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- [00:01]
Michael Stelzner
Hey, before we get started, I wanted to share some exciting news. Social media Marketing World 2026 just wrapped up and marketers from all over the world walked away with strategies they're already putting to work. But here's the thing. You actually didn't miss it. Why? Because right now, you can get a virtual ticket, which is access to everything that happened at the conference. Every session, every keynote, every workshop. We're talking about dozens of sessions on AI, Instagram, Facebook, ads, content strategy, and a whole lot more, all from the world's top experts. Attendee Jules McGuire said, quote, Every single session I attended, I've been able to take away probably three things, minimum, that I'm going to be able to immediately implement, unquote. And with your virtual ticket, you get access to all of this for the next 18 months. You can watch on your schedule, you can pause, you can replay, you can take notes at your own pace. Right now, these Virtual tickets are $200 off, but only until May 15th. Don't wait for the next conference to level up your marketing. Head to social media marketing world.info and grab your virtual ticket today.
- [01:11]
Jerry Potter
Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner.
- [01:21]
Liron Sigev
Hello. Hello, Hello.
- [01:22]
Michael Stelzner
Thank you so much for joining me for the social media marketing podcast brought to you by Social Media Guys examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzer, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want more exposure, more leads, and more sales. Today, Jerry Potter and I will explore important updates from YouTube with our special guest, Liron Sav. Take it away, Jerry.
- [01:43]
Jerry Potter
Helping you to simplify your social safari, here is this week's expert guide. All right, thanks, Mike. Great to be here. There's some important YouTube changes to discuss, including new tools that make content creation easier and faster, which is great for marketers, Right? Although that's not always a good thing. We'll talk about that. Also, a more intimate way to engage with viewers that could warm up potential leads much faster. And if you've ever considered working with influencers. But the idea sounds risky and stressful, I get that. But YouTube may have just solved that. So we're very excited to be joined by Liron Sigev. Liron's a YouTube strategist who helps businesses turn YouTube channels into lead machines. And today, Liron, Mike and I are going to explore what these latest updates for from YouTube and mean for small business marketers and owners like you. Liron, welcome back to the show.
- [02:34]
Liron Sigev
So excited to have me back. Thank you for doing that. Obviously I didn't bum too terribly the first time. So, yeah, let's share some knowledge because we know we're going to spice it up.
- [02:43]
Jerry Potter
So YouTube is obviously rolling out AI tools as fast as anyone and there are a lot of new content tools and they're available for both, you know, organic on the organic side, which is nice. That's not always true. So let's talk about some of these new tools first and I want to get your feedback on them and then we'll kind of discuss actually using them. So they launched something called ad motion for YouTube shorts, which is a tool that will let creators basically animate a simple photo of themselves into an 8 second short using preset motions and effects. So tell us about this a little bit and how you can see this being used. Liron.
- [03:17]
Liron Sigev
Yeah. So I think that tools are great, right? We need more tools. And what I like is that we have an option to use them or not use them. And especially as businesses who are not focused on being like YouTube creators or content creators, you have a business to run. So anything that's going to make our lives easier is always welcome. The fact that we can have a image and it gets like animated and gives us a little bit of life, I think it's cool, I think it's interesting. I think it's another thing that we have to try and I think you'll see a theme running through all of this, is that we have to experiment for ourselves. Right. Every business is going to be slightly different. We what works for one, not necessarily going to work for another. I'm very anti this whole guru kind of like close your mouth in your thumbnails because Mr. Beast did it. Like, I hate that because not everybody is the same. Not every brand is the same. So do I like more tools? Yes. And we're going to try more tools and try use them in our, in our systems. Absolutely. Is there anything that's like screaming out at me right now, like, oh my God, this is the hottest thing. Drop everything. Try this now. Kind of not there yet.
- [04:28]
Jerry Potter
So have you seen this one in action where it turns a single image into an 8 second video? Like, I'm trying to picture it. Like if you are a bakery, you have nice photos of your cakes or clothing or construction equipment or whatever it is and now you can all of a sudden turn that into video and then I would think put text over it or something like that for your shorts.
- [04:46]
Liron Sigev
Yeah, I mean, I've seen it used on other platforms. I know through AI, we have access to all these tools and we can animate an image and we can bring it to life. We've seen people do some really cool stuff with, like, old family photos and getting, you know, grandparents from, you know, the 1700s to kind of come alive. These are all cool. So is there a brand application? Yeah, absolutely. You know, if you can have a single photo and that, you not normally think YouTube is a place for it, but now you take a tool, you run it through it, all of a sudden, you know, the cake comes to life or, you know, an image moves across the screen, does it give it a bit of oomph and something to. To look forward to? Yeah, absolutely. But again, it's all just another thing, another arrow in your quiver to say, okay, I've got another thing that I could get attention with.
- [05:35]
Michael Stelzner
I have some thoughts on this. For those that use Google Gemini, they have this thing called Nano Banana 2, which is their latest and greatest model. And effectively what you can do is take any picture or image that you create inside of this, or you could upload an image and you can say, animate this and effectively what it will do is it will, for example, zoom in on it, add some background music and ambient sound effects and stuff like that. So I think this is effectively the same tech stack applied to make it easier for people to make shorts. And the part that I'm a little confused about is where does the audio layer into all of this? Obviously, I mean, you could manufacture this effectively yourself right now by taking an image, making it into a video using Nana Banana 2, and then adding audio over the top of it and getting the same thing. My guess is they're going to make it kind of one stop. Simple integration, don't you think, Luke Ryan?
