Dylan Huey: Social Media Saved My Life!

Our interview of Dylan Huey for “The Creative Influencer” podcast is available today for download on iTunes, Spotify, and premier platforms everywhere.

Dylan began speaking about social media from a unique perspective. In high school he gave a TED Talk on how social media "saved his life."  Since then, Dylan has built a career as a social media creator and entrepreneur.  He talks about getting his start on Musical.ly and about founding REACH, a rapidly-growing organization that supports college students interested in social media and the creator economy.

This interview is packed with Dylan’s insights on the current state of social media platforms, strategies for successful content creation, and his own experience building a career in social media.

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A transcript of the episode follows:

Jon Pfeiffer:
I am joined today by Dylan Huey, welcome to the podcast.

Dylan Huey:
Thank you so much for having me, Jon.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And you are a recent graduate of my wife's school, USC.

Dylan Huey:
I love USC. Yeah. I studied business administration minor at Thornton Music School for Music Industry, and I had a great four years, so I just graduated this past May.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And you, in doing research came across a TED Talk that you had done in 2020.

Dylan Huey:
I did. I did a TED-

Jon Pfeiffer:
How did it come to be that you got to do a TED Talk?

Dylan Huey:
It's a great question. So I'm from Silicon Valley. My high school was doing their first year of TED Talks and I've been doing social media as a creator since I was 15 years old back in 2016. Managed a bunch of influencers, so super knowledgeable in the tech space. They came to me and they were like, hey, did you want to give a TED Talk? So we spent six months building out what became of that TED Talk, which was Social Media Saved My Life.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah, it was the title that struck my attention first because you don't hear very many people say that.

Dylan Huey:
You hear a lot of negative stuff about social media and how people get cyberbullied on social media, have a lot of negative experiences. For me, it was quite the opposite. I flipped the script and I explained why social media has had a positive impact in my life. I got bullied in middle school, built my following because I got bullied in middle school and wanted to build a community for people who were related to me. So I was live-streaming for five hours a day in high school, and that's how I built my audience. So my TED Talk was how I was able to build that community, how I was able to show other people through social media that you can really find your belonging. And I think that my social media presence has had a positive impact on myself and my life, and I hope it's had a positive impact on other people's lives as well.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So I want to circle back on a couple of things. First, the going back and forth, when you're developing a TED talk, how much input do they give you?

Dylan Huey:
It's a great question. I wrote the entire script myself, so it was a six, seven page script. I actually looked back at it last week, but we did a lot of brainstorming. Honestly, I went to a Catholic high school and it was one of the Catholic teachers who worked with me on building out that script. I had a lot of ownership in what I wanted to talk about. I mean, everything that I talked about are things that really happened in my life. I talked about this one time where I was on tour. This mother came up to myself and my mom and said that my content saved her daughter's life. That's a very true story and a huge antidote that I love telling because it shows how things that happen in social media, have an impact in real life.

So anecdotes like that really, I built myself and I made the initial script. I think where they really came and worked with me on was how can we build inflection and presentation and really making sure that the Ted Talk was delivered to the best of its ability. But I wrote everything myself. I like to write my scripts myself, so I know what I'm saying.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And then in there you had also said that you had started your own channels. Which was your primary channel?

Dylan Huey:
I started my social media on Musical.ly, which was back then a lip-syncing platform. It turned into TikTok. I think what made me unique was that on Musical.ly, everyone was lip-syncing and making lip sync dance videos wherein I was live-streaming for five hours hours a day to 20,000 viewers at a time and just interacting with them in a very organic way. I was going live with fans and audience members. I had people who I didn't even know who were teaching me French for two hours and I was reading Shakespeare, which was my freshman high school homework class. So it was very organic and it felt like people and friends really coming together and that's really what I did. That was different from Musical.ly at the time.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah, I mean, you're the only person I know that started on Musical.ly that's still on TikTok.

Dylan Huey:
Yeah, it was a different platform. I've switched to Snapchat now. So Snapchat is my biggest platform today. I get 20 million views every single day on Snapchat. So that's become my biggest platform. And I think the reason why I switched very successfully from Musical.ly to Snapchat was my Musical.ly live streams was very focused on authenticity and community. I was live-streaming and that was my audience. On Snapchat, it's that same aspect. It's very authentic content. The content deletes after 24 hours and it really gives people a glimpse in my life in a very similar capacity. So I think Snapchat is really hitting and working for me for people to really see that same aspect that they loved my content for back in 2016.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And if you were to advise somebody that's just starting now-

Dylan Huey:
Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I want to start a platform.

Dylan Huey:
Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Which one would you pick first?

