oren meets world: social media easy mode? scaling strategies for 2025

Content is on easy mode. If you're willing to put in the work and you actually do the things that work on the network. This goes for a brand and this goes for personalities. And so we're gonna talk about that here today. We're gonna go through the state of brand content and what I think is gonna be different in 2025 and how you can act on it. Then we're gonna go through the state of the creative professional. If you're a person that wants to make content, particularly if you have any background in entrepreneurship, creativity, marketing, branding, et cetera, we're gonna talk about what can work for you. Then we're gonna go through the algorithms, their state, how I feel they work and what you can do to make sure you're taking maximum advantage. Then we're gonna talk through the secret, which is the concept of a format. This is the one thing everyone needs to develop. It's something that I've been working on a lot over this year that once you see broken down and explained, it will make almost everything about why social media content works make sense. Let's lock in. So for brands, the key things we're gonna talk about are concepts and personality, number one. Scaled accounts and multiple accounts functioning together, number two. Community, number three. The power of briefs, number four. And speed is number five. To kick it off, concepts are king. What you'll notice about the brands that are breaking out on social media right now is they have something specific about their content. It's not just here's my products or here's what we do. They have something interesting and specific that they're talking about or doing that makes their content stand out from the rest. We're gonna go through a few examples. You'll also notice for the most part, these brands are creator-led. That doesn't mean they're creator-founded, but there are personalities that are on camera that define the brand's presence. We'll go through a couple examples of this too because it's often who you wouldn't expect. And third, they're all doing both carousels and they're doing reels. This is in particular on Instagram. We'll talk about TikTok as well. But they are finding a balance between these two working formats because they reach and appeal to different people and feed into each other and their success. So what do I mean by content with a concept? So to kick off as an example of what I mean by ideas, we're gonna start with BK Coffee Shop and the content that they have here. So you'll notice that they have a recurring series with the creator who's one of the partners in it and other creators that come in and out where they present a avant-garde black mirror version of a coffee shop experience. People come in, they have these film title overlays, they film it like a little series, and they give these ridiculous concepts that come up. And these will be collaboration posts between the creator who started it, the actual account of the brand itself, and the creators that come in. As you can see, as you dive in, there's a who's who of people you may recognize from the internet who are coming in and making these guest appearances, all with relatively the same look and feel of production. It's beginning to establish this as more of a TV show. They're trying to be more of a Parks and Rec or something of that nature than they are trying to be a typical brand account. Now, before anyone kind of cries out at, oh, this would be so expensive, this would be so much to do, when you really look at this, they have the same two camera angles, they have a bunch of guests, they have a relatively simple editing style. You could spend a lot of money making something like this, or you could do it pretty straightforward. At the end of the day, with a two-camera setup, even a one-camera setup, if it's filmed with lines, that's particularly nice. And someone that knows what they're doing, the actors that rehearse, this is easier than you think. The concept is the thing that puts it together. And once you get into a rhythm of executing it the first time, the second time, getting good at it, you can continue to hit it, especially if it's doing well in the algorithm, it gives you the incentive to continue to execute these. And because the actual videos are doing well, now you get people that wanna be guests inside of them. I love this example because it's not your average, not a fashion brand or someone with a huge budget is a creator who has a coffee shop, who's looking at an out-of-the-box way to position their content as television and have it stand out on feed. In a similar way, I wanna look at Gant. So I love this travel series they have. I'm gonna do an art direction video in a few weeks, we'll dive into it a little bit deeper, but they have these concepts they have occurring. One is postcards from different places where they're filming these little vignettes of people that get a lot of views and looks. But if you go through their page, they have multiple of these concepts. Checking in for the holidays, where they're filming inside of a hotel scenario, and they're putting together little vignettes that show that. They are doing their best to create a bunch of different scenarios and test what works, and then continue them in different ways. But they're also balancing that with near-constant carousels of the product, right? All the typical things you'd expect from a fashion brand presented artfully and nicely in simple carousels next to each other to balance out these brand-building, more viral items with really straightforward things that actually show off what they're selling. And the balance they have in this account of trying conceptual things, of trying them multiple times to make sure they work, of tweaking them and