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Hey there, it's Michael Stelzner. As a loyal podcast listener, you've been with us through major marketing shifts. That's why we want to make sure we're covering what matters most to you when it comes to AI. Your answers to our brand new AI survey will influence the AI topics we feature in future podcast episodes. So would you do me a favor and pause this podcast right now and Visit Social Media Examiner.com AI survey. The survey closes in just a few days. Thanks so much for helping us create AI content that serves you best. Now on to the show.

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Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Talk show, your guide to the ever changing world of social media. On today's show, we're going to explore some really important Facebook updates, including all Facebook videos are now reels. So how does this affect the upload process and reach though? We'll explore that. Also, would you post more videos if Meta AI would actually edit them for you? And you know how as marketers, we've been putting the link in the first comment rather than the post on Facebook for literally years. Meta is finally taking a stance on that link in the first post strategy. We'll fill you in on all of that coming up on the show right now. My name is Jerry Potter, host of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a Social Media examiner production where we break down all the latest social media news and what it means for marketers like you. Well, Facebook mimicked Instagram again, and I don't think anyone who follows this stuff like we do was surprised. But all Facebook video are now reels. All Facebook videos are now reels. So they did this. They said for unified upload flow. It's been a weird couple of years on Facebook. I remember when reels first kind of came out and literally it was hard to even find where to upload them, you know, on mobile, let alone on desktop. But they wanted to have a unified upload flow. So we don't have to choose between posting a regular video or a reel. It all goes to the same place. No format limit limits. They'll support all video lengths and orientations with no restrictions. I'm trying to remember off the top of my head what the max length is for a Facebook video. I want to say it's like four hours or something crazy like that. So theoretically you could have a four hour reel. I think if that is indeed the limit. And then also doesn't matter if it's landscape or portrait, everything will go to the same place. Now, if you do upload a landscape video, when it comes up in the feed, it will be cropped as it has been or just, you know, the way it is in the feed. But audiences will still be able to turn their phone sideways in order to actually see it in its proper orientation. So existing privacy and audience settings from feed posts will also apply directly to reels. So this is important to know too. It doesn't mean just because it's a real or just because you upload a video, it's going to be public and go everywhere. So be aware of that. There'll be prompts to sort of confirm the privacy settings if necessary. And the video tab has been rebranded as the Reels tab. So videos are now just reels. Now. They announced this a few weeks ago, but the change has been rolling out gradually around the world to both personal profiles and to pages. Now, when Instagram announced this, this is something I think it's really important for us to be thinking about and testing. When Instagram announced that they were doing this, they essentially said, I'm trying to remember what the limit on Instagram was. I think the limit on Instagram at the time was 60 seconds still, maybe it was up to 90 seconds. But they said all videos are now reels, you know, and all of a sudden people were uploading these 8 minute reels and wondering why they weren't getting any reach. But at the time they said, but the shorter ones under 90 or whatever the limit was at the time are the ones that are going to get increased reach and reach. People who aren't necessarily following your page or profile yet. So there was no official announcement on that this time from Facebook, but just something to be aware of. And I think it's worth testing. I would say that longer videos on Facebook historically have had a much better chance of reaching people who don't know who you are yet than they ever did on Instagram. So we'll see what happens with that. All right, Meta has rolled out or is rolling out, depending on where you are. An AI powered video editing tool. So this is available in the US and more than a dozen countries and it's in the Meta AI space. So there's going to be three places that you can find this. The first one is in the Meta AI app. Okay. The second one is on the web where you go to Meta AI to use it there. And the third one is the Edits mobile app, that editing app that Instagram introduced. And the way they're describing it is there's over 50 AI styles that you can apply to 10 second video clips, no editing Skills required. Now, I think it's important to know here they're saying you can apply them for free for a limited time. So they didn't say how long or anything like that. But I have seen more and more tools doing this where they'll introduce a really cool advanced AI feature and they make it free for a limited time, obviously to get us to find out if it's valuable to us or not. And then they start charging us for it because the AI processing power obviously takes a lot. So if you want to play with it, now would be certainly a good time. Presets include transformations like a comic book effect, a soft focus dreamy filter, a fluorescent video game style. And the thing I like about this is obviously it removes some of the friction for us to get some interesting looking content out there. And anytime Meta introduces a new tool, if you got the time and the capacity, it's good to be an early adopter. But also with this type of tool, if you're one of the early brands to use it, you have the ability to