Social Media Cheat Codes

Hey, this is Sharan Treev, that's it. Welcome back to the Business School podcast and this episode, I'm going to give you the four big social media cheat codes. Everyone wants to have social media success, everyone wants to be an influencer, everyone wants to go viral, but no one's really shown them how, and so they constantly work on random videos and hoping and praying for something to go viral, hoping and praying for them to make money from this, hoping and praying that maybe a client will call them or a lead will call them based on the content or the ideas that they make. However, what if I told you that if you actually implemented these four cheat codes in sequence, your chances of going viral skyrocket, because this is how you engineer virality. The top creators don't just hope and pray that something will go viral. They have the cheat codes built in, they know the exact formula. And while they're not sharing it with us, we have to find a way to share it with ourselves. So in this episode, I break down for you the four social media cheat codes that are going to help you not only go viral, but to make a lot of money and it all starts right now. One thing is for certain, just because it's tried and true doesn't mean it's working right now. So the big question is this, where can you learn what is working right now? The strategies, the tactics, the psychology and the exact how to, how to go your business, how to blow up your personal brand and supercharge your personal growth. That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharon Trevata, and welcome to Business School. All right, let's be real. Social media is one giant game, and most people are playing it completely wrong. Not because they're not talented, or not because they don't have great ideas, but because they don't know the cheat codes. And the top 1% of creators, they're not working any harder than you or me. They're just playing a significantly smarter game. And today, I'm going to hand you the four tactical cheat codes to dominate this game. So let's get right into it. The big part of these four cheat codes is to hit the first one. And that is the social media game board. Okay, so imagine social media has a big strategy game, and you have 40 time blocks per week. How do you spend those blocks determines how successful you are? Now knowing the pieces is important, because the board consists of four key elements. Number one, the platform. Where are you posting? Is it Instagram, or YouTube, or X, or LinkedIn? Number two is the format. What type of content are you creating? Short form, long form, video, text, pictures? Number three is the audience. Who are you reaching? Is it your ideal client profile? Entrepreneurs, students, professionals, or people who want fitness? And number four, and four alone, is the message, what are you exactly saying? Is it your expertise? Are you giving them frameworks? Or are you storytelling to inspire them in some way? Say for example, you are a fitness coach, and you're targeting these busy professionals who don't have time to work out. Instead of randomly posting, we use a smarter strategy. So number one, on the platform, you maybe would use YouTube because you know that video builds trust. The format, you may use short form reels, because you know that busy professionals prefer quick insights. For the audience, you know that you can target working professionals who are struggling with fitness. And the message is really simple. You want something actionable and have fitness hacks that can help them save time so that these spend more time following you. So here's the kicker. One of the best things that you can do is to ask yourself, where does your target avatar actually hang out? I've seen creators grind it out on Instagram when their ideal clients are all over LinkedIn. That's what it's like to fish in the desert, right? Like the wrong place, wrong strategy. Not creators don't just work harder, they work smarter by number one, picking the right platform for their audience. Number two, using video because it's the fastest way to get trust and maximize their reach. Number three, tapping into like high valued audiences, because they know that they could use their spending power to get more revenue. And number four, you craft these high retention messages that help them stay with your content for much longer. The players who win this game don't just create, they allocate their time with a lot of precision. And that's the big difference between us and these top one creators. So now that you've got your social media battle plan in place, let's talk about kind of the next big piece. How do you actually hook people in with your storytelling? We all know that the hooker, the first three or three to 30 seconds are really important based on the length of your content. So here's what I want to talk about. How do hook people in and why this is the secret sauce of storytelling? Now, here's the deal. No content could have the best information on the planet. But if your storytelling is weak, people just won't stick around long enough to hear you give them the information that you want. And that is actually truly the problem. So the big question is, how do you make sure that people stay engaged throughout this process just like you are right now? So let's actually break it down. The first is, you got to ditch this traditional story arc mentality. The old school, what we learned in school was the beginning, middle and end format is way too slow for social media. Instead, we got to use waves of rising and falling tension to keep people hooked because it's almost like taking a three hour movie and doing it in 30 seconds. But then, the re-hooking. We think that the hook is important. Let me give you this. And this is worth the price of admission. The re-hooking needs to happen throughout the video. Every few minutes, you've got to introduce a new problem right after solving the last one. And this keeps that you're watching. It's not about the hook and getting the payoff. It's about the hook and getting the payoff and then introducing another hook so that they stay with you in this curve to the process over and over again. What I've learned though, most of the time to have your content really land is to use some kind of villain. Every great story has an antagonist of some sorts. And frame yours as a system or something outdated or thinking or a common mistake. Just like I said, you don't want the traditional story arc method. That's really important because once you have a villain, then everyone knows that we have a common villain and they want to spend more time with you and they buy into whatever you're teaching or sharing. And here's the last part. Is instant shareability and this idea that you've got to make your story so concise that someone can retell the story with a single sentence. Only then do you have the word of mouth virality built into it. Remember, you have to earn the right to their attention in the first three to five minutes. A lot of top creators talk about this. If it's a longer YouTube video, you probably have three minutes. If it's a shorter video, you probably have three seconds because we have to earn the right to their attention. And that's how the biggest creators do it. All right. So now that you know how to hook people in, let's talk about how to turn that hook the attention into money overall. And here is cheat code number three. That is how do you monetize your content, meaning how do you turn views into dollars in some way without coming across as aggressive or sleazy, right? So now you've got people watching your video. Okay. Cool. Now what? Well social media isn't just about getting likes. It's about