adjusting them, while at the same time having really sales-oriented, straightforward content right next to it is a really smart approach, I feel like, for brands that want to approach this and make sure they have performance dialed as well. But you may say, hey, those are high-budget. Those require you to have real cameras, people on set, scripting, all that kind of stuff. And you'd be right. There is at least some level of production value. But that doesn't mean that that's the only answer. When I talk about the algorithms a little bit later, I'm gonna note that Instagram is moving higher production value, but there are still tons of lower-production things that work, and on TikTok, lower production is still king. And so to call this out, I'm gonna look at Santa Cruz Medicinals. It's a legendary account. I'm pulling up their Instagram. They're bigger and more prolific on TikTok. But this is the creator, the founder, becoming a personality and treating every single moment like they're an ongoing narrative about his life. They have all of these things going on inside their content where they'll have rented houses. They have competitions with other creator houses. They're doing challenges. They're getting people into shape inside this environment. They have a cast of characters. He's doing constant skits, and it's all super simple, super low production done on iPhone, but they have created a narrative around their brand. He is showing up every day doing things like calling out Lunchables or creating X challenge or Y challenge or bringing people into it, sharing it with podcasts, clips, and it's a relentless stream of content around the founder that just breaks out of the box because it's treating it far more like you're watching a reality show about him where he also happens to be talking to the camera a lot of the time than it is anything else. And the last brand I'm gonna bring up is Dershoots. And I wanna bring this up because I talk to a lot of brands outside of the fashion space. I know a lot of you watching this are potentially in there because I make a lot of content about it. So we see all the cool content ahead of time, right? Because things happen there. But one of the biggest trends I think are gonna be happening for all brands in 2025 is way more humor content. So Dershoots has a constant stream of skits. They have two creators that are in almost every video and the founder makes some appearances as well. It's a male and a female creator. So there's a dynamic between the two of them that often happens. And there's also, they have their own individual characters and is a constant stream of funny videos. That gets tons of views. They're always wearing the clothes from the brand inside the videos. Sometimes the clothes are also at the center of them. Like you can see here, like with these loafers. But every video is conceptual. Every video is funny. And they release them absolutely constantly. They also have a pretty advanced strategy of putting different accounts for these when they open different locations. I'll talk about scaled accounts in a second. But using this humor aspect is another one where this is the creativity, right? Again, over the production. They've added production onto this as they've become more successful with it. But at its core, it's two people engaging with each other, acting out funny scenarios where creativity is king. There's no fancy cameras. It's iPhone all the time. And you can see the intention that's put into it and how well it's done for the brand. So let's talk about scaled accounts. One thing you'll notice is that there's multiple accounts now representing brands. You'll see the account has a brand. A founder will have a brand. An employee will have a brand. It'll be a behind the scenes account. Once you figure out content, I wouldn't start multiple until you know what you're doing. Once you figure it out, you start to realize content's actually pretty easy to produce. There's multiple angles and multiple styles. And the more stories you tell, the better it is what you can do. Again, I wouldn't recommend it until you have at least one figured out. But beginning to put those different pieces in place and say, we're gonna have one regionally because regional content works really well in the algorithm. Or we're gonna be able to have our content told by multiple voices or different. We have employees that create content. We wanna get on an account or we wanna have a secret account. Whatever it is, start thinking about that strategy. And so one key thing to remember, especially if you work at a company, is that it's no longer your company's voice representing you on social media. It's the combination of your company, your customers, and your team members. And that overlap that happens right there is how you can have something special happen because all of them should be a part of telling the brand story. And we'll get to this in a future video. But one of the key things that's driving a lot of this is the briefing process. I'll probably do just a dedicated creative briefs video at one point. But all of this does well because people are creating repeatable outlines and formats that work and are able to share them with others and get others involved and execute a lot of it without having to be in the middle of it at all times. And if there's one skill that is valuable going into 2025, it's being the person that can creative brief. My timeline is filled with people looking for a creative strategist and creative director jobs. And that is because finding people who can actually communicate that consistently, follow up, have nuance and report on it is tough. This is a new scenario. It's hard to have those proof of actually made from work to do that. And that's what we're seeing so much demand for now. And