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If you're like many marketers, last year was very challenging, but this year doesn't have to be that way. Napoleon Hill said, the starting point of all achievement is desire. If you want to improve your know how, your results and your career prospects, then Social Media Marketing World is your solution. It's the place where smart marketers go to get new ideas and strategies that actually work. Get your tickets at social media marketing world.info and secure your future. I hope to see you there.

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Welcome to the Social media marketing Talk show, your guide to the ever changing world of social media. All right, on today's show, we're going to Explore the biggest YouTube updates, including what's working best going into 2025. Direct from a new YouTube Trends and Culture report. A couple of interesting things in there that I think are worth sharing. Also, YouTube has been testing out a lot AI features on the consumer side, the viewer side. But I think this new one that we are getting as the people who are marketers and are uploading to YouTube may be the best thing yet. So I'm excited to share that and it may be time to change how we're thinking about video viewing on YouTube, specifically how many people are watching at a given time. All right, all that is coming up. My name is Jerry Potter, host of the Social Media marketing Talk Show, a production from Social Media examiner, where we break down all the latest social media news and what it means for marketers like you. All right, so let's start off with this content Trends report from YouTube, their global content trends report. Here's what they talked about, a couple of things that stood out. One, they talked about something that they are calling digital franchises, which based on that phrase, I would think it would mean a certain brand. But what they're describing is, and what they're seeing is a lot of different people creating content around one topic. For example, around a sports team or around retail Roblox or around the Paris Olympics. And what's happening then is community is building around all of these pieces of content, bringing them together, elevating the reach of all of them. So the interesting thing there, I think, and the opportunity for us as brands and marketers is to create content around those things. Now, some brands may already be doing that, but I feel like this may be almost a resurgence from what we used to do for people that were doing this back in the day where you would comment, you know, using trending hashtags on Twitter to get lots more reach. Now, X, of course, this might be a great opportunity for that I think now with YouTube, it is a different way of looking at YouTube because I know when I'm making content for my channel, my whole thing is, what can I make that's going to keep getting views for years to come. Right. I booked up the other day my top 10 videos from the previous 48 hours and one of them was from 2020. Only two were from 2024. So, you know, we do want that long living content. But I think there's especially an opportunity for shorts and perhaps community posts if we gather around some of these trending topics, these things that people are already talking about, to reach a lot more people and bring them into our own brand communities. So. So that was one thing. The other thing that they mentioned in this 2024 Global Culture and Trends report was the rise of video podcasts on YouTube as a place people are going for information. They did specifically talk about how a lot of political candidates this year in the US not just at the presidential level or aspiring level, but at all the levels, chose to be on podcasts over some traditional broadcast interview outlets. So interesting to see where that's going. I know personally myself, I did find myself going back to YouTube for news and information in the last year for the first time. I've never really done that. So apparently I'm not alone. And other people are doing that as well. All right, big update on YouTube shorts, or I should say the conclusion of a big update three months back now maybe YouTube said, We're going to three minute shorts. Your YouTube shorts can be up to three minutes long. As long as they are vertical and under three minutes, they will be considered shorts. So if they're still landscape or widescreen videos, they're still considered longs, as we like to call them, or VODS videos on demand, as YouTube calls them. So they said, hey, starting on this date, they're all going to be shorts. If they're, you know, vertical videos, under three minutes. And that didn't happen, then they said the migration is going to take a while. So the good news is now that has happened, any videos that you have published since that date, that was late October, early November, I think should show up in the shorts column of YouTube Studio or the Shorts tab, as well as coming up in the shorts feed. So just for fun, the other day earlier this week, I threw up a new YouTube short. It was about a minute 46, I think it's just under two minutes, just to kind of see what would happen. And I didn't craft it to be a short. It was actually A longer video, but I mean, it wasn't long, it was two minutes. But I just reformatted it to be vertical and so far, several days in, it's performing as well as my regular shorts would. So it's holding up from that standpoint. The retention is a little lower than what the average would be on my channel. But when they show you how many people are watching versus swiping away, 60% of the people, over 60% of the people are watching it and then a little less than 40% are choosing to swipe away. So not bad. I just wondered, you know, the first time you throw up something that's longer, is it going to, you know, get far, far less, reach only a few days in? So who knows what will happen over time. But as of right now, so far it looks like it's doing well. And I certainly plan to experiment with some more longer shorts and see where we can get with that. All right, it is that time of year again. Here we are, the beginning of 2025. Time to reflect on the marketing goals that you weren't able to reach last year and why, if you want to make this year, 2025 year, you finally achieve your biggest goals. I want to invite you to join us at Social Media Marketing World. I can't believe we're now in 2025. So the event is coming up this year. Now, if there was a proven path to success, would you take it? Commit to achieving your vision for this year by joining us at Social Media Marketing World. The next step, just go to Social Media Marketing World, choose the four to five sessions that will push you closer to your goals. Then grab your all access ticket and let 2025 be your breakthrough year. All right, I hope to see you there again, Social Media Marketing World to get all the information and the tickets and everything