turning attention into revenue and you got to be really diligent about that. And if you don't, then you're just going to have a lot of likes and a lot of shares and a lot of views and not really a lot more revenue, which was going to completely demoralize you. And that means understanding how the game actually works. Now I want to give you like a simple three step monetization plan. You probably heard this before, but I want to break it down in the pieces so you know exactly what to focus on and where your potential hole, maybe. So the first step of that process is to find your monetization path. I call it the money map. Are you selling a product? Are you selling a service? Are you rules today? Did I mortgage broker or coach a consultant? Are you selling sponsorships? Do you have affiliate links? What is your end game of this process? That's number one. You got to find the money path. Number two, you got to lead viewers down some kind of happy path. Like people call it a funnel, but some kind of happy path. And they do one thing. What is the next thing that they do? Every video or every piece of content you nudge people towards a next step, whatever that is, maybe a free guide or a newsletter or a product page, something that way can go deeper with you. And here's the reason. We think we shouldn't sell, but we should. And the reason for that is you're robbing the people of their increase to do more with you. And so you don't want to do that. If I want to, if I love your content, I want to do more with you, I want to sign up with you. I want to get consulting with you. I want to buy your product. I want to join your community. You got to give me a way to do that. We've been conditioned that we shouldn't sell. Well, you don't have to do it directly, but you can say, hey, if you like this, you will like that. And then just offer it so that people can choose to go deeper with you if they would like. And the third step is you got to scale with some kind of automation once you have this money flow, this money path, right? So once you know that your system works where people are watching the videos and actually signing up for whatever, then you're selling them something, you, we got to find a way to run it on autopilot. Otherwise, it's going to feel like grind. That's how the top three creators go from like it being a side hustle to actually being a full-time income and it's running over and over while they're making money while they're asleep. You don't get paid for your content. You get paid for the action that your content drives. And that's the most important thing. So we have to engineer our world for the action that we want people to take. Now, speaking of action, let's talk about the small moves that can make a massive, massive, massive impact for you. And that is the cheat code number four. I call this Mario's power ups for immediate growth. All that means is the, in Super Mario, a tiny mushroom can double your size, right? So these small actions give you access to some massive growth and I want to give you what these few micro challenges maybe. So the, all called power ups, right? The first one is a lot of people don't like doing this because they think they're aggressive, but a 30 second pitch video. Essentially, you're telling people, hey, here's who I am, here's what I do. And here's how you can work with me and you, you got to have that because at some point someone is going to say, hey, how do you work? And you got to like record this pitch video and just post it on LinkedIn. People will see it and you'll be shocked that, oh my gosh, I feel like I'm selling, but you're not because you're essentially telling people exactly who you are and what you do. Now, if you, if that feels aggressive, at least you have that video to use at some point in overall conversation. So you've got to have some kind of 30 second pitch video that tells them who you are, what you do and how you can help them because without that, you have to spend a lot of time back and forth on DM or email or scheduling call, et cetera, that creates way more fiction in the process. Here's the power up number two, which is the 48 hour digital kind of product sprint, right? And what I mean by that is, could you spend 48 hours creating a mini ebook or a PDF and upload it to like any service called a gum road, something that's easy for you to deliver on this product? Because then people know that you have an artifact. You have an asset that they can download and they can work with to actually try out working with you. That's a really powerful thing, having that is good because it also helps you organize your thoughts way better. And here's power up number three, you've got to schedule some kind of partnership call. We think that we have to have paid ads or we have to hustle to do all of this. In today's world, collaborations are really, really powerful. The goal is to reach out to one person using what I call the Avengers script. You know, the main idea behind the Avengers script is that you know the Avengers didn't work alone, right? Because the whole concept of partnerships is that we know that you know, big hinges swing on little doors. So how are the other big doors on the lives of the little hinges? And how can one small move unlock everything for us? And the partnerships is the answer. So for example, you would reach out to somebody and say, Hey, I know you're targeting healthy professionals who want to get healthy. I do XYZ. Why don't we do a joint webinar and collab together? And so we can share our email, listen, share ads and share our network overall. If you do that, you suddenly double your audience, you suddenly double your reach and you build a nice affiliate partner in this process that nobody can take away from you. So I give you four cheat codes overall, but the ultimate insight is this. The main truth about this is success isn't just about knowing more. You could totally go and learn everything that there is to learn online. But that's not the answer. Success is about actually executing better on the fewest smallest things. I just want to do the fewest smallest things that get me the result that I want. And now that you have these four cheat codes, I would literally only work on these four cheat codes because it is exactly how everyone that I've hung out with, everyone that I have advised and even for myself have created and used these four cheat codes to have an insane career. So now you have the cheat codes to master your pitch, to build partnerships and the strategy. So all you have to do is execute on these cheat codes overall. I know I went a little different from my normal podcast episodes. So I want to give you this big idea, which is if you like this, I would love for you to take a screenshot and tag me and post it on social because that way I know that you like this episode and I can make more like this for you. So if you like this, please do me a favor, I take a screenshot and tag me and I can make more like this for you. Hey, Sharon, I have a cool gift for you. Since you like this podcast, I actually have an ultra super secret, private podcast that I make just for my partner companies and the CEOs and influencers that I advise. It's called 10K wisdom because I tried to wrap $10,000 worth of value in every single episode in just under 10 minutes. That's why it's called 10K wisdom. It's raw, it's real, it's got no intro or outro or anything like that. It's just straight to the point and to the insights. Since you like this podcast, I think you will like that. So for the first time, I'm making it available to you. Just go to 10K wisdom.com, the number 10k wisdom.com and my team will activate it for you as my gift. Go to 10k wisdom.com. I'll see you there.