- [06:24]
Liron Sigev
Yeah, I agree with that. I like the idea of being able to put a person in the picture. So a lot of people don't want to be on camera, you know, but if you can upload an image of yourself, and we've experimented with this a bunch and it works really, really well, and you have an image and all of a sudden the image comes to life and you give it a little bit of animations and the person themselves doesn't have to be the actor. Really like that. I agree about the music kind of. How do you sync that up? I would love to be able to get to that point, which I think we'll discuss, where you can actually clone your voice as such and have that little thing come into play. So again, I think all of these are like Micro steps as they testing things. We have to remember that YouTube is this global behemoth that has got gazillion of hours of content uploaded constantly. Every little thing has a massive impact. And when it comes to things like animating a photo to a video, that's not a small lift, that's a big one, that's going to have bandwidth implication, that's going to have storage implications. So I like the fact that we are marching towards where we want to be and this is just another little step. They'll test, analyze, fix it, do the next iterations.
- [07:40]
Jerry Potter
So one thing I think it's important for businesses and marketers to know too, is that other people can take any single frame from your YouTube short and turn it into an 8 second video as well. Now, attribution is still there, so it'll still link back to your actual video where it came from. But I do think this potentially introduces a really neat, you know, user generated content situation where it's like, hey, grab any frame from our video and turn it into something and we'll pick a winner.
- [08:11]
Liron Sigev
Look, we, we kind of into this area of like content and identity theft and then repurposing somebody else's hard work where they came up with the idea, they came up with the concept and all you're doing is clicking a button saying, hey, make me the same. Like we're, we're kind of in that weird transition area. YouTube will work it out. YouTube is really good at understanding content and understanding fakeness. And yes, they have their faults, absolutely. But their system is geared for it. From day one they've been fighting spam pretty hard. If you remember, as a content creator, the amount of spam comments we used to get compared to what we get now, they've really kind of stepped up that game. So I like the idea of a brand being able to remix somebody else's content. But and this is like a massive bat here, you have to add value, you have to enhance the clip. What I absolutely hate, and this is going to do very big brand reputation, is when you take somebody's clip and you remix it and you put your little face in the bottom corner as a talking head, kind of green screen, just your head as a cutout. And you keep on pointing above your head because you're pointing to the original content and you've said nothing. So that kind of erodes your brand's reputation. If you want to add more content, more context, that's amazing. Tip to go. So as an example, we're talking about the bakery or in the food prep industry. If you're in that industry and you've seen a creator, anybody online using your product in their cooking recipe, that's a great one to remix. But as you remixing it, add your version to it. So stop that clip and say, okay, see, at this point they used our product here, the health benefit, here's what's going to happen with the product. This is what we're going to do. You're adding your authority to it. So the attention shifts from what you remixed back to you as the brand. Whatever you do, don't just remix. Put your logo at the bottom and going, hey, here's my content. That means you've got nothing to say.
- [10:13]
Jerry Potter
I love that. Yeah. Because Meta has actually said recently these reaction videos where you don't add anything, you're not going to get any reach. And I wouldn't be surprised if YouTube is already doing that or they will follow suit because it just seems to make sense. But I love what you said it sounds like. So it'll require a little social listening.
- [10:29]
Liron Sigev
Right.
- [10:30]
Jerry Potter
So you can kind of find out if people are mention it because they may not tag you every single time. But I love the way you frame that. The social proof being built in. Like, here's one of our customers using this. And by the way, here's something else as opposed to here are the health benefits of this thing we sell and nobody's using it.
- [10:47]
Liron Sigev
You could trend jack this thing to bit if you're smart. If you're a smart marketer and you're watching the trends and you're watching who's doing what, then you can think, okay, this is working really well in that industry. How can I kind of remix that to make it work for my audience? I think we're going to see a lot of very powerful plays happening. And because the tools are making it easier and easier to create content, we always go back to the original thought, which is ideation. The idea counts the most if you can come up with a great idea. Execution now is handled by so many of these tools. That's the bit that's exciting that it's easier, but you've got to come up with that original idea. Just pressing a button going, remix, make it my own save and upload. Not going to do you any favors.
- [11:34]
Jerry Potter
Yeah. So for reference, if you're looking for this feature where you can take a frame from somebody else's short and turn it into a video, it's called Reimagine. And then there's another one called Add Object. And I like this because one of the things that I've been doing on YouTube for thumbnails, and you can do this in Nano Banana, as you mentioned, or ChatGPT, is, you know, you take a photo, you can obviously tell it to make it look more professional or whatever, but you can also. My wife discovered this. You can find an outfit on a clothing site from, you know, Macy's or Target or whatever and say, hey, put me in this outfit. And it works really well. So I've been using it to kind of wear brighter things on my thumbnails, for example. So it's not always a, you know, a black Henley or whatever. But this is now something where YouTube is letting us do this with videos. It's called ADD object. And you can basically say, hey, here's a photo of me and here's a cupcake. Now make me skydive while I'm eating this particular cupcake. Which sounds really interesting. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. But now, of course, eight seconds is the limit. But I gotta ask. YouTube has spoken out against AI Slop. We've talked about that here on the show. So do these announcements surprise you? Because they could potentially lead to that.
