Forget Algorithms: The Only 2 Things That Matter for Social Media Success in 2026

Evan Lee: I'm so excited to have this guy here. Whether you know him from Hoop Talk, letting it fly, or his incredible newsletter, or honestly just being funny as hell in the chat. We got Jack Appleby here. So everybody, we gotta welcome Jack to the stage.

Jack Appleby: I love that hoops comes up before marketing now. I did marketing for 15 years and two years of basketball videos and now here we are. Um...

Evan Lee: It's just 'cause it's me. I think because like basketball is so near and dear to the heart, it's like I gotta, I gotta, another person who's hooping, have to shout him out. But Jack, I'm gonna pop out, do your thing. I'll see you at the end, okay?

Jack Appleby: I appreciate it. Um, also and Dara is just like, oh, like that's all I have time for. Like she just threw so much stuff where I'm like, I'm trying to get the recording. I know her personally. I like learned way too much just in that 10 minutes right there.

Jack Appleby: So hi everybody. Uh, lots of talks today. You've heard so much already. Everyone's powering through. Um, and you just saw lots of creative examples from Elfried and Dara, and you're gonna see absolutely none here. Um, it's gonna be a lot of text. We're gonna talk about concepts, we're gonna talk about ideas, and that is all we're gonna talk about here because I really do believe if you're gonna make great social content, it's really about having two best practices and that's what's most important here. And you know what, me presenting in this format will, will lead, this will actually be a tie-in here at some point.

Jack Appleby: Um, but if you don't know me, hi, my name is Jack Appleby. I have worked in social media strategy for 15 years now for some of the brands you see on screen, um, as well as a lot more, usually agency side. And kind of during that time, like worked for brands with zero dollars and worked on $20 million ad campaigns, $2 million creative social AORs, all every version of social you could possibly have. And decided to start writing about the industry while doing it.

Jack Appleby: Uh, ended up developing about 80,000 followers on LinkedIn, the same on Twitter, and then about the same in my newsletter, Future Social, um, where I write about social media strategy once daily on LinkedIn and weekly in my newsletter. Uh, and then just for fun, started my adult basketball comeback, uh, as How to Hoop Forever on Instagram and TikTok where I have almost another 200,000 followers who don't know that I've ever worked a day in marketing. So I have two internet presences. Uh, I would love to have you follow either or both depending on which one makes the most sense to you.

Jack Appleby: Um, and before we get into the full weight of the talk, I will say this is normally an hour-long talk. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna publish the full version of the slideshow on my LinkedIn account. Like that is my actual God-given name. You can search me on any social platform, there it is. Um, or if you subscribe to my newsletter, Future Social, you'll get the full deck version as well as the 150 essays I've written over the last three years about social media strategy. So would love to have you there.

Jack Appleby: Uh, but we're already three minutes in, so let's get to the meat of this. I really do believe if you want to make great social content, there are only two best practices that actually matter.

Jack Appleby: Uh, there are a lot of lies you've been sold over the last couple years where we think things like...

Jack Appleby: platform growth hacks or like perfect pixel sizing and resizing for every single platform. If I hear one more person ask me about optimal post times, I'm probably gonna scream at this point. Um, and if you didn't see it, literally an hour ago, Instagram officially announced five hashtags per post, that's all you get now. So I don't even have to answer that question anymore. All of this, these things, they're interesting, they move you a couple of percentage points maybe, but they are not the most important thing. The two things you really gotta focus on if you're making great social content or great advertising campaigns that will then affect your paid content...

Jack Appleby: You gotta have really truly great creative ideas.

Jack Appleby: And you gotta have really truly great creative hooks. Um, I mean, I've been doing this for a long time. When I started working in social, Instagram wasn't on Android, Facebook didn't have video, YouTube had 301 plus, which might be a number many of us don't even remember at this point. The fundamentals of social, as many times as we've had different algorithms or platforms, the fundamentals haven't changed. And that's the most important thing for you to learn if you are a social strategist or a paid advertiser or anybody else making content for these platforms.

