Unknown Speaker (0:01)

Got big marketing goals for 2025, but you're not sure how to achieve them. Learn what works from the brightest minds in marketing by attending Social media Marketing World 2025 this March. That's where you'll learn how to apply AI to your work, the latest in organic and paid marketing and strategies you can put to work right away. Secure your future by getting your tickets at Social Media Marketing World. I hope to see you there.

Jerry Potter (0:33)

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 most important YouTube updates that marketers need to be up to date on, including new ways to get more engagement on shorts and lives. Also, a new type of YouTube ad that is probably obscenely expensive. They're not telling what it will cost, but might be really effective for the right right brand. And is YouTube adding groups like on Facebook? Sort of. We'll tell you the latest on YouTube's community building features and how you might be able to take advantage of them as well. My name is Jerry Potter, host of the Social Media Marketing Talk show where we break down all the latest social media news and what it means for marketers like you. All right, first up, YouTube shorts updates. You now can add Q and A stickers to mobile live streams and YouTube shorts. So this allows for customizable real time audience engagement on lives but also an easy way to get engagement on your shorts. I've actually played with this on my channel, yet I'm mostly a long form focused strategy but I know on some of the other platforms with the short form videos when the option popped up to be able to add stickers that got more engagement, it can make a huge difference in your watch time and then of course that immediately affects your reach as well. So I do think it's potentially worth playing with another update with shorts templates if you've been using those long time request templates has come to basically support photo imports when you are creating a template and now instead of just the 3 second countdown there's a toggle so you can have a 3 second countdown or a 10 second countdown when you are creating your shorts. Now this next update YouTube is called the video Highlights and tell me if you're as confused by this as I am and this is just one of those things they're testing. There's not a lot of information about it right now, but it did come directly from YouTube and they say the tool allows creators to extract portions of their existing long form videos. And publish them as standalone 16 by 9 format videos. So that seems like the clips feature already and so it doesn't say anything about whether it will show up on your channel. Or maybe this is just an easier way to take an existing video and turn it into another one. Like right now we can do this where you can take a long form video and you can chop a short out of it. But these ones that you pull out, these highlights as they're calling them, are 16 by 9. So they are widescreen videos. Am I getting those ratios right? I'm trying to double check now in my brain. But anyway, if you have access to this, you'll see create a video highlight show up in YouTube Studio on desktop if you have access to it. They're only testing it with a few people, but if you see it, try it out. Let us know what you think. All right, In a couple of months, thousands of marketers are going to gather and say, Diego, for the biggest marketing event of the year, Social Media Marketing World, you're going to be joining them. If you want to make 2025 your most successful year yet, consider attending. It is the place to learn from top experts and connect with other marketers from around the world, other people who get us right past attendee Laura said, Social Media Marketing World has been my favorite and most effective event for networking. It's one of my favorite things to do as an adult. Very nice. I'm super honored to be speaking again this year. I'm going to be speaking about how to create a YouTube podcast that can be a complete marketing funnel in one hour a week. If you want to join us for everything involved with Social Media Marketing world, visit Social MediaMarketing World to get your ticket today. Again, SocialMediaMarketing World, and I'll see you there March 30th through April 1st. Well, Super bowl is coming up and all of the commercials have been added to YouTube. Why is that important for us as marketers? It's a really great way to get inspiration and also I think, see what is resonating with people. So if you work for a smaller business or you're an agency that runs smaller campaigns and things like that, we don't have access to the data that some of these major corporations have, right? The surveys and the focus groups and all this stuff that they do to make sure that their advertising is effective. So you can basically go on YouTube to what they call the ad blitz and watch all of them. Obviously they're also going to have comments which can give you more insights and Inspiration about exactly what's working. And the most interesting thing about this, by the way, just, you know, surprised me. Well, maybe it didn't. In 2023, 88% of adults 18 to 49 watched ads for the Super bowl on YouTube compared to 68% who watched the ads on the actual super bowl on tv. All right, a new form of advertising is coming to YouTube, or it may be. It's an experiment right now, and this is going to brands to purchase exclusive masthead ad space across all platforms for specific hourly blocks. So the way it works, as I understand it, is if you had some major event or you wanted to be aligned with a major event, maybe the super bowl for a full hour or however many hours you wanted to pay for, you could have the masthead across all of the YouTube platforms. This includes desktop, mobile, connected TV and tablet devices. Now, they have not released any pricing details, which makes