become a pattern disruptor. Right? So imagine some of the big memes and things that are going around or have gone around for the last few years and you know, after a few days you're sick of them. Well, imagine being the first brand or one of the first brands that has that fluorescent video game style or the comic book effect or whatever it might be. So just something to keep in mind, it's a good argument to maybe start using it now. Once you've done the edit, you can share it directly to Facebook, Instagram or the Discover feed without having to leave the app. So that's another way that they are removing friction. I think it can be really good for product videos or behind the scenes. If you've ever shot something for your business that's, you know, eight to 10 seconds long and you're like, oh, I'm going to make that into something. And then you never do until your phone's like, you know, your phone's, you know, drive is, is too full. This is an opportunity to take something like that. Like if you have a visual business, cake baking or, you know, anything like that, and then quickly turn it into something automatically with AI just to kind of see what happens with it. Or if you have product videos, you know, even just filming a picture of a product or a video of a product, but you kind of move around it, I could see it quickly doing cool things with that. Personally, I've used a lot of AI video editors and I'm still too much of a recovering perfectionist, because even after it does it, it's like, I want to change this, I want to change this. We're not at the point necessarily where we're going to get exactly what we want just by pushing a button. Maybe coming, but we're not quite there yet. All right, we've got some more Facebook video updates and I'll tell you what Meta is now saying about link sharing. But as you heard with Meta, AI is changing things everywhere. And one of the best things it can do right now, it's not editing videos as we talked about, it's eliminating a big part of your to do list. I can free us from repetitive content creation, data entry, routine analysis, so you can focus on breakthrough ideas and strategic thinking that actually move the needle. So that's why we've created the AI Business Society to make this easy for you. You'll discover proven strategies from our expert trainers. You also get the support of a community of business owners, marketers and content creators, all on a similar AI Journey. Member Michelle west says she joined because even after working with AI for over a year, she knew she'd only scratched the surface and wanted to stay on top of the tech. So if you want to work smarter, not harder, join the AI Business Society today. Just go to social media examiner.com AI business again social media examiner.com AI business well, Meta is cracking down more on copyright checking. So if you are using a song or something else that you don't have the rights to inside of your content on Facebook, they've now actually added this copyright checking tool to the Facebook Reels Composer. So you can actually scan your reels before publication to identify any, like, potential copyright issues. So one of the things we've been able to do on YouTube for years is if you schedule a video ahead of time, then in the background before it goes live, you'll find out if there are any copyright violations and you have the potential to take it down, fix it, you know, different things like that. So this is great because it helps marketers avoid post publication penalties like demonetization or the ones that we really care about, marketers, limited visibility or audio removal. You ever put up a great reel and then all of a sudden it's muted. Now this was already available in Business suite, so if this sounds familiar, you're like, man, I thought we already had that. Now it's integrated into the Reels Composer, so it streamlines the workflow for us a little bit. And the way it works, by the way, is if you enable it Meta scans the video and then holds it for up to one hour to allow revisions before it goes live. Without this though, it'll go back to the way it was before, which is checking after publication, and that's when you can end up getting muted or demonetized or reduced reach. So feels to me like unless you were trying to get something out right away and you were confident there was nothing at risk, sounds like a no brainer to just turn it on and remember, you know, these checkers have gotten better. I remember years ago I was doing a Facebook Live and there was a radio on or something in the other room and it picked up a song that was playing. I felt like I could barely hear it and it said, oh, we've entered your Facebook Live due to copyright violations. So these things have been pretty smart for a number of years. Meta is also updating its content policies on Facebook to reduce the reach and monetization of unoriginal content. So this is a little bit different than what we just talked about. Unoriginal content is reposted material with minimal edits such as looping or cropping someone else's video. Anything that gets flagged as unoriginal may be demoted in distribution or have the monetization disabled temporarily or permanently. But if you are somebody that does like reaction videos or things like that, content that adds new value, reactions, commentary, remixes, those won't be penalized. So Meta is testing a thing right now where they will actually link back to the original source when the duplicate content is detected to credit original creators. Which would be great if you have people making a lot of stuff out of your content. But right now it's just in testing and we'll certainly keep you posted on that. All right, so for years now, years as marketers, you know, we figured out, I don't know when 2019, that putting links in Facebook posts killed your reach. Unless it was a paid ad. Right. Well, now Meta officially recommends doing what we've already been doing, which is adding external links in the first comment of a page post rather than in the caption. So