Transcript of The 3-Second Rule to Captivate Audiences

You're listening to the Vault Unlock, where the real secrets of success are revealed. Every episode, one founder, one confession, one strategy that created income scale and unstable growth. Forget the hype. This is unlocking the code they swore they would never release. The playbook is revealed. The vault is unlocked. And we are back. We are here with Keith, and I'm excited because Keith and his company, somehow, I have no idea how we even got here, but they created the largest TikTok dance off at sea. Welcome to the episode, Keith.

Yeah. Thank you for having me, and I'm excited to share my story.

Oh, I'm excited. Just for those that don't know who you are, what you do, in a short nutshell, tell us, what is it you do?

Yeah. So I run one of the largest social media agencies in the nation. We help some of the world's greatest brands with their social strategy, content production. And like you said earlier, which we'll get into the details of producing things like the largest TikTok dance at sea. So we're a social media agency. We help brands with their social media strategy.

And where did that come from? Before, you were the largest social media agency working with some of the top brands. Who was Keith before that? Tell us a little bit of that story.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I've always been an entrepreneur. So that's really... I don't know anything besides business, and I've always done business. But yeah, one day, because I was in marketing before socially in, one of my friends reached out. He has a couple of restaurants. And he said, hey, Keith, can you run my marketing for me? And I said, yeah, absolutely. Let's do it. And then we started running their marketing. It was one restaurant. Now they have 16. Started in college, and now we're a team of 50 full-time people. So it's grown a lot in the past 14 years. Wow.

There's a lot to unpack there. We're probably going to come back there. But I'm really excited because I really want to hear, how did you... First and foremost, running a digital agency for some of the top businesses in the country is a huge honor. How did you get to that level? How did it get to the point where you get in rooms, those types of people, and start having those conversations?

Yeah. I mean, it didn't happen overnight, but the cliché answer is a lot of hustle, but it's the truth, right? Trying to invest every additional dollar we have into our marketing, taking as low as a salary that I can get so we can put more money into marketing. And then over time, just stacking and stacking and stacking. Then finally, 10 years later, SEO starts to pay off. So it's literally just hustle, hustle, stack, pay myself as little as possible so we can move that money into marketing, trying to increase marketing budgets over time. And now a lot of people in the industry know the socially in name because we sponsor events, we host events, we have a much larger marketing budget. But yeah, man, it was like double tripling down on marketing and trying to find every dollar we can put so people know who we are and we at least get an app back.

The hustle, the everyday hustle that most people won't do. I love it. So that hustle leads to now you're in a room. How do we get to you being in a room to the idea of let's get the biggest TikTok dance at sea? Tell us about it.

Yeah. So I can't claim credit for that idea. That was our creative director, our art director, and then the entirety of the account, the team on the account. But we've been working with Carnival for a couple of years now, and we wanted to do something drastic. The TikTok TikTok award show was coming up. So we were like, hey, what can we submit that's going to blow it out of the water? And the team came up with the largest TikTok Dance at Sea. It was a huge coordination, as you can imagine. There's guests on the ships. There's seven different ships that we have to coordinate at the same time. So a lot of coordination, a lot of effort from both teams, Carnival team, my team, everyone.

How did that... I can only imagine, but let's just high level a little bit. How did you even get Carnival to to buy in? To buy in to bring seven, not one, not two, not three, seven. I'm going to assume some of their largest ships all in the same, I'm going to say the same area in the middle of the ocean. I'm just thinking that's also a massive liability.

A huge liability. And like I said, a big effort on everyone's side, not just the marketing team, but also legal, also the ship captains, also the staff who we had to let know. They had to also learn, the dance that was happening. So a lot of coordination across the board. But how do we get to that point? I would say we pitched well over like 20, 25 different ideas, like big campaign ideas like this one. And then we ended up landing on this one. So there was other really grand novel ideas that would have taken equally, if not more effort to pull off from a production standpoint.

Did you get to go on one of those ships? Were you get to be there live?

I wasn't there live, but a bunch of our team members were there.

To I'm sure they told you. I just want to understand, what did it look like? What did it see? Seven ships coming together in the middle of the ocean and then getting everybody onto the same-It's fascinating.

A big Jumbochon turns on at the same time. The model that we hired to do the dance to teach everyone on the ship comes on. Everyone's lively. All of the staff, the people who are working on the ship, they're excited. And then the tutorial comes on and everyone's like, what's What's going on here? And you can see it in the video, the final video we produce. People are confused what's happening, and then the explanation happens and everyone gets into it, and then it turns into a big party.