- [12:42]
Liron Sigev
Yeah. Okay, look, love YouTube, so let's just get it on the record. But you can't play both sides. I mean, this is a PR move. You know, it's like saying, here's a bunch of guitars, go and use them and then complain about the bad music.
- [13:00]
Michael Stelzner
Do you think this is reaction to Sora going on a business? But from open AI, you know, it's
- [13:04]
Liron Sigev
always been on the roadmap, like, I understand it, YouTube as a platform, they want to be seen as a legitimate place to go and do business. They understand YouTube is part of the buying journey. They understand people go to YouTube more than just to be entertained. They go there to learn about products and services. They have to keep brand reputation.
- [13:23]
Michael Stelzner
Have to.
- [13:24]
Liron Sigev
At the same time, they understand that it's difficult to come up with a thumbnail. Right. They know that a lot of creators have the entire content ready and sit for a week on it because they can't come up with the right thumbnail. So they want to make it easier to do that. So you're trying to play both sides. Here is some really easy tool to get you to create content. Oh, by the way, we're really going to come down hard on AI Slop stuff. It's a PR brand reputation protection move. You, you, you got to understand that from a YouTube point of view, you've got to Be seen as playing both sides. They have a very difficult position, but they're doing it as best as they can. Am I worried about YouTube being flooded with a gazillion faceless channels? Just absolute slop. And that's just taking over. I'm not, because again, YouTube is really good at identifying those. They're already taken away all the incentives, those kind of channels no longer get monetized. They've come down very hard on content. People who kind of create their content based on somebody else's content stealing them, essentially, they're really doing a good job as far as that. Take away the incentive of money. Well then it kind of takes away the reason to have a hundred faceless channels where up until now it was just an AI loop that you just say create.
- [14:42]
Jerry Potter
If I'm hearing you correctly though, when you say a lot of this is just PR playing the other side, like, of course we don't want to promote that stuff. But if people watch the slop, no matter how low effort it was, I think low effort content was the phrase that YouTube used, then they don't really care. They're going to happily show it to as many people who enjoy it.
- [15:01]
Liron Sigev
Yeah, look, exactly. You know, it's the user is the algorithm. We've heard YouTube saying this a million times if I don't mind watching what somebody else has deemed as AI slut. But for me, hey, that helped me fix my issue or that helped me learn about this new feature that has come out and it happened to be given by an AI avatar or a comic character. But I'm okay with that because I just wanted the information. Well, then I'm going to see more of that stuff. So the stuff that's going to get surfaced to the top is going to follow what the viewer follows. So the viewer likes a certain thing. It doesn't click away instantly. All of these are good signals for YouTube and says, okay, well Jerry really likes to wear a dress. He just said it. We've got it unrecorded. Jerry likes to wear his dresses and he likes to play on YouTube. Great. Well, we're going to show him more of that stuff. Whereas kind of someone like Michael say, like, I'm not interested in that crap. Don't you ever show me that. Well then it's just not going to.
- [15:58]
Jerry Potter
Yeah. And apologies to our audio listeners who can't see the lovely piece that I am wearing.
- [16:02]
Liron Sigev
Beautiful, stunning session.
- [16:04]
Jerry Potter
So I want to ask then because for a lot of businesses in our audience, I know they are creating long form content and if you are a long form YouTube content creator, it is felt for the last year or so that shorts is getting all the attention. So with these recent announcements, is that a strong suggestion that we should consider adding shorts to the strategy? Or is it just because AI processing is so much cheaper? Like they're willing to do it for an eight second clip, but nothing longer than that?
- [16:36]
Liron Sigev
Again, goes back to testing, right? I like shorts as a strategy, so leaving AI aside for a second shorts as a strategy is really, really powerful. It's the additional way to get in front of a very, very different audience that maybe isn't watching your long form content. So you can get that as a discovery mechanism. And people who like to watch shorts, guess what, they don't like to convert from shorts to long unless there's something super powerful. The original thinking was, oh, I'm going to see your stuff. Really like you click on the long form video, subscribe to your channel. That was the original thinking. But over time we've realized that people watch shorts on the toilet waiting for the doctor and they're just going to scroll through shorts and next, next, next, and occasionally they find something so powerful, then they go, oh, hold on a second. I actually do want to see the entire one hour interview because this was really, really good as a clip. So should you try shorts as a business? Absolutely. Is it going to be surfaced in front of a different kind of audience? Yes, that was the intention of Shorts. I'm giving you that, that leverage and, and it's the equivalent of, you know, we've used this analogy before of having a food truck, right? You have your restaurant and you have your food truck. Your food truck is a little bite sized, getting people to sample a little bit of your, of your content. If they really like it, well, then they're going to walk into your restaurant and sit down and have a real meal. As far as building a community, building a real audience engagement, there's no question that long form is absolutely the way to go. Shorts is more of a, hey, taste some good food. Long form is more like, you're gonna come back.
