with AI, with just more time to experiment and learn, more engineers, they got larger. And we can think about, okay, what are the implications of fundamentally better algorithms for creators? Number one, which is most obvious, and this ties into all the bad advice that you'll hear, is a lot of the things that used to matter as indicators or proxies for how good content is just don't anymore. I'm talking about hashtags, likes, shares, comment ratios. All of those things matter much less now than they used to in terms of how much content gets pushed across nearly every social platform. And hashtags are the primary example of this, where they got borderline completely deprecated across nearly every social platform. You have literal clips of the CEO of Instagram being like, yeah, hashtags just don't matter at all in terms of reach or visibility. I believe Zuck has said the same. On X, I think they stopped using them completely, like they just aren't usable anymore. On YouTube, just about the same deal. So trying to put like 25 hashtags in your video description and using that to get ranked so people click on it, that just doesn't work. And the same thing of trying to get a bunch of people to like videos, to hit certain ratios, like all that kind of accessory stuff, that gets away from that core notion of do people engage? Because that is the proxy, that is the true state of a quote-unquote good or engaging piece of video for these companies. And the content which gets people to do that the most gets rewarded. And so as a second implication, you can't really fake that. You can't fake a lot of people that the algorithm shows your content to enjoying your content or hating it, but for whatever reason, sticking around and spending their time on it. And so if we wrap all of that together, we can start to think about content less as a, oh, we need the perfect title or thumbnail, or we need to encourage people to like, or we need all these hashtags and to game it. And more so just if we create content that people want to watch relative to other content, so as a percent of the video, they stick around for longer than most videos, then we're going to do extremely well. And then that starts in turn to explain why you see the most random videos or creators or the low effort things go and get millions of views, right? The big trend on reels these days is just four photos with music, like talk about not gaming the algorithm. You just straight up put four photos up. It's not like one photo and that might go and get 12 million views. And so this is not to say that things like titles and thumbnails on YouTube are completely meaningless, but rather that everything else is downstream of people watching the video of watch time and engagement. And for you as a creator or a business owner who posts on socials, the lesson there is that is what you want to optimize for. Forget about things like hashtags and like ratios and shares. If you focus on maximizing engagement and you can iterate through that process a lot and you get really, really good engagement numbers, even if everything else was horrible, give it enough time and that content will do extremely well. And then things like a good title or a thumbnail are just a cherry on top. Now, unfortunately, that is the much harder thing to do, right? It's easy to come up relatively easy with a fantastic title and thumbnail combination on this platform or a very lengthy script that has great sounding data and statistics for a Instagram reel. But the fundamental purpose of these social apps is to get users to spend their time on it. And that means your fundamental problem to solve as a creator is exactly the same. How to get users to spend their life watching you when you're playing one of the most competitive games in the world with tens of millions of other people, also all creating content that anyone can watch and doing so probably with more resources and experience than you. So that is the challenge of it, but also the fun and the opportunity of it. And that's what I wanted to get across in this video. I hope that makes sense. And that's the pretext to all of the kind of social strategy that we talked through on this channel. That in mind, I wish you well wherever you are in the world. And I will see you in the next one. Cheers.