Dylan Huey:
That's a great question. I think each platform is very different, and I don't think it's a matter of which platform you want to choose, but I think it's more about what type of content you want to make. The biggest thing when I hear people say, I want to start a platform and I want to build a following, is that they want to do it, but they haven't really done it. It's the same thing as a singer wanting to become a singer but hasn't released any music. If you're not releasing content, then you're not going to be able to build your own platform or build a following in the first place.

So a lot of creators in this space, it takes them 700 videos before they start going viral. So if you're making content that is just strictly on how can I please the algorithm on TikTok, then you're going to get burnt out very quickly. And creator burnout is a huge, huge, huge problem where a lot of people are feeling burned out, but if you're doing what you love and making the type of content that you really enjoy making, it saves yourself that burnout because you're having fun with what you enjoy doing.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Right. No, I found that all successful creators have to put in a lot of work. It just takes time.

Dylan Huey:
It does. And some people don't-

Jon Pfeiffer:
I just want to echo what you're saying that if you don't enjoy it, I have seen clients come and go. They realize it's a lot of work.

Dylan Huey:
Totally.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So I want to circle back to what I was going to ask you initially, but I got on the Ted Talk. You are the founder and CEO of REACH.

Dylan Huey:
Yes.

Jon Pfeiffer:
What is REACH?

Dylan Huey:
It's a great question. We started off as a student organization at USC as a place for people passionate about social media to be able to come together, learn from each other, collaborate with each other, and really grow. So we started off as a student organization on campus where these students can really just collaborate and people who want to become influencers had a place on campus very similar to the film and TV department at a school being able to support these actors. So we built a place for students by students for people passionate about content creation. We grew it out in the last 22 months or so from one university to now 75 universities across the United States. So we've grown it out nationwide. It's the fastest growing national student organization. We now have over 2,500 members in our organization. And now we've also launched on a for-profit side. That's all on the nonprofit college side. We've also launched into a for-profit side now as well where we have a marketing agency working with a ton of brands just to be able to help connect brands and creators together.

Jon Pfeiffer:
What's the for-profit name of the company?

Dylan Huey:
It's called REACH. So everything's under one umbrella company of REACH. We have our nonprofit, which is REACH Nationals, that's what's tied to all the universities because a student organization has to be a nonprofit for it to be on most campuses. So that's all. It's called REACH Nationals on the nonprofit. And then on our for-profit, we have a marketing division called REACH Marketing. We have a ventures division called REACH Ventures where we have equity in 15 creator economy tech startups.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Do you have to be a college student to be on the nonprofit side?

Dylan Huey:
As of right now. Correct. We have over a thousand alums that we're also have in our network. We're on track. What I think we're on track to do by the end of 2025 is to launch non-collegiate chapters as well, very similar to the Recording Academy, how they have Grammy U and then they have their professional chapters. We want to build that same thing because there's a lot of creators who aren't getting the support and the community who aren't in college. So I think what's great for us is we started off as college built that pipeline where everyone who is on college knows about REACH, wants to join a REACH chapter because of the evolving wave of influencers and influencer marketing. But we're going to eventually launch outside the college sphere in the next few months, especially.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I don't know if you have a REACH chapter at Pepperdine, but I am an adjunct professor at Pepperdine and let's say a student came up to me and said, I would really like to start a chapter here. How do they go about it?

Dylan Huey:
It's a great question. So what's great is that all of these 75 chapters that we started have been purely based on inbound. So we've done no outreach to any student to tell them to join our chapter or start a chapter. It's been students coming to us, which I think is showing the tide of the landscape. People are seeing the reason that REACH is so important on their campus. Here in SoCal, you're right, we don't have a Pepperdine chapter. We have a USC, UCLA, LMU, we have a Chapman chapter, we have a CSUN chapter, UC Santa Barbara. Pepperdine, I think is the one chapter that we don't have in SoCal.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I think I need to fix that for you.

Dylan Huey:
I think we need to start a chapter. It's really, it's student-led. It's like any other student organization where if a student is really passionate about this space. Here on the national side, we have a national advisory board with individuals from Meta, with Snapchat, with Edelman. All these top companies that we're able to bring in guest speakers, we're able to build in workshops. I think students really love REACH, especially on the West Coast because we're able to provide them resources that they can't get in the classroom. Content days, colab days, teachers won't be able to set up time for that. Working with brands to go to movie premieres here in Los Angeles, these are tangible opportunities that students get access to by being in the REACH network that a typical classroom just can't set up. In addition, we have resources and partnerships with all these tech companies that are providing resources for students who want to be influencers while they are in college.

So I mean, the pipeline is super easy. We've had all these students come to us, reach out to us saying, hey, we want to start a chapter. The template is great. We built a template for these students who want to start a chapter to be able to know a little bit more about REACH, know the resources that they have here on our national side, but we also give them ownership in their chapter. Each chapter is a little bit different, right? Our USC chapter is very different from our UPenn chapter just based off of how the two universities operate. So we really give those students ownership into building out how their chapter really looks like.