- [18:13]
Michael Stelzner
For folks that are listening to the podcast next week we have a episode dedicated to YouTube Shorts with John Scott and it's going to be a great show. One other thing I just want to share that I think might be what's going here with YouTube and all these AI short form stuff is for those that are not familiar, OpenAI developed this app called Sora, which was a very easy to use video app that effectively created reels and shorts as of this recording, by the time this show comes out, everything will be shut down. They shut it down on April 26th or the 28th or something like that, mostly because they did not have the processing bandwidth and power to accomplish their bigger mission. So I think this could be a play with big daddy Google, who has lots of processing power and effectively can bring some of the same functionality over to YouTube Shorts to draw all those people that want what Sora offered over to YouTube. Because, you know, even though it wasn't super huge, there was a lot of people that were creating really creative content that they were specifically using inside of ads and all their kinds of mediums, specifically on the Sora platform. So I do think this is a play to attract some of those people over to that particular thing. I just wanted to throw that over to fence.
- [19:26]
Jerry Potter
Interesting. Yeah. Well, so one thing I think, you know, with all of this is as we talked about, this helps us scale attention. So I'm all for any of these things and some stuff will catch on and some stuff will won't. But another one I want to ask you about, Liron, is, you know, YouTube has had this effect maker and they've expanded it and they've added AI tools to it. And so now you can actually create these effects that can be used and you can basically create them with simple prompts with no coding required. Before it was a lot more complex. And it's available to anyone who has advanced features unlocked, which also includes, I think advanced feed, like to Uploaded longer than 15 minutes, I think. Is it advanced features like it says, advanced. But most channels have gone through this process to have that unlocked. My favorite thing might be that you can do it on desktop because I don't like working at my phone. It's at effects.YouTube.com but let me ask you about this. Is this an opportunity for brands to get more of their kind of, you know, almost like memes that people can use in other shorts or how do you see this tool being utilized by marketers and business owners?
- [20:29]
Liron Sigev
Yeah, again, goes back to ideation. Right. So because it's prompt based, it's about coming up with a really creative idea and then saying, okay, well how do I execute it? So before we had all these features, if you had this crazy idea, if I want a, you know, my brands, I don't know, swinging through the city skylight of New York like Spider man, that's big budget, that's huge production cost, that is years of planning and getting permissions. There's all of that stuff coming into play. Now you can go, hold on. I like this idea as a concept. Let me go test it out. Let me just type this prompt in. I'm going to reiterate a couple of times until I get it right, and then I'm going to test it and see what happens. And if my audience really likes me swinging through New York, holding my cake in my hand, hey, maybe we'll do a series of this. So experimentation, experimentation again. Ideation is taking the stuff that you have in your head and you go, if I had unlimited budget and all the tools in the world, what would I do? Great. You now do at your fingertips. So those effects are really cool. Like you said, the prompt used to be super complicated. You had to be super detailed with camera styles and angles. And, you know, you had to be like, almost as a director. Now it's evolved, and now you can say, hey, I'm thinking, I need a drone shots over New York as the sun is setting, and you want to get a really, really good first attempt at it. You might have to play with it a little bit. But it now adds, and it's. Everything that's adding is really, really powerful to the creative director who's sitting there thinking, I need to make an ad. I need to create content. I'm out of ideas. Like, how do I execute this? Because in my head, I know what I want to achieve, but in reality, I just don't have the budget for this kind of stuff. Yeah, well, now you can.
- [22:19]
Jerry Potter
If anyone brings up cake again, I'm going to have to get some after the show. We're going to need a new example.
- [22:24]
Michael Stelzner
Really passionate about this is it looks a lot like Snapchat, and it looks a lot like Facebook filters, you know, and Instagram filters, But you can create your own. I mean, that's kind of the cool thing about it, right? Where in the past, if you remember, like, usually it was some huge brand that was paying a lot of money to have one of these things created. You know what I mean? That could allow you to put on, like a. Like a Marvel costume or something like this. They were timing it with the release of a new movie, but now it looks like you can actually create these kind of things yourself, which is kind of neat. And if you want to get super creative. I don't know if this feels more like a consumer play than a business play to me, though.
- [22:59]
Liron Sigev
Yeah, I think it's more of a community play. So it's like, you know, my fans, my audience, my customers, you know, to your point, if you remember, Snapchat had this thing that, you know, during Comic Con, in a certain geographic area, you had to be there to experience this filter. And that costs a lot of money to get that. To get that into play. Now I can do this this afternoon. And now about adoption is more like, do my customers really care? Right. Like, that's. That's what it's going to boil down to. I'm trying to build on my channel. Like, it's not about creating content. It's about more of being you, showing who you are. And I think in the age of AI, where things are so perfect and can be spun up with a bunch of prompts, we're going to gravitate more towards authenticity, authentic content. And people throw that word around quite a lot. But if it's you in there and you're making a mistake and you cough during your interview and. And you leave that in and you don't cut that stuff out, that's cool. Means you're a human. I want to connect with that. Oh, and now I've got this cool thing I can actually use as well. Yeah. Where am I going to put this filter on my own content because of branded? I don't know. But if you have things like Coachella is. That's happening and people really want to be there, but at $10,000 for tickets, people are not. Look, maybe there's some play there. My concern is always in the back of my mind is, could this backfire? Like, could I have a filter that I had all this great intention, but maybe I didn't think it all the way through and now it gets misused and now my brand's associated with that. So brand reputation is seriously something we all have to consider. With all these tools becoming so easily available, we cannot get swept away in this, like, hype. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
- [24:44]
Jerry Potter
Yeah, it's definitely high reward, but also potentially high risk there.