the data shows that 97.3% of US Facebook post views exclude external links. So there is no link in the post. If it's in the caption, it doesn't count for this. So again, over 97%, which obviously shows the reach disadvantage for link containing posts. As we've known now, it is always worth testing. I will say that, you know, the problem with that is if you make content that gets a lot of shares, the links get lost. With the shares if they're in the comment. I can tell you just in the last week there have probably been three times where whatever came up in my feed was something compelling enough that I was like, oh, I want to read that, you know, and then it said link below or link in the comment or whatever. And as soon as I realized, oh, then I've got to click to go back to the original post. Then I've got to go down to the comments and find the link. I was like, nevermind, I don't care that much. So it's all about balance, right? If you get a lot of shares anyway, might be the type of thing that is worth keeping, you know, at least testing keeping the link in the post be part of that 2.7% that has a link and gets lots of views. All right, couple of new features to tell you about. First, music for text based posts. So we've had these text based posts for years. You know, usually it's a picture or a colored background and you can write a handful of words on there, right? Well now you can add music options to those posts so you can add short audio clips to your update. I've already started seeing this in the last week. So as someone's scrolling, a music clip will play with the feed, adding this auditory layer to written content if sound is enabled. Of course, some came up in my feed. The only reason I even knew there was music is because the caption said something like, wow, I added music to this post or something like that. I had to turn the sound on to do it. If you've already got the sound on because you were watching other stuff with sound, then it sounds like it will just come through. The goal is to enhance engagement and emotional connection in a format traditionally limited to plain text. That's the official PR line there. So this is rolling out to all Facebook users on both mobile and desktop platforms globally. Shout out to my friend Deb, who was the first one I saw using it. The song she chose was the Top Gun anthem from the original Top Gun movie, which I don't think I've heard anything about. I remember liking that song back in the day because I had the soundtrack, but I was like, that's the song you chose. Okay, good times. All right. Some ads updates AI is obviously changing everything about the way that we do paid advertising as marketers and Meta Announced is testing new generative AI powered video tools. One is called Video Generation 2.0 and the other one is called Video Highlights and the idea is to help marketers create more engaging and more efficient video ads. So the first one, video generation 2.0, uses generative AI to turn multiple images into into dynamic videos with overlays and music. So maybe you don't have footage of your products or anything like that. Now you can take multiple images and then turn it into something with generative AI. And I haven't actually seen this in action, but I assume what they're describing is what we've been seeing in a lot of places where it takes a picture and makes it into a video and then it would put these clips together. When I worked at an agency, oh my gosh, getting video from clients was nearly impossible, but we always had lots of images. So if you're in that boat, that could be a really cool tool. And then Video Highlights is going to enable you to quickly view key scenes with AI generated summaries of that. So both features are currently in testing, so you may or may not see that. Meta also announced a new branding feature in Meta Ads Manager that's giving you basically branding presets. So we've already gotten used to these in some other tools like Canva, but now you will be able to save brand presets so your logos, colors, fonts, even tone to your ad creative. So this is going to allow the content creation part of ads to not only be faster, but also to be consistent across campaigns, especially if you have more than one person that's in there managing everything. So you can enable these during the ad setup process. So if you've got access to it now, that is when you will see it go in, start a new campaign. And if you have access, you should see it. So that should be really interesting. They also suggest presets based on past ads, URLs, Facebook pages, Shopify accounts, so you don't necessarily have to go in and put in the hex code of each color and different things like that. So very, very cool. And Facebook is stepping up account security even more, introducing passkeys, which gives a password free way to sign in using biometrics or device pins. This is one of those things. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. But again, in my, when I worked at an agency, if you had to get the client to send you a text code every time you had to re log into their Instagram account or different things like that, such a hassle. So on one hand increased security is great, but on the other hand, if there was a way that maybe we can do this so that you don't have to go through the client and maybe this won't make that any easier. I guess that's my fingers crossed. Hope for it. So it's initially available in the US and Canada and so you can watch for more of that very, very soon. Quick reminder Learn more about becoming an AI enhanced market at social mediaexaminer.com aibusiness again social media examiner.com aibusiness and if you want to add a podcast to your listening lineup, we've got two for you to check out the Social Media Marketing Podcast as well as the AI Explored podcast. Until next time, may you be wise with your marketing decisions. Thanks everyone. Bye. The Social Media Marketing Talk show is a Social Media examiner production. For more social media insights, Visit Social Media Examiner.com.