Jon Pfeiffer:
What about with the NIL, the name, image and likeness for athletes? Do you find that many of the members of the chapters are athletes?

Dylan Huey:
I think what's great is that when we started REACH, NIL wasn't a thing, quite frankly. And we have had more and more student athletes be really interested in joining our REACH chapters. At USC, we have Olympic athletes, Olympic Gold medalist for swimming. We have the youngest American girl climb Mount Everest. At UCLA, we have a UCLA track and field athlete. So we're seeing more and more students who are athletes, see the value of having social media and see the value of a program like REACH benefiting them. Because typically athletes and social media don't really overlap. An athlete doesn't have time to learn about social media and how the best practices of social media look like. But with a program like REACH, we build out curriculum, the chapters build out curriculum that are beneficial for all the students. It's things like headquarter tours at TikTok, headquarter tours at Snapchat for these students to learn how they can maximize and have the best practices on the platforms that they're making content for.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I know one of the problems for athletes is, and you touched upon it, is they don't have time.

Dylan Huey:
They don't. They don't.

Jon Pfeiffer:
They're practicing. And that's why only, I mean the Caleb Williams's of the world have their own team to do that.

Dylan Huey:
A hundred percent. And I think what's great for REACH members, so I mean right now nationwide, 50% of our members are creators, and then another 50% are people want to be on the backend, whether that be influencer marketing, whether that be talent managers. And we've really curated our own mini ecosystem of the creator economy where if an athlete or any creator joins our network, they can find their potential first talent manager, or they can find their first editor or their first videographer, photographer, these resources that will help them scale where they can build a team just through students like them who want to be in this space.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And then tell me about the for-profit side, because you have to have all of these juniors and seniors who are now graduating like yourself.

Dylan Huey:
Not a hundred percent.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And suddenly you're not eligible. What do they do?

Dylan Huey:
Which is great question. So on our for-profit side, we've built a really strong pipeline as a early career incubator for these graduates who want to be more on the business side of the influencer marketing space. So we have a ton of divisions here at REACH on our for-profit division, we have a marketing agency where we're working with over a hundred brands. These are brands like Temu, and we're working with some clothing brands and we're working with Fashion Nova, et cetera, on influencer marketing, student ambassador programs, gifting opportunities. It is very similar to your stereotypical influencer marketing agency, and we're working with a ton of brands every single month. We have over 30 individuals who are working at that company, who are, and a lot of them are recent graduates who were in our REACH chapter and now they want to have that first hands-on experience hoping to maybe work at a bigger marketing agency in the future.

So that's one division, it's a marketing division. We have a talent division where we represent some creators, not who are in our collegiate chapters, but a very substantial creators with 10 million followers plus. We have some recent alums, some current students who are in our REACH chapter that want to gain a hands-on experience of what is it like to represent a creator with 15 million followers on TikTok, and we're able to build them that experience. And then we have a ventures division where we're building out, we're supporting tech companies in the creator space and the tech space to help them gain access to these consumers who might be influencers or college students who we've really built out a pipeline of incubating these startups. And we have some students who are recent alums who are helping and growing that division of REACH as well.

Jon Pfeiffer:
To your knowledge, is there anything like the nonprofit side of REACH on campuses where you-

Dylan Huey:
That's a great question.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay.

Dylan Huey:
We're the only influencer organization and we're the fastest growing national student organization. I think when you think of national organizations, the few that I think of are Greek life, so all the fraternities, all the sororities. You have a few that are on the marketing side, like American Marketing Association, PRSSA, which is a PR association. There is none for creators. And what we've done really well is to be able to build this community nationwide where it's not just about a specific chapter. If a chapter at USC, if a member wants to meet other creators at a different university like Penn State or Syracuse, now we have that national network where these students can be able to interact with other creators at other universities that they wouldn't be able to meet otherwise.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Now, do you have your own platform? In the early days of Facebook, you could only be a college student.

Dylan Huey:
It's a great question. We're building out a platform right now that'll be ready end of the year, and that's something that we're really excited about, especially because our biggest problem right now is that statement that I just mentioned, a student at USC, they have to look through the REACH Instagram over at Penn State to see who's a member at Penn State. So we're really building out that community platform right now, exclusive for our members, and there'll be additional stuff like workshops and access to these resources and access to these influencer campaigns that they might want to participate into to earn some money as a creator themselves.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So I want to shift gears completely.

Dylan Huey:
Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
How do you consume your media?