- [24:50]
Michael Stelzner
Last month, I was on the ground at Social Media Marketing World, and a lot of marketers were telling me that they're overwhelmed and there's a really good chance you're feeling the exact same way. My opening keynote was called the Future of Marketing how to Thrive When AI Changes Everything. I shared research, real AI applications and a framework for utilizing AI as your most powerful ally, which ultimately will make you irreplaceable. And here's the thing, you can still watch it, and it doesn't stop there. Not just my keynote, but all the keynotes and sessions and workshops are available for you right now with your virtual ticket, we're talking dozens of quality sessions covering everything from AI to Instagram to Facebook ads, content, strategy, all of that available to you right now. Grab your tickets at $200 off, but only until May 15th. Head to social mediamarketingworld.info that's socialmediamarketingworld.info to get your tickets today.
- [25:47]
Jerry Potter
So YouTube is, I think, top of funnel for most businesses and marketers, but they are rolling out new features that I think it makes it easier for us to nurture people along. And when this feature first started getting tested, I got really excited because it's one of my favorite ways to communicate and that is voice replies. So now this is rolled out to everybody on YouTube and essentially you can reply to comments on videos using audio. Now, this only works on mobile devices, but you can do it in the regular YouTube app or the YouTube Studio mobile app. Both Android and iOS, you have up to 30 seconds to record a message. And I played with it a little bit today and I can share my experience a bit. But Liron, what are your initial thoughts on this? Now that this is wide open to everybody? I mean, have you used it at all or where are you at with it?
- [26:36]
Liron Sigev
Yeah, just like you, I was really looking forward to it because, you know, thinking, I get a comment, I really want to reply. I hit record on my phone and then I'm done. Like, my, this is really cool to build up your community. That was the theory, right? In reality of it, my question to anybody is this. Do you want a reply to a comment from some rando at Walmart? Yeah.
- [27:00]
Michael Stelzner
But from you, they might want to hear from your voice if they're fan.
- [27:03]
Liron Sigev
Ah, ah. You've just nailed it. That's exactly it. If you have a personality LED brand and if you're like the Michael and the Jerry's of the world and you really want to hear their voice saying, hey, thanks for watching. Like, that's cool. If you are. If you're gonna get a reply from like the Alex Farmers, Gary Visa of the world, that's cool. I would read that. I can definitely see that. If you're the local baker. Sorry, had to do that. If you're the local baker and people really love your cakes and somebody left a cool, positive comment and you want to reply because everybody knows you by name. Awesome. Is this a strategy that you want to start deploying in your business, saying every comment now needs a voicemail? Not really sure.
- [27:45]
Michael Stelzner
I mean, everybody could listen to it. No. Yes.
- [27:48]
Jerry Potter
Yes.
- [27:49]
Liron Sigev
It's completely public, so it's out there. It's like relieving a text reply, which, by the way, I think a lot of brands are missing an opportunity of just replying with text. I mean, I think that is completely. If you haven't done that, don't jump into voice. Get used to the replies of the replies. Right, okay. Because you're opening up yourself to an entire different world. And I think that again, like, the theory of this is great. And I think the theory of it is that if you have a reply with a voice, you're going to make that really cool personal connection perfect. Absolutely. You should be testing this. Do not make it a policy that every single comment now gets a voice reply because this scales really quickly and now you're gonna have an issue. And is it the same voice? Is it always the same person that's in the video? Otherwise it gets confusing. What happens if there's multiple people in the. Like, it kind of snowballs very, very quickly. So I like it. I like it from a personality channels for sure. Absolutely. I've tried it a bunch of times. Didn't make a massive engagement spike in my. Not at all.
- [28:54]
Michael Stelzner
And technically I have to stop watching. Well, they might have to stop watching another video in order to listen to your reply.
- [28:59]
Liron Sigev
Right. You're interrupting it. So I know a lot of people watch the video and whilst like it's going on, they're scrolling through the comments. Right. Definitely. Very common on like the Instagram feeds, Facebook. The video loops and loops and loops because the person is reading the comment.
- [29:15]
Jerry Potter
Yeah.
- [29:16]
Liron Sigev
Now you got to say to yourself, well, is this valuable enough for me to pause the video, press play and to listen to it? I think it'll be very novel the first time, but I think it's going to be a free for all if. I mean, they're not even talking about opening this up to. Not the content creator, but to everybody that's gonna be.
- [29:34]
Michael Stelzner
That would be process to listen.
- [29:37]
Jerry Potter
Yeah, I don't see that happening.
- [29:38]
Liron Sigev
But it's the talk. It's kind of saying it's wealth. You're gonna reply, they're gonna reply to you with voicemail.
- [29:44]
Michael Stelzner
Do they have a transcript version of it if you don't want. Not yet.
- [29:47]
Liron Sigev
Right. For the Love of God, YouTube. Neil, if you're listening, just don't like, seriously, this is going to be spam 101. Like we're gonna. It's gonna be terrible. And how do you police that and monitor it and like what's good and me as the Creator, I can now quickly scroll through some text and go, okay, yeah, there's no hate speech here. I'm gonna allow this. Or well, how do you do that when there's a whole bunch of little play buttons that you got to listen to every single voice? No, I think it's a terrible idea. Yes, opening up to the guest, like to anybody who can comment and leave a voice on any channel around the world.