there. So. All right, some new creator tools, a couple of new content creation tools that are launching for posts. These are the community feed, the regular posts, the ones that look more like posts on LinkedIn and Facebook. And over the last year, year and a half, we've seen YouTube lower the barrier for who has access to these and really leaning into this. And there's a couple of exciting pieces of news this week around this. It's definitely making me think more about those posts going into 2025. So first of all, Text Transform, which is basically letting you rephrase and customize the post text in various styles. So they're incorporating AI with that. And then the other one is Dream Screen. So this is where you can Type in a prompt and YouTube's dream screen will generate an image for you. Well, now that has been incorporated directly into posting in the community. So I have never been a big fan of some of these AI images. They look so cartoony and everything like that. But at the same time lately I've just for fun been thinking I'll make an image for this and it comes up with something really good. So definitely something I think to play with and take advantages of going forward. Right now, these are currently limited to English language users in select regions, so you may not see it yet. But it does sound like this is something that's going to fully roll out and everyone will get an opportunity to use it. They've also announced what I think is the best AI update for YouTube from our perspective as people who are creating the content for YouTube and using it for marketing. And that is the new Inspiration tab. So for a while now, I think at least over a year, YouTube has had an Inspiration tab that was part of the analytics interface in YouTube Studio. Well, now it's on the Content tab. So if you go into YouTube Studio, you click on Content and then by default it's going to show your Videos tab, but there's a new one to the left. If you have this feature called the Inspiration tab and it's essentially a fully functional AI brainstorming tool for coming up with YouTube videos. And it'll give you ideas automatically, you can refresh just like any AI tool and it'll give you new ones. And once you have them, here's the part that is just so different from going to chat, GPT or Claude or anywhere else for that is it actually shows you the ideas based on what your audience is watching. So other topics of videos that your audience is watching. And it'll also show you there's kind of a sliding scale there and they've been a little vague about it, but it's, it'll show you like low interest, medium interest. I think maybe they have high interest and extremely high interest. I don't have it open in front of me right now. So you can not only see like what topics your viewers, your actual viewers are watching videos about, but exactly what their interest level is. And I believe it said, and I know they're still tweaking this, but they're only counting videos with over a thousand views. So these are other videos topics that are already doing well. You can type in, refine them and it generates for you the title or multiple titles to choose from, an outline and thumbnails which actually look pretty good compared to where we were with, you know, generated images on AI even a year ago. Anyway, it's not available everywhere yet, but if you do have it, you will find it under the content tab in YouTube Studio. And it's been a lot of fun for me to play with for sure. Another one is the auto dubbing feature, and this is an even softer launch. This is not everywhere yet, but available to creators in the YouTube Partner Program. If your brand is in there, this is your opportunity to essentially create dubbed versions into other languages of your videos for free without any action required from you, the person that is creating the video. So you can basically go through and it'll do this. And you can review, unpublish, or delete dubbed versions through the languages section in YouTube Studio if you want to do this. English videos can be dubbed into French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish. And while videos in any of those languages can be dubbed back into English. And I'm sure we're going to continue to see this rollout and improved as well. So definitely something to check out if you are looking to reach people in other languages. I think the big question for us as marketers, though is, is if you reach somebody in another language but they don't speak English, in my case, can we serve them in other ways? But if the way you are serving them is with the video or you have other ways to continue to communicate with them in your funnels with other languages, then this is an incredible opportunity. So it'll be interesting to see where this goes. And I know the next step of AI is going to be where it'll not only change what is being said, but it'll actually change the speaker's mouth to match as well, which is, you know, that's going to change everything, obviously, so be interesting to see where we go with that. And creators in a test group right now. This, this. I got laughed at for being excited about this next update, just so we're clear, but I am so excited about this. Creators right now in a test group are being allowed to record audio responses to comments through a sound wave icon in the iOS app. So right now it's just on iOS. I'm grateful that I've gotten a channel that grew to a point where I couldn't keep up with the comments, but I still sometimes feel guilty that I can't answer everything. But, oh, man, if I could just, you know, be out on a hike and hit record and go through and answer YouTube comments with my voice, I would do that in a second. So we'll see how it goes. Obviously, it's not just about people who are uploading videos and replying, you know, making sense for them. The consumer side, they would have to want to listen to audio messages as comments as well. And I think we all learned from Clubhouse that audio is something people can get excited about and then get over really quick. So we'll see exactly what happens with all of that. All right, Speaking of AI, one of the big storylines, certainly at Social Media Marketing World last year and, and in conversations among marketers all over is what's happening with SEO. Is blogging dying? What's going on? We know blog traffic has gone down because AI, or even the AI results at the top of a Google search can get people the answers they're needing. And so people are seeing a big dip in blog traffic. Well, if you are on YouTube, this could be the equivalent of that. Google is introducing a limited pilot program for a new search feature focused on YouTube video content. And what they're saying is it will provide easily digestible summaries of YouTube videos based on user search queries, aligning with current user engagement patterns on Google search. So our interpretation of this is essentially someone will do a Google