The Complete 2026 Social Media Blueprint

In this video, we are going to talk about how to hack social media to grow your business in the year ahead. This is all based on scientific principles. It is based in evidence. It's based in data. The research comes from places like Google and Accenture and LinkedIn. Now, entrepreneurs and business owners, you're all on social media, but are you using a strategy to drive social media into business? There's no point using social media if it's a toy, if it's a

distraction. It's only valuable to you if it results in leads and sales. So, let's get into a step-by-step deep dive into how to hack social media to grow your business. Now, my background with 20 years plus of entrepreneurship is all about advertising. I've grown multiple businesses with ads. And for many, many years, I thought ads were way better than social media. I was not terribly interested in organic social media because I knew that I could just spend money and generate clients using ads.

distraction. It's only valuable to you if it results in leads and sales. So, let's get into a step-by-step deep dive into how to hack social media to grow your business. Now, my background with 20 years plus of entrepreneurship is all about advertising. I've grown multiple businesses with ads. And for many, many years, I thought ads were way better than social media. I was not terribly interested in organic social media because I knew that I could just spend money and generate clients using ads.

things have changed and any business that wants to succeed has to be using a system like the one I'm going to share with you in order to be able to win business in a cost-effective way. Now, if you do run ads, this is actually going to turbocharge your ads. You're going to get amazing content for your ads if you do this. And if you don't run ads, you'll be able to fine-tune your messaging. You'll be able to use this system, and then when it's working, you could ramp it up using some ads as well.

When you get this system in place, the cost of winning business is going to drop through the floor. you are going to win business with a lower cost per lead and a lower cost per sale than you've ever had before once we put this system in place in your business. So, let's get into the system and let me walk you through the key ingredients. Ingredient number one is that you are going to need 11 pieces of short form content. Now, why do I say 11 pieces? 11 pieces is the

evidencebacked number of pieces that people have to see you in order to notice you. In order to get noticed, you need to be seen 11 times by your prospects. Think about it like this. People see you for the first time when they've seen you for the 11th time. Now, the clock resets every 90 days, which means you've got to post a lot of content. Unfortunately, if you post once a month, it's not going to be enough for people to even notice you. But if you start posting every day, people are

going to start noticing you week in week out. I know that's frustrating to hear. I know you don't want to be posting every day. It sucks. It's annoying. But if you get this systemized and if you get a process in place, you start posting every day, you start getting noticed every day, and the whole system starts to flow. Consider what it would be like to walk through a busy street. There's thousands of people all around you and you're going to walk from one end of the street to the other end of

the street. At the end of the street, I'm going to ask you, who did you notice when you were walking down the street? Now, most of the time, you'll say, "I didn't notice anybody. Everyone just turned into a blur." However, there are five types of people who you would notice. And we call it the three S's and the 2Fs. The first thing you would notice is anything that is scary. If you saw a scary person walking down the street, you'd absolutely notice them because the brain is attuned to finding

the street. At the end of the street, I'm going to ask you, who did you notice when you were walking down the street? Now, most of the time, you'll say, "I didn't notice anybody. Everyone just turned into a blur." However, there are five types of people who you would notice. And we call it the three S's and the 2Fs. The first thing you would notice is anything that is scary. If you saw a scary person walking down the street, you'd absolutely notice them because the brain is attuned to finding

things that are scary. How do you leverage this? Well, you talk to your customers about the scary things that could happen in the industry that you operate in. You talk about what could go wrong. You talk about the trends that are negative. You talk about the bad news stories. You talk about the horror stories. Those are scary things that absolutely get noticed. Talk about the things that go wrong. Talk about the things that break. talk about the things that cause destruction. And if you can

do that, that's a piece of content called scary content. The second thing you would notice is anything that is strange. So if someone was walking down the street dressed as a giant banana, you would totally notice it because you're not expecting it. Now, how do you leverage this in your marketing? You create content that sounds a little bit strange. Now, if I was to say something to you like, "The laziest people make the most money." You would go, "What do you mean by that? That sounds strange.

I've never heard that before. What do you mean?" So strange is anything that invokes curiosity. It's something that people haven't heard before. It's novel, it's different, it's a totally twisted take on things. And if you can share something that's strange, it'll get noticed. The third S is sexy. If you are walking down the street and you notice someone who is really sexy, they would catch your eye. And in the same way, people notice sexy when they're online. Now, what does sexy mean? It means

desirable outcomes. Whatever it is that your business does, it probably produces a desirable outcome that people want. You should talk about that desirable outcome. Forget about the process. Forget about all the stuff that goes into it. Talk about the big sexy outcome that people would like to achieve. You might talk about business systems. Talk about business freedom. You might talk about hiring talent. Talk about the sales that come flooding in when you hire a new salesperson who can perform.