- [30:23]
Jerry Potter
Nah, I could see opening it up to collaborators, for example, somebody who's, you know that with that collaboration feature. But to answer your question, Mike, there's always a transcript. And at least as of now, you can't even listen to it on the computer. You can only play it back on mobile. Which one thing that came up for me is I got really self conscious about the way that I speak because I was like, okay, I said the word like 28 times in this 27 second video and it picked up every single thing accurately. So. But yes, the transcript is part of it.
- [30:54]
Michael Stelzner
Well, and just a little tip for folks that do not know this, There are plenty of AI to text tools out there that exist. If you're doing this because it's convenient, you could use Whisper Flow, you could use the standard tools built into your operating system that allow you to speech to text it. But man, if they just had the ability to send a private message to that person, that would be fascinating. I do not see that coming. Do you see that coming?
- [31:19]
Liron Sigev
I'm old enough to remember when YouTube stopped your views at 301 because they had to verify all your views back in the day, you know, and back in those days you could actually send messages to people on YouTube. You built something up. But guess what happened? Two things, spammers and marketers. Then guess what's going to happen with voice spam? As in marketers, huh?
- [31:42]
Michael Stelzner
So what was your experience, Jerry? I'm curious how it worked for you.
- [31:45]
Jerry Potter
You know, I was out on a walk today and I was thinking ahead about the show and I thought, oh, let me just open the YouTube Studio app and let me just see what comments I had here. And it was really light and easy for me. And I try. I can't keep up with all the comments on my channel, but I try and do the best I can, you know, now there are AI suggestions that are built. I don't even know what plugin I have, but it'll be like, how's this sound? And I'm like, yeah, that's perfect. But it was really convenient. And to me, as you mentioned earlier, Liron hearing the voice of the person, I think is really powerful. This is where I think it can warm people up faster because it's like, oh, wow, they're talking to me. You know, if you can tell by their username, all the ones I replied to today, I could see their name in the username. It was like, oh, Eileen, oh, Rick, oh, Jill. And so I was able to address them by name as well. And so I think when you are commenting as a company, you know, all that intimacy is gone. So I enjoyed it. I could see doing it more. But I. I had one comment from a guy who said that his wife has had this health thing and has to be at home and he has to be home to take care of him. So he's trying to grow on YouTube so he can, you know, because he can only be at home. And it was so much easier for me to express the, the sympathy that I was feeling in my voice than to be like, you know, typing, sorry, bro, or, you know, anything like that. And so I enjoyed it. Yeah.
- [33:09]
Michael Stelzner
And the other side of it too, is that if you are on a phone, especially if you are of a certain age, which I think most of us that are on this show are of a certain age, where your eyes aren't as good as they used to be.
- [33:21]
Liron Sigev
Right.
- [33:21]
Michael Stelzner
And typing on your phone is not going to be easy. Okay, you got this little thing that's like about an inch tall. That is your keyboard, right. Like, like, how in the world are you expected to have a timely comment in that situation? Your only option is voice to text, which usually messes things up. And the idea that you could just really express yourself, especially most creators that are used to talking can free flow a little bit. So I would imagine this might make it easier for us to communicate with some of our most loyal fans in any situation that we're in. I don't know, what do you think, Leron?
- [33:53]
Liron Sigev
As long as we don't use it for. For the sake of using it. As long as we don't reply and going like, thanks for watching, thanks for being here. Like, I think that's going to be. That's a terrible play. I think if someone leaves a thoughtful comment, match their energy reply back with a thoughtful reply. Someone leaves an energetic comment, reply back with an energetic voice, voice note, you know, so you're matching your audience, you're meeting them where they are, and does it warm them up to you to make you more human? Yes, because remember, YouTube's biggest issue that we have is that we have a Very limited touch points with our audience. If we going live, yes, there is a chat now, we're doing it together. But besides that, what do we have? We have comments and we have the community tab. That's it, that's all we've got. We can't talk to them any other way. So is this a cool little feature to enhance our communication with our audience? Absolutely. Give it a go, see if you like it, see how people react. I've worked with a channel where the we've made a point of only replying with, with voice. The community hated it, completely hated it. They flamed them, completely replied back. I wasn't expecting that. Like we just stick to making videos like. And they went, oh God, we didn't see that one coming. Because our theory was, let's be more warming, let's talk to our community, let's get more in their space. That community hated it. And much, much to your point, Jerry, about the, like, the username. I think you've hit a very interesting point here. When people are super confident and they're leaving comments because I don't know about you, but I watch plenty of videos, haven't left a single comment. Right. Most people just watch a video, enjoy it at best, give it a thumbs up at best. Right. So who are the people that are actually leaving comments? It's usually the absolute core fans or the absolute haters. Right? That's who you're engaging with. So I always like to have that in the back of my mind saying, okay look, these people left your comment telling you you suck in your video. Do you really want to talk to them and leave them a voice note?