Jack Appleby: Uh, and this is the one piece of creative that you're gonna see in this presentation. Uh, because besides my marketing presence and my basketball presence, I may or may not have like a secret emo TikTok account where I make content about my old Warped Tour days. The reason I'm showing you this silliness, uh, is this TikTok did several hundred thousand views. There I am painfully sitting here like this and I'm in front of, uh, a tweet that is a very hyper-niche emo reference. Why am I showing you this right now?

Jack Appleby: Because this comment on that TikTok really summarizes like one of my core beliefs about social media. It's not about making perfect looking things. It's about what is the story you're telling, what does the content actually share, what's the emotional value you get from this. Because this is literally a TikTok of me green screening in front of a screenshot of an Instagram post that is a screenshot of a tweet. There is not one thing optimized about this, but it did several hundred thousand views because people were able to figure out what we were talking about there. And that is so much more important than perfect production value.

Jack Appleby: So obviously the question here is, how do you get to great ideas and hooks? What does that even mean for social media content? And again, normally an hour-long talk, we're gonna power through a handful of these right now.

Jack Appleby: So much of it comes from brainstorming. Like I do think it's cliché to reference MrBeast on one of these kind of meetings, but there's a reason he's the best at this stuff and has a half million, uh, or 500 million YouTube subs. Brainstorming is everything. And I truly believe we don't spend enough time thinking through ideas at the macro level or the micro level. So what I really hope when you're brainstorming social content, it's not about, oh, I saw this trend or oh, I saw this visual format. It's about what is a belief that you hold as someone who works for the brand? What's the tension that the audience seems to feel? What's a story that only your brand can tell?

Jack Appleby: And like maybe it's 'cause I'm 37 now and past my like LOL chuckles phase of marketing and life, but I think almost one of the biggest things many people are missing, especially in organic social right now, is focusing on the emotional benefits that your brand or product or even that piece of content can provide the audience. Yes, there's a lot of focus on Gen Z laughter right now within social content. I think we forget that fundamentally we're trying to make people's lives better with the products that we work for and we are solving a lot of problems that people have. And that's something that's taught in a marketing 101 class, but it's not being integrated into modern social a lot of times. So please, when you're brainstorming, how are you bringing the emotional benefits of your product to life?

Jack Appleby: Which, and I love that Dara got this question at the end when we talked about campaigns versus tactics versus individual, uh, concepts. I really hope when you're brainstorming for your brand at a macro level, you need to think in ideas before you think in tactics. What's a tactic? Like I'm sure for all the paid advertisers here, I'm sure you've talked about the different visual formats. Like the screenshot of the text message is like a really common ad, or maybe it's like handwriting or what those might be. Those are tactics. And it's good for you to know all the tactics. But you also need to think in the ideas that we talked about. How are you making people's lives better? What is the takeaway we want someone to have from this? What do we want them to action against? You'll have a million tactics. You can scroll and learn a bunch of tactics. But getting as good as possible at brainstorming full ideas that have real emotional resonance, that's where you become a really expert level marketer.

Jack Appleby: Um, and then this is one of my favorite like gut checks to use on any piece of social content. If you pretend any Instagram Reel, TikTok, static post, carousel, pretend that you need a YouTube title for that piece of content. The reason why, if you can't summarize what that post is supposed to mean in five to seven words, I would bet that the concept you're trying to portray is not gonna come through in that creative. So always be able to come up with a one-liner when you're looking at a piece of creative that you might want to put out in the world. Do people understand it when you say it in that one sentence?

Jack Appleby: Uh, another one of my favorites. Learn from creators, not other brands. Uh, when I worked in telco, I was like, I don't care what the other telecommunications companies are doing. That's not gonna help us. I want to see how people are infiltrating the feed. One of my favorite creative director quotes was a, an old CD at Adidas said like, we're not competing with Nike, we're competing with Netflix. This is about share of attention on social. So go learn from who's doing the best work out there and the most creative work, not necessarily just your competitors.