what helps things like this scale. So moving on from brands, we're gonna talk about people and what makes people stand out on social media now. If you're trying to create your own presence as a professional. And then I'll dive into the state of the individual algorithms. So first I will start out that social media is the portfolio now. There is no more, hey, I'm gonna go to this website to look at X or Y. You are discovered and understood on social. And the key reason of that is because the core work on its own often doesn't matter as much anymore. How the work performs in context, aka how it moves on social media becomes even more important. And this goes for everything from copywriting to photography, to actual content creation, to any marketing campaign you might have. So much of it goes back to that, that putting it in the social media context becomes ultra important. Most skills lead back to content. Brands are sold by content. That goes from everything from services to physical locations to products. And then money and passion are both generated through content. So I'm gonna talk through a few formats that you can use to make content for yourself that are impactful now that will actually make a difference if you're trying to look for what should I do to actually start participating in that that's gonna work. So the first is what I call the creative carousel. This is one from someone who was in Cut30 recently, who again, I like to highlight this one because it's not beautiful. His typography is not amazing. It's cut off on several slides, but it's still got 2,300 likes or whatever it is. Cause he's literally just using the carousel format to tell his exact story. And people are interested in his story. And this is a really key thing to think about. And I wanna encourage, and I'll start again with this one that doesn't look beautiful, but tells a cool story as a great example of putting multiple slides together with texts on top of them to tell a story people wanna hear is one of the easiest ways to make content if you don't wanna put your face on it. Another example for a brand, this is a conceptual carousel, right? I want this idea of a creative carousel. You can tell a story. This is one where they're just presenting photos artfully, but it's creative, right? It's not just these photos here. It's Gumtree has their notifications silenced is like a key call out of this, right? Where you're able to actually show and explain something that's going on and put it into a creative way. Another one I like to call out. So Katie just has these carousels where she's basically telling her story about running, what she's eating, what she's learning. And she's just putting text in cool patterns around this. And some of this, you could scribble on your iPad. Some of this, you could use text wrap tools and Photoshop or similar to do, but she's basically presenting her life artfully. So when I call out creative carousel, I really mean creative. I mean, there needs to be interesting things that are happening to help tie it together, but it's an amazing vehicle to showcase your life and whatever it is that you do and are interested in. And should be kind of the backbone of how you're thinking about personal content strategy. And the same goes, not just on Instagram, but TikTok weights carousels even higher than ever, literally as of today, higher than ever. And it has, now they have another dedicated feed just for photos. And if you are on threads, which I know not a lot of people are, one thing that is bubbling on there, I think will bubble at other places is you're seeing these people do these like day nine of using threads as a photographic journal where they're really playing with like text styles on things and like how text overlays. I think we obviously see a decent amount of this on Instagram already. This is another style where if you can learn to do that and document your life and participate in it, it's a great way to look at making content right now. So besides creative carousels, another idea is actually curation, right? Where I don't think anymore, you can go on there and just read the news and say, here's what's happening in marketing or here's four things you can learn about accounting or whatever it is. Now you need to take it a step further. And so this curation one, this is from Yaw, another Cut30 grad and one of my friends, where he's put together a bunch of slides where he's just, you know, obviously there's a bunch of known brands in here, but it's talking about what he thinks is interesting about them with a common theme. It's another aggregation piece you should look at for personality. Creative carousels and then curation. And curation can be via carousel or via video. And then the third is the idea of ideas. So this is a format that I've used a ton where I would basically say, hey, if I was creative directing X, I would do Y. This woman is using a similar format to great effect right now and has grown a lot of followers and is making some really cool content. But what you'll notice about this is it has some inherent virality because of its controversy. So she is basically presenting, if I was gonna make a brand, I'd do it like this. Awesome showcase of your skill set. If you are doing anything, if you are an accountant, if you are a photographer, if you're a strategist, if you're a copywriter, basically saying, hey, if I was, you know, one I did maybe like nine months ago or six months ago if I was Skullcandy, I'd do collaborations like this, right? And you should be able to present yourself in that context is an anchor and a hook that works really well. It gives you a challenge and makes good content about it. But she's upping it a notch because people are here for the comments, right? When you look at what is one of the