And then, yeah, a huge party. I mean, that'd be a fun party for sure. And then I'm I mean, you just shot up the drones up there and just got it filmed?

Got it filmed. Then we had people on the ship. So we have videographers across all of the ships. We had people who were going live during the event. So it was a huge production effort. A lot of people on all seven ships.

And did it turn into one awesome video posted on TikTok? Or can people see this?

Yeah, people saw it. It was one post video. There was multiple times where we were going live. There were stories involved. I mean, it was a whole campaign. So leading up to the event, the people who were guests on the ship, they knew it was going to happen. It was part of their email campaign like, Hey, welcome aboard. So it was a whole campaign. And yeah, there was one final production at the end of it.

That's awesome. I mean, that seems like a fun time. So there's a lot of things that get to that, right? And going back to what you're saying is working as a college kid. Yeah, do you do marketing? Yeah, I do marketing. Yeah, do you do sales? Yeah, I do sales. Whatever it is, you figure it out, you turn He got into, I think you said eight, eight different restaurants?

Yeah. Now he has 16.

Now he has 16 restaurants. And he continued all the way from back to college to now doing mass production that see Is there that one thing that you see that worked or the one, the aha moment or the secret code? Was there anything in when you look back that really sticks out for you there?

A hundred %. So there's really two things. One is the fact that we have doubled down on organic social. Organic social for any business owner listening is where it is right now. That's what's happening and what's working. And then truly what we did, Yuneek, was hire really good people. We have a team of 50 full-time people. They all live and breathe social media. They're all constantly learning, actively, not forcefully. So the biggest difference, even the idea of the largest TikTok dance at sea, we did Samsung New Business Week. We do a lot. It's because of the ideas of the people that we employ. So two things we did really well, organic social and hire the best people in social media.

And then have a passion, have a true passion for social media. A hundred %, yeah.

But let's I love social media. Let's start there.

Let's talk about something I think is really important, and you just said it is organic. Organic social. So where is organic social today? Why is it so important today? And where do you see it going as an expert into the future?

Yeah. So organic social is just going to get bigger. And when I say bigger, there's going to be more eyeballs that come onto the platforms. Naturally, platforms are just growing. A lot shifted in the past two years. So organic social was dead. Now it's not dead. You see less content of people that you actually follow now. So organic social is growing. And the way to win at organic social is the more at-bats that you get. I like to call it the more at-bats, aka the more that you're able to post, the more opportunity you have for the algorithm to show you love. And now is the best time, right? You could have a million followers, and I could have a thousand followers. My post could still potentially to get more views than yours because of what's happening within the algorithm.

Okay, so let's talk about what is going on with the algorithms today? Because the algorithms are always changing, constantly changing.

Always changing, yeah. So they're transferred to an interest-based media, right? So social media equals I follow you, you try to get as many followers as possible, and then you hope that your followers see the content. Now it has switched to interest-based. So I don't always see my followers' content, like the people I follow, I see content that I'm interested in, or at least the algorithm thinks I'm interested in. Yeah.

Okay. So I got that. Let's talk about that because that's important even for the one thing there. So before The idea was I would go on and I would follow people on social media. And then when I would show up on my feed, it would be all the people that I follow.

That's right.

Today, it's changed and I'm going on my feed. And I've noticed that because I'm like, there's so many people that I don't follow that keep showing up on my feed. And it's because it's based off my interests.

Yeah. And we even believe in the near future, there's going to be two feeds. One will be of your followers, and then one will be of the interest that you have for discovery.

So if you're a business owner, and I know a lot of business owners are scared to even go on to social, I would even say some of them might not even know what organic is. They're going, what's different between organic and is there another one? How many types of social are there?

Bunch of types. But there's organic, there's paid, there's influencers. Influencer falls in the realm of paid. But organic is where it's at in terms of it's low effort. It's not going to cost you any money outside of your time to create the content. And maybe if you have zero skills, you'll have to hire a developer or someone. But organic is the easiest lift. It's the lowest hanging fruit. And to answer your question directly, there's a bunch of other a bunch of other types of social media influencers, like I said, going live is another one.

In terms of organic, does it matter if the production value is high or just the content is-We prefer low production, actually.

That's another misconception people have is like, Hey, if I'm going to be on social, the quality of content has to be really highly done, where we've actually seen the numbers show low-fi production is what works. Get in front of an iPhone, get in front of a camera, just start talking.

Because it's more relatable.

It's more relatable. It feels real.