Dylan Huey:
That's a great question. I consume, I mean, strictly social media on my end. I'm constantly looking through TikTok. I think a lot of people are consuming their media off of TikTok, but I don't even have a TV anymore. So everything is strictly on short form social media on my end. I do look at Apple News on a daily, but my two biggest platforms that I consume are TikTok and LinkedIn, quite honestly.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah, no TikTok is a addicting.

Dylan Huey:
It is.

Jon Pfeiffer:
It doesn't matter what your age is, it's a addicting.

Dylan Huey:
It is. Most definitely.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I tell you, I, don't even know how I got on it, but I got on one of the TikTok pages where they have car crashes from dash cams.

Dylan Huey:
Okay.

Jon Pfeiffer:
It completely changed the way I drive now.

Dylan Huey:
Yeah. Oh, I can imagine.

Jon Pfeiffer:
People are idiots.

Dylan Huey:
It's for videos.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay. So how many hours a day do you spend consuming media?

Dylan Huey:
That's a great question. I mean, I'm constantly getting busier, busier with our REACH team. We're at 35 employees over here now on our for-profit side. But I mean, my device, my TikTok, I'm spending hours. I think for us, on my side at least what I want to do, consuming media is not only knowing the market and what's trending and what's doing really well on social media, but on also understanding why it's doing well. So I'm also consuming and understanding the algorithms on each platform and what the algorithm changes are and the guidelines and rules, and the reasoning why content's doing really well. A lot of creators come to me nowadays asking how they can maximize their social media following and how they can scale up. And I have 15, 20 creators a day asking me to take a look at their accounts and give them feedback.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So let me stop you right there. What are the top five things a creator can do?

Dylan Huey:
I think it's consistency. That's a lot. There's a lot of things that creators can do really well. I think it's consistency, knowing your audience. I love when creators take a look at their analytics, but I don't think that the analytics that they take a look at on their Instagram analytics, audience analytics is that indicative of what good content is. I think good content is good content. So if you're putting out content, it's going to find its audience regardless. I was talking to an influencer last week and she was mentioning that some of her videos get 5,000 views. Some of her content get 200,000 views, and I was telling her that it might be super beneficial for her to take a look at the videos that do 200 views per video, which she's doing very well at getting 200,000 views. Figure out why it's getting 200,000 views. There's a few reasons.

It's niche, it's audience, it's understanding the trends, right? She's interacting with the trends. She's building it out to be her own, so she's taking ownership in those trends. Then the 5,000 views are typically when she's trying something new like a day in my life or a talking video, which her audience really doesn't know quite about that much because they follow her for her dance videos. So what I told her is for every four videos you do that is you're going to know that hits that 200,000 view mark because it fits the audience, it fits that niche. It's what you're consistently putting out that your fans really like, then put out an experimental video, and then put out four more videos that you know are going to hit the algorithm.

Reason why is that on TikTok, each video is very individual of each other. So each video has the same opportunity to go on that explore page, but even if that one test video doesn't do the best, because you have four videos before and four videos after, people are going to go to your account and see that test video and watch it, and it'll boost that content rather than just pumping a lot of experimental videos. And then after you're like, oh, why is all my views getting 5,000 views and then putting out a video that's going to do well, offset your videos that are experimental with videos that you know are going to hit the algorithm.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah. Because that is the 20 million question is how do the algorithms work?

Dylan Huey:
Totally. That's a great question. I mean, it's always changing, right?

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah. I mean, everybody wants to reverse engineer it-

Dylan Huey:
Totally.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And then they change it. As soon as you think you figured it out, they change it.

Dylan Huey:
Yeah. The algorithm's changing, I think, once every other week, and it's a lot to keep up with, but I think at the end of the day, if you're a creator and you have an audience, people are going to resonate with your content. If you're putting out good content that it's going to find its audience.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And people hate it when you tell them that.

Dylan Huey:
They do. They do. I need to growth hack the algorithm. I'm like, you don't really need to growth hack the algorithm. Just continue putting out content.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah. Good content.

Dylan Huey:
It's going to find its audience.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So I try to keep the interviews at about a half hour and we're almost there. So I want to ask you one final question. Where can people find you on the internet?

Dylan Huey:
Great question. I mean, typically I tell people to just google Dylan Huey and you'll find a bunch of stuff, but my biggest platforms are LinkedIn. I try to post every other day on LinkedIn talking about the creator economy and the landscape of the creator space, as well as Snapchat. I'm posting every single day on Snapchat. My handle is @djrodinflash, which is DJ, R-O-D-I-N-F-L-A-S-H. Beyond that, I'm also on every single platform, like every other creator and entrepreneur. So TikTok, Instagram, all the other platforms I can be found at @rodinflash, and yeah, I'm everywhere.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Thank you. This has been fun.

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