Figure out what is the big sexy outcome and then talk about the outcome first because that gets noticed in short form content. Now, you've probably already seen this in some of my videos. I often talk about millionaire and million-dollar and all of that sort of stuff. It makes me feel a bit sick as well. However, it totally gets the views because that's the sexy thing to put in the headline. Okay. The first F stands for free value. Free value is where you solve someone's problem for free. It's

where you give people a nugget of information that they go, "Wow, that was so valuable. I can't believe I got that for free." So, think about free nuggets of value. Anything that people would normally have to pay for or ideas that are normally behind the curtain, if you give those away for free, then people will take notice of it. And then the final F

is leveraging the familiar. Now, if people see you alongside something that they already know and understand, then they will recognize you next to that. If they see you next to an influencer that they've already been following, then they're going to pay more attention to you as well. I personally, I went on Diary of a CEO. Lots of people know Steven Bartlett and therefore because he's familiar to them, they paid more attention to me. So leveraging what is already familiar to your marketplace to

capture some of that attention. So what is short form content? It's content that can typically be consumed in a matter of minutes. It might be a short post on LinkedIn. It might be an image. It might be a graph. or it might be a short video like the ones that you'll see on Instagram or Tik Tok or YouTube shorts. That short content is the key to getting noticed. Before people can get to know you and buy from you, they have to notice you. They're going to see your

content 11 times. They're going to notice you and then they're going to want to go to this next step. Okay, the next step is long- form content. And in particular, we need 2 to 7 hours of long- form content. Professor Robin Dunar did a research assignment into how people make friends and how they form bonds. And what he found out is that when people spend 2 to 7 hours together, they really get to know each other. So after people notice you with short form content, they want to get to know you

with long- form content. And it takes 2 to 7 hours to do that. Now there's three types of long- form content that's really, really powerful for people getting to know you. The first one is a book, the second one is a podcast, and the third one is a workshop. Now these three formats are excellent for people to get to know you. And of course, you can express those as long- form videos on YouTube, podcasts on Spotify, long reports on LinkedIn, workshops that are

delivered on Zoom, books or reports that people can find on Amazon or as PDFs that are on LinkedIn. Any of that type of content is long- form content. It's typically content that takes more than 15 minutes to take in and consume. Now, what will that content contain? It will contain what we call capstone. Capstone stands for clarity, authority, problem, solution, the why, opportunity, next steps, and the essence. A great piece of content gives people clarity around what

the content's going to cover. It gives authority as to why they should listen to you. It talks about the problem and solution that you've noticed. It talks about why it's important, which we call the why. It tells people what the opportunity is for them, the next steps that they should take, and it leaves them feeling emotionally uplifted because it captures the essence of what your brand's all about. At Dent Accelerators, we call that the capstone framework, and it forms the basis of all

sorts of assets that we use with our clients. Now, to really bring this to life, we're going to add four little ingredients. We're going to call these HVR. HVCR stands for high value contextual references. Now, what the hell is a highv value contextual reference? It's a fancy way of saying that people judge you based on what they see around you. When people see that you are associated with big brands, when they see that you've won awards, when they see that you have a lot of followers, when they

see that you're associated with symbols or markers of high performance, that is a high value contextual reference. An extreme example of this is where you see business influences in their Ferraris or their jets. It's a high value contextual reference. Now, another example of this is imagine that you want to be seen as datadriven and high performance. You could do a video or you could do something that includes references to sports and scoreboards and data. And by

referencing those types of things in your videos or in your content, those are highv value contextual references. Most importantly, you don't want to provide any low value contextual references. You don't want to have anything in your long form content that says you're perceived as cheap or inefficient, broken in any way. I once saw a business coach lose a major contract because the potential client saw that they had a cracked Android screen. Now, that is a stupid reason not

to work with someone, but it totally made an impact because that contextual reference said that they were low value and that they were in some way broken. And the person noticed it and said, "That's not my business coach." Remember, people do judge a book by its cover. So, make sure you have high value contextual references around your long form content. Imagine there was no such thing as the digital world. You walk down the street and you notice someone that you've seen 11 times before. You