Jack Appleby: Uh, and that's why you should just watch what's trending and theorize why it's trending. I stole this from Paddy Galloway, he's a YouTube strategist. He encourages everybody to go scroll and think why something is succeeding. Because that trains that part of your brain to be able to brainstorm better what else might succeed. Sounds simple, sounds super fundamental. I promise it helps. I do this literally every day.

Jack Appleby: Um, and then finally, just do the work over and over and over again. Like I know for the paid advertisers on this call, like you have, like you're versioning to death, you're A/B testing, you're really good at this. For the organic social folks on this, this is where like when I used to manage bands, which is another side quest I had back in the day, if my bands come into a studio with 12 songs to record a 12-song album, we've done something wrong. You need some B-sides, you need some additional material. You gotta have more things that you're trying. So just do the work over and over again.

Jack Appleby: And again, these are the places to find me on the internet where I'll publish a lot more of this stuff. That is my like no exhale nine or 10 minute talk. But thank you guys for listening to this. I hope you got something out of it. Uh, appreciate you guys.

Evan Lee: Jack, killed it. People in the chat are like, I screenshotted every slide. Like I have it and I'm ready to go. So everyone's soaking it up even though you were so kind to condense it to the 10 minutes. Jack, I want to ask you a couple questions though since you, since you wrapped up on good timing here. So the first one that I have is actually referencing your last statement around like there's paid marketers here, then there's organic social people here. I'm curious how you think about the overlap these days and like how people are thinking about, uh, like you talked about hooks of course, but outside of hooks, like how are you thinking about the overlap between the two and any higher level thoughts you might have?

Jack Appleby: I, I mean, I would hope that different people are managing both of those 'cause they are different skill sets, right? Um, but the thing that was tough even when I was at the agency side, both sides can learn from each other. There are things that the paid marketers learn just from again, like volume of paid testing that I can't get to because at the end of the day I'm only posting once per day per brand. But at the same time, as an organic marketer, there's so many insights I can get to from things that we've tried either for like short form or mid form content or even just the hooks that we should pass along there. Of course everything needs to fit under one campaign so it's like a cohesive message. But I just encourage everyone to talk to everyone on all teams. Like you'd be amazed what you can learn and you'd be amazed how infrequently everybody talks.

Evan Lee: Jack, I love it. There's one final question that I want to slip in here too is like there's a lot of people who are just beginning this journey, whether it be on organic, paid, content creation, all of the above. One of the things I'm curious about is like you've developed a strong opinion over time on what will work and what doesn't. So what I'm curious about is like how do you train your brain to start thinking this way and do the research on these brands?

Jack Appleby: Why were there multiple laughs backstage at Jack, you've developed opinions? Why did I see that? Um, no, I mean this is where like I encourage anyone, like whether like you want to have a public presence or like just the professionals working in the space, like you are paid to be an expert. And I know some rooms are scary and I know we all have hierarchies and bosses, but like you're paid to be there and have an opinion. Like always come in solutions based and like you should, whether it's proactive or reactive to any need, like the way to train your brain is you should always be able to present a new idea. Like quick, quick weird anecdote about songwriting. Ryan Tedder, singer for OneRepublic, um, something he talks about and trains songwriters to do is you don't show up to the songwriting session with nothing. You do 50 minutes of prep and you come in with three ideas of stuff and you look like the genius in the room 'cause you actually did your homework and then you, it ends up being your song. Do the homework ahead of time, do the research you have, and the, and I will say the best way to start having opinions is just be encyclopedic about this stuff. Consume it, figure out what it is and why it works. And if you can articulate what it is and why it works to anybody, that's how I, I grew fast in my agencies was my seniors couldn't do that and I was just like, here's all the content I'm seeing and what I like about that.

Evan Lee: Jack, I love it. I love how many seasons of life you've gone through too and like bringing some back like now back to life. You are the best. I sincerely appreciate you taking the time. Everybody in the chat, you gotta show love. Gotta show love. And what a better way than LeBron in the chat. That's the best way to go out on this one. Appreciate you my friend. Appreciate you.

Jack Appleby: Thank you.