- [36:02]
Jerry Potter
Oh yeah, oh yeah. I kill them with kindness demonetized. That's fair, that's fair. I like what you said. I just want to reemphasize this, that if they say great video and you take the time to record a voice note that says thanks for watching, at that point you're wasting their time. Right? So if you're not going to bother to say, hey, thank you so much, this means a lot. I'm a small company and you know, and we have a small team and so I really appreciate you watching. Which could absolutely further loyalty and make them more likely to click on their next notification. You have published a new video then? Yeah, it's not worth it. But I do want to go back to something you said earlier where people would like to hear from, you know, face channels, but not from corporations. And I think back, and this goes back a long time. I don't know if they still do this or not, but I feel like Starbucks was the first brand, at least that was known for replying on Twitter and adding a name to the end of every tweet that they replied. So it'd be like, hey, glad you enjoyed your coffee hyphen Jill, or whatever it might be. And so do you feel like there's just no place in that? Because I also have a memory of being at an agency and I was replying on behalf of one of our clients as a restaurant and the customer's reply was, the restaurant is talking to me or like the building is talking to me. I don't know what to do here. So for individuals, like, if they know you from the channel and the company, then it's worth it.
- [37:29]
Liron Sigev
You remember when, when hearts first came out in the comments and you could heart a comment and you know, I don't know about you, but if I left a comment on a big creator's channel and they gave you a little heart or somebody gives you a thumbs up or a heart on Twitter, you get a little notification, oh, Casey master. Like my reply? Like, that's awesome. Like, I like Casey even more now. Right. So I like those kind of features where not the restaurant is talking to me. It's more like it's going to boil down into the way that you come across if you go, thanks for watching. Super excited. Did you hang out here? Did you remember to subscribe? Oh, now I'm in sales mode. You've just, you've just lost them. Use that opportunity where somebody leaves you a comment, come back to them and say, thank you for hanging out here. Like you said, we have a small team. We really put a lot of effort in. Is there anything else that we should have done in this video? Could we have done anything? You know, what would you like to see? Now you're having a conversation. Now you're adding value. Now you're adding your voice. Now people, oh really want to get part of that conversation. That's cool. I like that.
- [38:33]
Michael Stelzner
One other creative thought here. For anyone who's listening that happens to have a business where you are selling services like let's say a real estate agent or let's say you are a consultant of some sort. If someone said great video and you click on their profile and you see that They've got a YouTube channel that might be relevant to what you're doing, that's when you might want to respond with an audio note and say, hey, thank you so much for watching my video. I see that you're into blah, blah, blah, blah. And by the way, I am also into blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm super excited that you commented. You see where I'm going, like just a little, what I'm going to call lead, nurturing, that kind of a thing could potentially go a very long way.
- [39:12]
Liron Sigev
Again, going back to the point of we have very little way of interacting with our audience. Yeah. Let's use it in an effective way and really get to get together with it. I love that idea of creating those relationships because you're not going to forget it. Right? That's the thing. That's. You're leaving that lasting memory. Some random person somewhere in the world took the time to leave your comment and you can see there was a heartfelt comment, Mike, like what Jerry was mentioning earlier. And now you get a response from the person who made the video. Talking directly to them, not to everybody, and giving them a really thoughtful reply. You've got a core founder, so my
- [39:51]
Jerry Potter
top takeaway from this is if you're going to bother to use it, do it with intention. And if you can only reply to 10 people and do it really well, that's better than replying to 50 people. People in a way that doesn't make sense. And one more thing I want to add too, just as a, as some encouragement. You know, you mentioned how excited people would be to get a response from a big name on a big channel, but for the person who's watching your video, and you commented like, you are that big name. You are a big deal to them, which I really like as well. So true. All right, this is interesting for people who are intimidated by influencer marketing, you know, like, okay, what's going to be a waste of money? You know, anything like that? I, and I am very much in that camp as a marketer. YouTube is unveiling a platform. They're calling it creator partnerships. And this is essentially the evolution that used to be called brand connect. If you're not familiar, and it's integrated across YouTube Studio, Google Ads, display, you know, all of the different platforms and a couple of things that really make this stand out. First, Google Gemini, which is of course Google's AI, is helping brands identify ideal creators from over 3 million channels by looking for signals like audience similarity or organic brand mentions, different things like that. They've also are using AI to streamline the outreach, so you can basically build creator lists and soon you'll be able to send bulk partnership inquiries. So it's removed a lot of that upfront work as well, and so at this point, it feels like it's removed a lot of the objections for brands wanting to work for with influencers. Do you think, Liron, we're going to see an explosion of new brands willing to take this level of risk with these kind of tools with AI helping out?
- [41:37]
Liron Sigev
Yeah, I think we're going to see a lot of brands now starting to experiment with working with influencers. You know, remember, up until now, you either had to kind of reach out to the influencers themselves or you had to go through an agency. Right. And those were essentially your two options. What I like is that it's making it easier for a brand to at least see what's out there. Everybody's heard of influencer marketing. Everybody's heard of partnership. People understand that if you can get your product and service in front of a big audience, that's going to help you within your business. So this is just kind of removing that barrier and allowing you to at least see, I can go in and I can say, this is my audience who kind of matches my vibe, who matches from a data point of view. But that's one part of the equation, right? Because it doesn't stop at the match. The data cannot tell you whether it's a good fit or not. It can tell you statistically whether there's an overlap. But I might have an overlap with Jerry's audience, and I might want to sell my widget to Jerry's audience, but man, like that Jerry guy in his dress eating cake, like, I don't know if that's going to be my. My people are going to resonate with that. So statistically we might match, but are we actually going to get on? It's the equivalent of the swipe left, swipe right on the dating app. It gives you the. The matchup, but you got to then do your homework to see whether it's actually worth pursuing. But are we going to see people at least trying it? Yeah, absolutely. This is a great power move.