me think it's probably really expensive. And I also haven't seen anything about whether you'd be able to only target certain demographics or if it is literally all of YouTube. But the flat hourly rate model, they say, will provide more predictable budgeting compared to when you pay for impression based pricing. Because then at least you know exactly what it's going to cost upfront. And that's always good when you've got a budget, especially if it's a budget that somebody else sets for you. Right. Well, we have seen this quite a bit. YouTube Cracking down on ad blockers and ad blocking software, and they are not letting up. Some people were specifically accusing YouTube of having unskippable ads that were like several minutes long. So if you watch YouTube, can you imagine you're sitting there and you're like, okay, I'm ready to hit the skip button. And it just keeps going and going and going. Well, Google says that it is perhaps partially being caused because somebody is using an ad blocker. So just know that YouTube is not letting up on that in any way. All right. The most exciting and scary update around YouTube, I think right now is the expansion of communities. So are they adding essentially Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups to YouTube? When I first started my YouTube channel years ago, I didn't feel like I was able to build community in the way that I wanted. So the second platform I went to was a Facebook group. But now that more of that is coming to YouTube. So here's the basic breakdown is the community tab that has always been there is now available to all channels, no matter what size you are. It used to be, I think we had to get in the YouTube Partner Program before you would even be able to do that. The posts are kind of like regular posts that you would see on other platforms. You can do images, you can do links, polls, different things like that. And now what's happening is your audience will also be able to post in that space. Okay, so if you go to your channel right now or the channels you manage, you may already see that your Community tab has been renamed to Posts. I know mine has. And if you get this update, you'll get an email notification and your mobile channel page banners will show you that you can enable Communities with the option to activate or disable the feature through your channel settings. Here's where it gets weird. Okay, it's mobile only. So if somebody goes to your channel on a desktop computer, they can still go to your Community tab, which is now the Posts tab, but they'll only see stuff that you or whoever the channel belongs to have posted. But on mobile, it's both. So I saw a video of somebody that does have access to it and demonstrating a couple things I think it's good for us all to be aware of around this. Okay, number one, if you have a big channel and this video I watched was a big channel, it might be more than you can keep up with and moderate. So it has the potential, I think, for bigger channels to become a burden more than a benefit, because already our viewers and communities can engage in the comments of the posts that we put up. Obviously there's going to be spam and different things like that. There was one thing that was part of the settings, which is you have a setting you can turn on where somebody has to be subscribed to the channel. I think for a day or a full week, you have either of those you can turn on. So somebody can't just subscribe and then start posting right away. They do have to subscribe to your channel too, to post, which is a good way, I guess, to build up those numbers. So again, it's only on mobile, which is my least favorite place to type as well. And so it'll be interesting to see. I know if I got access to it, I would certainly turn it on and see what happens. But it's nice to know that it is totally able to be disabled as well. Well, we've been hearing more and more about YouTube expanding into the living room and living room viewing of YouTube growing as well as YouTube wanting to make sure people are logged in when they are viewing. Used to be YouTube liked the views no matter what but now they want to be able to show the ads that are most pertinent to the person, show the videos that are most pertinent to each individual viewer because they can charge more for those. Right. Well, just an interesting update that's kind of pertaining to that. They have removed the guest option from the TV apps starting with Apple tv, Roku and Fire TV platforms. So it used to be you could use it as a guest. Now that is totally gone. So just another step in that direction. YouTube really wants to encourage logged in viewing. And if you are interested in these types of experiments that YouTube is testing all the time, we've told you about a few, sort of on the creator side, but also on the consumer side. If you like this stuff, if you are a YouTube Premium member, you can now activate multiple experimental features simultaneously. And they've set up a website. So I went in and some of them, I was like, well, I don't need that. But you can go to YouTube.com new n w and you can sign up for these experiments. If you're somebody just like to kind of want to see what is out there and what's going on. It's certainly a way to stay ahead, especially if you're a marketer and know what is available to viewers or some viewers in the audience. All right, all right. If you want to join us in San Diego, it is coming up soon. Quick reminder, Social Media Marketing World takes place March 30 through April 1. Grab your ticket today at SocialMediaMarketing World. Again, Social MediaMarketing World. And if you want to add another podcast to your listening lineup, couple for you to check out the AI explored podcast as well as the Social Media marketing 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 Insight, visit social mediaexaminer.com.