stop and say hello. You get talking. You sit down and have a cup of coffee with them and you get to know them between 2 and 7 hours. So, this is getting noticed and getting known, but we're doing it in a digital format. This takes us to the next step and this is where the money is made. This is where all of this hard work pays off and that is to send people to a high converting landing page. And on that landing page, you're going to have a call to action. You're going to

have something that you want people to do so that they can signal that they're interested in working with you. So, there's a few things that we have to have on this landing page. Thing number one is called a hook. A hook is a really clear, powerful statement that hooks people's attention. My two favorite hooks is called a readiness hook and a frustration hook. A readiness hook is where you say, "Are you ready to get something done? Are you ready to get a certain result?" You might say, "Are you

ready to run your first marathon?" Or, "Are you ready to grow your business?" Or, "Are you ready to hire an amazing salesperson?" So, that's a readiness hook. The other hook that I like is a frustration hook where you name the frustration that people currently experience. So a frustration hook could be feeling frustrated watching your business move sideways or feeling frustrated that you always hire someone who doesn't work out. So the hook is either readiness or frustration. Those

two hooks work like magic. After the hook, people scroll down and they see a value proposition. And a value proposition says if you do this, you will get this. If you fill in this assessment, we will measure and improve these three things. It tells them exactly what they get in exchange for taking action. So, you are clearly explaining the value proposition to someone who doesn't necessarily know. I want you to be super clear. I want you to spell it out. Give people at least

three reasons why they should take this next step. Once people see a value proposition, they often think it's too good to be true. And this is where you reaffirm your credibility. Now, your credibility could be your background, your history. It could be your qualifications, or it could reference important research that you've done. Your credibility could include your bio, your headsh shot. It could include some powerful statistics. These are the things that give credibility to what you

said in the value proposition. And then finally, you've got a call to action. That's a button that tells people what to do next. It could be take the assessment, join the workshop, join the webinar, could be join the discussion group. It could be request an information pack. The number one call to action that I absolutely adore is an online assessment. For a lot of B2B businesses, for a lot of services and consulting, SAS businesses, an online assessment is a powerful call to action.

If you've not done so already, go to scoreapp.com where these types of landing pages have already been created for you and they come with a free account. There's over 150 templates already in every free account that you can choose from. So, this part is super easy cuz it's already been done for you and it takes less than 20 minutes to customize. There'll be a link in the description below so you can get yourself a free score app account and get started with that landing page. Now,

with the credibility, a lot of people worry that they don't have enough credibility, but I can tell you because you've had the short form content and the long form content, people only need a little bit of credibility just to know that it's safe to go ahead and work with you and take that next step. Now, remember, the next step is a free next step. It costs nothing to do an assessment. You might even say, "Take the assessment. It's totally free, takes three minutes of your time, and gives

you immediate results." A powerful call to action like that converts at 20 to 40% traffic into leads. And once you've got leads, everything flows from lead generation. This is all about capturing attention and trust. But this is about converting it into action by collecting that lead. So short form content and long form content is about getting noticed and about getting known. But having a really powerful landing page is about converting that attention into

trusted conversations. Now, once you're having those trusted conversations, guess what? You're going to make a lot more sales. This is my methodology for how I use social media to grow my businesses. every single business that I'm involved in, we have a short form content strategy, a long- form content strategy, we have our highv value contextual reference points, we have our landing pages, and that is how we're turning attention and online engagement into business growth. Since implementing

trusted conversations. Now, once you're having those trusted conversations, guess what? You're going to make a lot more sales. This is my methodology for how I use social media to grow my businesses. every single business that I'm involved in, we have a short form content strategy, a long- form content strategy, we have our highv value contextual reference points, we have our landing pages, and that is how we're turning attention and online engagement into business growth. Since implementing

this indent accelerators, we went from having 1 to 2,000 leads per month to consistently getting 8 to 10,000 leads per month coming in like clockwork. Now, it's not just my businesses where this is working. I've rolled this out in several of our clients businesses and it is absolutely blowing up their businesses as well. If you've got a steady stream of short form content, long- form content that builds trust and landing pages that converts, you're going to see business growth. This is

how you hack social media to make your business grow. Okay, if you've enjoyed this video, please leave a comment below. Give the channel a subscribe and a like. Check out some of my other videos on this channel, and I look forward to seeing you soon. All the best.