It feels more real. I can see that. And if there's business owners sitting there thinking like, oh, man, the social content, organic social, what would you say to them knowing what you know, knowing the power of social, what would you say to them sitting there saying, It's time to open up? Let's get going.

Yeah. So if you decide that it's time to get going, one of the things to think about is going to be your hook. The first three seconds of the video is going to either lose the attention or capture the attention. So if you're thinking about that, you're off to a good start. And then consistency is the most important, right? The more app-bats you get, the more consistent you are, the more opportunity is that you're going to win on the platform.

So when is too much? Because I have clients that post once a day, and then I have clients that post six times a day.

Yeah. So six times might be a little overkill, but the beauty about it is there is not too much now, right? Certain platforms, like TikTok, there are more eyeballs than content on the platform. There's more people watching than there is actual content to consume, which is why you might be with a friend and say, Oh, yeah, I saw that TikTok, too. That's because there's not enough content there. You guys are seeing the same thing.

Wow. This is interesting. In a world where I almost think there was so much, we're inundated with content. And you're now saying, on a, specifically, you're saying on a platform like a TikTok, There's actually more eyeballs than there is actual pieces of content. Exactly. So would that be safe to say there's massive opportunities still to be on TikTok?

A hundred %. And which is why you see these platforms having massive incentives for creators, Facebook, TikTok, Snap. They pay creators tons and tons of money to make content for the platform because they want to keep the eyeballs on the platform.

Where do you see AI coming in now with all this social AI? You don't know what's real, you don't know what's fake. You're going to have social accounts that are not even real people. That's going to be tough.

Even to this day, it's tough to determine if it was an AI or was it real? So I hope the platforms ultimately make the decision of having some marker to help the user understand is this AI or not? But AI is playing a big role already. It's optimizing ad campaigns. Automatically AI runs in the background to decide what type of content to show you. There's generative AI now, right? So a lot of your content as a small business owner, you can make within ChatGPT and Canva to be able to post, right? You're like, damn, I don't know what to post. Well, just go to ChatGPT and it can make the post for you. Yeah, absolutely. There's really no excuse. If you put a little bit of creativity in there, you can win. But yeah, AI is going to play a big role, man. I think what it's not going to replace is not going to replace strategy at the end of the day.

So AI won't replace strategy. And I would say does it replace personality? And the answer is, well, I think it can.

Yeah, for sure.

So really, the only thing you have is strategy to win on social media.

Exactly.

Where do you see it in five years, 10 years?

Social media? A, I, I.

Social media and AI. Where do you see the whole- Yeah, so In five years, I see it fully being interest-based.

Like I said, we're seeing that. I don't think followers are going to matter at all in five years.

Okay, this is important. Followers won't matter in five years. What's going to matter?

What's going to matter is putting out good content that is going to resonate with anyone in the world, not just the people that are following you right now.

Okay.

So having a sound content strategy that is going to excite the person you want to- You want to speak to.

Yeah. So today, is it about followers, views, is it about comments, engagement? What's it about today?

Yeah. So right now, it absolutely still is the same thing, right? Like, engagement matters, the first three second matter, the amount of views you get absolutely matter. And that will never end, right? Like the amount of views you get will directly be correlated to how good your content actually is. Is it crappy? Is it good? Et cetera. But right now what matters is engagement rate, shares, the amount of views you get, all of the things that you already know.

And then there's this argument I think I see out there, at least I know I have it internally. Is it better to have 10,000 curated followers that know who you are and are very much, say, your niche versus 2 million followers that are more general, but you have an opportunity to speak to a wider group of people.

Yeah. At the end of the day, it's going to depend on the business you're in. For us, we're a B2B business. We don't need 2 million followers, 10,000 really engaged followers versus 2 million non-engaged followers. I'll take that all day long. But if I was in the movie business and if I was in the entertainment business, I'd probably take 2,000 2 million, I'm sorry, unengaged followers than 10,000 people who really, really like me because we're in two different businesses.

So it really goes on the model of your business and what you're trying to achieve off social.

Exactly right. But the bigger value will come from that 10,000 engaged users for sure.

What are you seeing some of the biggest brands do now? I mean, you're working with some big fortune top 500. How are they thinking? How are they seeing the future? What are they saying behind the scenes?

Yeah, so we're seeing an increase in organic spending. And when I say organic spending, I mean Creating the content, right? Someone has to be in front of the camera creating the content that you post. We're seeing a higher spend there, and we see that it's going to continue to uptick just because organic is not going anywhere. They're also very experimental these days. So the largest TikTok dance at sea, that's a really experimental campaign for a brand to do. And we're seeing that across the board. Even brands that are legacy brands, like Samsung, are starting to do experimental things on social. So using AR filters, using the frames, all different types of things. So I think brands are opening up more and allowing more experimentation to happen on social.