search and, you know, sometimes a YouTube video will come up in the results. They click on it, they watch it, they get the answer, everybody wins. Well, it sounds like if this works the way that they are expecting it, they would get a written summary of the section of the video that answered the question that they were looking for, and they would no longer have to go through and watch the video. So it'll be interesting to see where this goes. YouTube has been a little bit more optimistic about it than I feel right now. They said the expanded summaries are designed to encourage. Encourage user engagement by prompting viewers to watch the full video on YouTube or explore the creator's channel. That obviously could happen. I think it all depends on what the summaries look like. You know, if it says, hey, here's part of it and watch for more, then maybe that would be the intended effect where people would click through in a sense where they wouldn't click through before, just based on a title and a description. So we'll see just something to be aware of as we go through this next year. This is kind of cool, especially if you have a podcast for your brand. YouTube Music is now allowing users to share specific timestamps in songs and podcasts across Android, iOS and web platforms. The obvious use case here, I think, is if you have A podcast for your brand and you wanted to share a specific clip rather than having to go edit everything like that. You could literally go into YouTube music, share with the timestamp, just like we do with YouTube videos now, and then share that perhaps on Instagram Stories or another platform like that. So while it would be amazing if our audiences shared our content, I think the most obvious thing upfront would be an easier way for us to share the content. And obviously YouTube wants us to send them to YouTube Music as opposed to Apple or one of the other podcasting platforms. So, okay, updates for channel management, including the YouTube app and analytics updates. So they're introducing new features to the main mobile app. Now, if you don't do stuff on mobile, this is where it can get confusing because you have YouTube Studio app, which is sort of to sort of creator studio on mobile, and then you have the regular YouTube app and each one has had some of the same features and different features. So now in the main mobile app, that's the YouTube app that consumers use, you can now see your videos of all visibility states, public, private, unlisted, scheduled memberships, drafts. Analytics are being simplified to make performance metrics clearer. And they're adding data stories. If you haven't seen those, that's where it'll just pop up and say, hey, this video is doing 30% better than what your videos normally do. You might consider making more like it, which I like those. It's just kind of, not only are they usually encouraging, I've never seen one that's like, boy, this video stunk. Don't ever make one of these again. But it's just a great opportunity when you're in between looking in your analytics to see something and go, oh, yeah, that's a good idea. I think I will make my next video all about that. So this is good to be aware of. YouTube is strengthening its enforcement against clickbait bait by targeting videos where titles or thumbnails make promises that aren't delivered in the content. Now, this is especially, they said for news and current events, but I think we all know that people who do click baity stuff ruin it for all of us, right? It makes all the rest of us who are marketers really have to level up. Like, we want to get the clicks right, we want to do whatever we need to do to get the clicks. But once that trust is eroded, then it's really hard to go forth and do that. So one of the things that I've been doing and doing with my clients along this is think about how you can incorporate something into your title after you do the keyword research for what the best title is. But think about something you can incorporate into your title that will make it stand out, but also position it as something that they can't assume they already know. So let's say that I help farms with marketing and I had a video and it was called 3 tips for marketing your farm on Facebook in 2025. Right? That would be something they might go, oh, they're just going to say, post more often, make reels and whatever else it might be. But instead if you reframed it where it was like, you know, marking your farm on Facebook in 2025, whatever the keyword was, and then in parentheses it said how one farm grew 1 million followers or something like that, you get specific, what are you doing in your own brand, your own business, your clients, different things like that. That's where I think there's an opportunity for someone to not only, you know, not jump to the conclusion, but that, oh, I know what they're going to say. I've heard this advice a million times. But also to give them something that they can't go to ChatGPT for. So that's kind of how I'm looking at all of that. All right, some other AI updates. This, this is an interesting one because I have opted out of this on my YouTube channel, but they keep prompting at the top, hey, are you sure you don't want to do this? And this is the opportunity to decide whether or not you want your content to be used for AI training by third parties outside of YouTube. Okay, so this is in the settings, so you go into YouTube studio, lower left, and then it's one of the tabs in there. And essentially it requires both creator permission and approval from any applicable rights holders. So content ID owners or anything like that, to enable AI training access to YouTube and their third parties. The one thing that's really interesting is you can go through and you can say, no, you can't use them, or you can say, yes, you can use them, or you can say, yes, you can use my content to train AI tools, but only these specific companies. And then there's a list of, I don't know, 40 or 50 of them so listed in there. You can say, yes, Amazon can use it and Apple can use it, but nobody else or Meta can use it, Microsoft can use it, OpenAI can use it, but nobody else. ByteDance is in there, the parent company of TikTok. So anyway, that's just something to go in and see and make sure that the setting is set the way that you want. Also related to AI, you know, YouTube is slowly trying to make sure that viewers know whether something was AI generated. And so right now when you upload a video, there is a box you can check where you say, hey, this has AI where it shows somebody doing something that they didn't actually do or anything that would be misleading like that. Right? Not I use chat GPT to write my script, but something that would actually mislead somebody and you're supposed to check that they don't require it yet still, which kind of surprises me. I'm assuming it's going to be one of those things that you have to check as a requirement here soon.