things that helps content succeed the most, it is the comments on it because dwell time goes longer and watch time goes longer when people are scrolling through the comments to see what other people say. And so she has a lot of controversy around these videos because she generates all the images she uses from them in AI. AI is still, no matter how much people start using it, reviled on the internet in terms of image generation because it's replacing creative jobs, et cetera. Won't go too deep on that in this video, but you will see a constant, you know, 22,000 likes on someone just hating on her use of AI, right? But it doesn't matter. That sparks the conversation to get her ideas in front of more people. It has an innate virality to it because of the controversy. And that's something else to think about. But this idea format is wonderful. I would encourage you to put yourself in the shoes of what you would do for a company or scenario and apply your expertise to it as a key content format to stand out with personal brand. And you don't have to do that with just long content. Someone who I think does it well with short content and lower production value content is this creator. And she does predictions, right? They're usually iPhone, they're usually a little less put together, but she will literally say, here's what I think is gonna happen with this company or this brand or the Kardashians, or I think this app should be created or why doesn't this exist? It's 90% of her content. Right now she's doing 31 days of predictions like for the holidays, which is smart. And I think she did it last year too. But again, she's just putting her ideas out there in like relatively low production with some text on it. And if you are the kind of person that has ideas or your company wants to show that off, this is a great format with which to do it. And I think, again, reading the news or saying this thing happened or breaking it down into a playbook is moving away in 2025. Real ideas people can resonate with and think is what people want to follow. And the last topic I will talk about is creating art, like creating actual things people find interesting. You can have art in any way, like from this design creator who then kind of created a toy to someone showing off their photography but doing it in a super artful way. If you want to show off something creative that you do, you need to present something like really artful and unique. I couldn't find the original creator for this. This is taken from a style of a creator that got really popular. He was doing like, this was his thing where he put his hand with whatever on it behind him cropped and that got super popular. Then a lot of people jumped on the trend. It started by one person who was basically, I'm making carousels like this. And literally it was like a nicely lit shot of a hand, nicely lit shot of a person, one cropped behind the other, really fun format. And so this is the kind of world we exist in, right? Where if you are creating, like find some standout look and feel way and then continue to create it. And eventually it might get adopted whole scale, but you're gonna get the followers' attention in the meantime. All right, so now we are gonna talk about the algorithms and how to look at that into the new year. This is really tactical information to really think about how content moves and why. So first is the Instagram algorithm, probably more important than ever as the looming TikTok ban in the US comes up. But you will notice that content on there is upgrading. More and more high visual content, movie level production content, great looking content on pro cameras is succeeding. And I would be leaning into that if this is your primary platform. And I'd be doing what I showed earlier and creating a 50-50 mix of carousels and reels. You have to be good at both, I feel like, to really stand out in the new year. If you are excellent at one, that will always work, but I think it's really worth testing doing both. And one thing to note about Instagram's algorithm is they have what I call like a, almost like a mass algorithm. They can put you in a bucket. They basically say, do you like marketing? Do you like cars? Do you like female fitness? Do you like men's fitness? Do you like fashion? They take these big buckets and put you in an algorithm of the bucket. You're in the marketing algorithm, the design algorithm, and you can be in a few at a time. But that's how they look at these big macro algorithms, which is why creators can blow up and do really well because if you start to dominate inside one thing, you get shown to anyone that's in that algorithm. That's how I view Instagram. And TikTok is not that, right? TikTok is very specific. It will give you exact creators you like and show you a ton of it. It will give you exact niches you like. You really like, you know, dark anime, but only from the 90s period. Got it. You like conspiracy theories, but only this type of conspiracy theory. They're on it. They will give you really exact versions of the things that you're into. And that's worth thinking about as you create because Instagram needs to know where to put you. And if there isn't an algorithm for what you're doing and it's throwing you somewhere else, then you're not gonna succeed. Whereas in TikTok, you can make the nichest content you want and you may not get a ton of views from it, but it will be the people that are actually interested in that subject, provided you're making something that can kind of point them in the right direction, has good captions and descriptions, et cetera. But TikTok is more than ever now different than Instagram. It is iPhone content. It is base level content. Very little pro quality content succeeds on there. It has lots of photos. It has lots of skits. It