On social. I mean, the social, I think, I don't know what the numbers are. I haven't looked, but for mainstream media to social, who's winning now?

Meta is, hands down, still winning. They have the longest watch time. They have the most monthly active users. They own multiple platforms. They own Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus. They own all these different platforms. So meta is still huge. Up and coming is obviously TikTok, but one that gets slept on a lot is Snapchat. Snapchat has some of the highest engagement rates, meaning that when you post the highest amount of people watch your content, a lot of people sleep on Snapchat. And then the topic of conversation right now is Reddit, because all of the LLMs, like ChatGPT, Perplexity, they train on Reddit data. Well, they train on many data, pieces of data, but Reddit is one of the ways that they inform their answers. So businesses are now trying to figure out, how can I get in on Reddit? So OpenAI recommends me next time someone searches for my solution.

That's interesting. See, there we go. That's something interesting that people don't know. So how do businesses get on Reddit to make that happen?

Very easily. You go to Reddit, you create your corporate Reddit account. Pretty simple. But you want to create your corporate Reddit account, and you want to have your personal Reddit account. For me, my personal Reddit account is Keith Cacedia. It's branded. It tells you who I am. So now Keith can go and jump into conversations, but then socially in, the corporate account can also go in and jump in on conversations. So I would start there. Simply is create your own personal Reddit account, create your business account, start jumping into conversation.

There's some gold here. Reddit, because you don't really hear a lot about Reddit. You just hear about the Reddit people. You hear all the Reddit people. That's right, yeah. The reviewer, the keyboard warriors.

Very It's a unique community. But yeah, all of the LLMs are training on Reddit data.

So I'm hearing experimenting is key. I'm hearing, obviously, organic social content is key. I'm hearing consistency is key. Making sure you have the hook for the first three seconds is key. We've gotten into a little bit of newer ideas, so Snapchat being one. And in forms of Snapchat, if someone's a business owner, they're not not doing dances and teeny bopper things. Is that still working on Snapchat?

Absolutely. So what you can do on Snapchat if you're a small business owner is what we call entertaining education. You can also create maybe a close group So if you're a bookstore and you have a frequent customer list, you can add them to your Snapchat and maybe not your Instagram, and they get exclusives. So there's a lot of different ways. If you're not on meta, don't just go straight to Snapchat. That's like priority number three. But absolutely wouldn't see that.

But it's growing. There could be. There's a massive opportunity there. And then Reddit is the secret opportunity to tie into the LLMs.

Yeah. And there are tools out there. So there's tools like profoundP. There's a bunch of them if you just Google AI Visibility tool, and it shows you how you rank in ChatGPT. So if someone searches best social media agency, how often does socially income up? So business owners can use that and figure out, am I even showing up in ChatGPT?

And how How do you get people to show up? If you're not, what do you do?

Yeah, so you reverse engineer it, right? So you say, who's the best social media agency? It says socially and it says a bunch of competitors, and it gives you the reference. It shows you how it got that answer. And you go to those places like Reddit, and then you start to engage. If it's a blog that it's pulling from, reach out to the blog owner and say, hey, can I have an inclusion? Can I pay you to be included in this blog post that ChatGPT is referencing?

I love it. It's just reverse engineer. It's not hard. It's very easy if you just ask the right questions and see the... All right. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that we must know about social media and how you go from a college kid to 18 restaurants of marketing ideas to a full agency to the largest dance off at sea.

Yeah. I mean, the big thing is, is people get too caught up, like we talked about earlier, in high production. They don't put out content because they're afraid. A big part of social media is to be social. You got to be yourself. So a lot of the brands that we work with, we try to humanize them as much as possible. If you're a business owner, especially, put yourself out there because people buy from people at the end of the day. So it's not just content about your products, and it's not just promotional stuff. Humanize it.

Humanize it. So being authentic, be authentically you is what I'm hearing. Exactly. That's awesome. Where can people find you?

All social channels and sociallyin. Com. My name, Keith Cacedia.

Sociallyin. Awesome. Thanks for being with us, Keith.

Yeah. Thank you so much.

Have a good day. And that was another episode with The Vault Unlocked, where Proven Builders, real strategies and unstable growth happens. Subscribe now because the next unlock could be the one that rewires your business forever. This is where the playbook is revealed and the vault is unlocked.