- [43:12]
Jerry Potter
So this, and you brought up a great point is, you know, I think all of us know that as good as AI is getting, sometimes it's wrong, sometimes we disagree with it. And I think that's the real strength as a marketer now is to know when to agree and when not to agree with AI but let's say the AI match the brand with someone. Like when you say, you know, do the research or whatever it is, like, what next steps would you recommend for a brand so that they can make sure it's a good fit and you know, lower their risk before investing any money.
- [43:39]
Liron Sigev
So I think it's the traditional Good Housekeeping stuff. So number one is go and watch the last 10 videos that they, that they have on their channel and understand that. Do you resonate with that? How do you like the way they come across? Do they explain that in a way that you think your audience will understand as well? And remember, it's not you as a business. Right. You got to look at it through your customer's eyes so you might understand your product really, really well. You got to remember that it's your customer that's watching. So look through it, through their vision. Look at the last 10 videos and say, wow, okay, I really connect with this person. They make sense to me as a customer. Cool. So that's the first thing I would go through. Their comments, Read the comments before you have to listen to all the. Read through the comments. Understand what their audience. Are their audience really hostile? Are they really supportive? And again knowing that only a fraction and the loud few other ones leaving a comment but it kind of gives you a little bit of a, kind of a sentiment of how the audience responds. So many of these creators have really wholesome communities which are super loud and super friendly. Great. That's a great indicator that you want to kind of be, be in there. I would also look at previous sponsorship videos that they did. Now good creators who follow the rules will always mark their content as sponsored. They will have include paid sponsorship comes up. So it's very easy to find those, those partnerships. Go see if it's a natural fit. Do they do like a Linus Tech tip kind of kind of vibe where they talk about one thing and completely non related. Here's how to install your new WI fi system. And now a word from our sponsor drink Coca Cola. What? It's got nothing to do with it. But are you okay with that? If you're okay with that, great. If you know people are going to skip right past it to going back to the video, then maybe it's not a good fit. You want to create as naturally including their products into their content because that's. You want your audience to go along for the actually watch the branded piece and not skip over it. So these are kind of like the first couple of very quick ways to see whether you like this person. Does it make sense? Is this your vibe? Is this your audience?
- [45:57]
Jerry Potter
Yeah. One of the things that's neat about this is you're as the advertiser, as the marketer. You're going to be able to See the brand's insights, the analytics and if creators turn them on, you'll get to see them even before you work with them. And actually as somebody being on the creator side, I can tell you I get reminded constantly, it seems like a few times a week it's like, hey, you should turn on your analytics to share with brands. And what they're quoting is that people who have turned this on get 60% more visibility inside of the creator partnerships platform and double the brand inquiry. So it's just, I think that's good news for marketers is on the other side, they're really encouraging the people that are creating the content to turn these on.
- [46:40]
Liron Sigev
Yeah, it's, it's the whole thing of, you know, I want to find a good partner. Right. And a good partner is going to share what their data is like. The part I don't like is putting like a creator hat on is I'd like to see it the other way around as well, like how much sales that my campaign do because you know, you might think you, you didn't get enough views or enough or reach and you're feeling really down about this partnership. But on the other side of the table, the brand's so excited because they finally did some real, real numbers. So I would like to see like a two way street. But I think to your point, the more that we share as creators, we're saying, look, here's who we are. This is our authentic self. This is what the data says. Data is unemotional. We did really well, we didn't do really well. How do we go from long term? So that is my one thing about working with a creator is that just remember that it's not always about a flash in the pan. You've got to build trust. You got to build a relationship not just with the creator, but with the creator's audience. And sometimes it doesn't can't happen in a one and done. Sometimes you got to do three or four or five or do a series of videos where you kind of being mentioned in the right context to the right audience and eventually everything will start clicking in place. When you work with a brand, you've got to understand it's not just about the data, it's about the creator and their audience. And the biggest thing that you can do to help yourself is let the creator create. Give them guardrails, but let them do their magic.
- [48:12]
Jerry Potter
That's great. And now you can do it lower risk, which is an incredible way to get your foot in the door with influencer. Marketing Liron, this has been an incredible dialogue. Thank you so much for joining us today. If people want to explore working with you, we're where do you want to send them?
- [48:25]
Liron Sigev
Head over to lironsegive.com hopefully there'll be some links. And happy to chat. Always online and always happy to talk. YouTube content, AI, automation, all that good stuff.
- [48:37]
Michael Stelzner
Liron and Jerry, thank you so much for being on today's show. Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@socialmediaexaminer.com 718 that's 718 weeks in a row of this darn podcast. If you're new to the show, be sure to follow us. If you've been a listener for a while, we would love a review.
- [48:52]
Liron Sigev
You do.
- [48:53]
Michael Stelzner
Check out our other show, the AI Explored Podcast. This brings us the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzar. I was joined by my co host, Jerry Potter. We'll be back next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. Catch you next time.
- [49:09]
Jerry Potter
The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner.
- [49:18]
Michael Stelzner
Don't forget you can save 200 off on your virtual ticket to Social Media Marketing World, but only for a few more days. Go to socialmediamarketingworld.info and secure your tickets today.