has lots of people participating and talking candidly. And I do feel like this is now the time where if you don't have content, kind of like the Santa Cruz Medicinals guy's show where it can kind of cross over to both and is lo-fi, you need a specific strategy for TikTok. And the only people that are able to get away with this high end content are big brands with established followings who are doing that kind of thing. And after that comes YouTube and YouTube is just mainstream content when it comes to shorts. It shows the shorts to everybody. If you want something to really succeed in there, it has to have massive mainstream appeal. It is barely an algorithm in terms of what it gives you. It's very light on that. If you wanna have huge success on there, it needs to be something that anyone of any age or level would love and like, which is why you see so few people blow up on it who don't have mass appeal content. And niches are really hard to build there and so is personality. And then we have LinkedIn. LinkedIn is boosting impressions right now. You'll see massive impression numbers because there's a little module on the screen that has a carousel. And anytime someone scrolls by that module, which they'll scroll by a dozen times whenever they're in a session, then they get an impression on the video, whether the video plays or not. So you'll see you're getting huge impressions on LinkedIn, but not actually many views. But LinkedIn video is great. They're pushing it more than ever. I'd highly recommend creating on there, but it needs to be a balance with other content. It's a lot of filler. There's a lot of people that really interact with it. It's a good thing because everyone on there is obviously more qualified, more professional. It's good if you're building a business, but I feel like it needs to be anchored with another strategy. And what does do really good on LinkedIn is approaching it as a team. LinkedIn rewards companies whose people comment on each other's stuff, gives you the option as an employee of a company to notify people at your company when you tag them that a post has gone live. There's a lot of little features like that that it actually helps if you work in LinkedIn as a team. And I'm gonna talk about two things and we're gonna wrap up. So the first is developing a format. This is the most important crucial secret to making content succeed is you'll notice that almost everybody who really blows up has a couple things in common. They are doing a thing is number one. So for instance, Nara Smith is cooking food from scratch in every single video is why she's one of the biggest TikTokers if not the biggest TikToker. My boy Thor is chopping wood every single video. He is chopping wood while he gives you life advice or flirts with the camera, whatever it is. Ken, amazing fashion account, is sitting at the same table with the graphics in the same style giving you this information. His is the least of like I'm doing a thing but he's explaining it to you like in this very similar look. But they will be doing an item that they complete this action every time. I think that's crucial. I think there's an account with that one girl who eats a ribeye every day and talks, right? She's completing an action while she does it. And that's crucial. You can add that into your content that you are doing a thing and it's the same thing every time. That is a very useful thing to anchor content inside of and a crucial thing that helps people stand out. Second is they are set up the same almost every time. Their sets don't really change. They have a unique look and feel like Nara's always wearing couture. Thor always has a unique ax or a crazy piece of wood or whatever it is. But they have set themselves up. You'll notice their framing is almost the same exactly. So people when they scroll by, they know this is unique content of this person. They recognize it immediately and that means they stay and dwell if they like it. So we now have, they're doing a thing and they're presenting it with the same visual format. And then they package it the same way, right? The same titles, the same texts in the same places. There's consistency in the branding of it. Look at the shift fashion group. They make content that we're taking apart clothes all the time. And it's a little technical, right? It's not like the most exciting content but people that are interested in it are really interested in it but they package it the same. The shots are the same each time. The text in the title cards is the same each time. And there's a hundred examples of this, right? You'll find that someone doing a thing, completing an action, cutting open clothes, baking a cake, whatever it is, combined with the same framing and formatting, adding on to value or entertainment, whichever you're getting from it, is just a key part of finding success. So I highly encourage people who are stalled in their content to think about how do I adopt this format when I create it? We have another Cut30 kicking off. It is January 7th, Cut30.co if you wanna join us for that. I will always disclaimer that that if you are like a student or you're new in your career or whatever, please just take the free content and roll with it. When I sell or package anything, I do it for people that are at a certain place in their career or a certain place in their journey where they have the resources to spend on it. If you are, again, a student or a junior person, I do not want your money from anything. If you are a professional or you're really about buildings, you know, your brand content or whatever it is, then I make solutions for you and you can hit me at Cut30.co. Drop any questions you have around content. I'm gonna do a follow-up video to this coming here in a few weeks and appreciate you watching.