A (0:00)

Hey there, it's Michael Stelzner from Social Media Examiner. Are you a marketer trying to navigate the AI revolution? What if you could create content twice as fast, automate tedious tasks and become the go to AI expert in your company? The AI Business Society, brought to you by your friends at Social Media examiner gives you expert led training, a supportive community and proven frameworks to master AI marketing that will boost your value and your productivity. Join now and lock in your discounted member pricing@social mediaexaminer.com AI.

B (0:43)

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 the most important YouTube updates for marketers, including features to help marketers reach way more people of things rolling out for this. That's really cool. Also, a playlist update that I certainly didn't see coming, but I can see some functionality for us as marketers and ads on YouTube are getting way, way smarter thanks to AI. So we will jump into all of that on today's show. My name is Jerry Potter, host of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a Social Media examiner production. We break down all the latest social media news and what it means for marketers like you. So first, some updates for YouTube shorts. Shorts now have a visual guide. This is something that they were testing and essentially as you're moving stickers and text and other elements around on the screen, it'll kind of give you a little warning like, hey, this is going to show up where the like button is or this is going to be covered up by, you know, something else that's on the screen. And it's funny because they said this is now available to everyone after a successful testing period. It's one of those features where we've had it on the other short form video platform. So it's kind of like, how did we not have this already? Of course, of course it tested well. Like, who wouldn't want that? But anyway, good to know that it's there. Another addition to shorts that I am excited about is quiz stickers. So quiz stickers is essentially, it's similar to polls but it's different because you can ask them to answer something and then you can behind the scenes, when you set it up, choose a correct answer and then once they guess, then they find out if they were right or wrong. And so this is a whole new level of, I think, you know, taking advantage of curiosity because people want to know if they're right or wrong or they want to know the answer with polls, you want to vote to see like how other people voted. But I think this goes to another level. So I've been using them on a community tab and now you can actually use them on your shorts as well on both Android and iOS. You won't be able to access this though, of course, if you upload on desktop or pre schedule them another way. Also, the shorts captions Editor, YouTube is bringing the ability to add and edit stylized captions to shorts. Again, on both Android and iOS, this was introduced to, quote, make videos more engaging. But there was another part where they suggested more people may be watching shorts on mute. So there's no data on that, but we do know that's definitely true on short form video platforms and obviously sometimes it's happening. So certainly something to keep in mind. You can add visual captions to draw people in. That's always going to improve consumption and watch time, which will help our shorts get seen by more people. And then Google Lens is coming to short. So if you're not familiar with Google Lens, the way Google Lens works is essentially it looks at something and then it'll go and find information about it online. So when I saw this headline, I was like, how's this going to work on shorts? So the way it works is essentially if somebody's watching a short, they can pause it and then at the top there'll be a lens place where they can tap and then it will go and find information about whatever that object was. So they can either tap a part of the screen where they see something in the video, or they can drag sort of a square around that section to find all of that stuff. So it is in beta, but they said they're rolling it out to everyone. So this will be kind of interesting. I don't know if it's kind of like a, you know, potential scavenger hunt. Encourage people to pause your shorts and try it out and see if it's there. One thing to know though, and this is a little bit of a bummer for us as marketers, is the feature won't work if you have shopping, affiliate links or paid promotions. So this is only an organic tool, but again, might be something that's fun to play with. All right, next up, a feature to help you reach way more people. But with everything going on around us with AI, are you feeling ahead of the curve or falling behind? Because a lot of people are still trying to figure out how to use AI in their marketing. So imagine if you could be the one mastering cutting edge AI tools, implementing proven strategies from successful AI marketers and staying ahead of the curve by joining us in the AI business society. So it includes expert led training from top AI marketing innovators. This is the biggest thing for me because I don't want to have to keep up with all the changes. I want somebody else who focuses on that full time to come out and go, here's the stuff you need to know, right? You get that. Also a welcoming community of other forward thinking marketers and you can try everything 100% risk free. We are getting to that point where being an AI powered marketer is not going to be optional much longer. So if you want to stay ahead of the curve, now's the best time to get started. Go to social media examiner.com AI business to join today. Okay, social media examiner.com/AI business. All right, let's get some more reach for our videos on YouTube. So the auto dubbing feature where you can basically turn your video audio into other languages is now expanding. So everyone who is in the YouTube Partner Program now has early access to auto dubbing. So you'll find it in inside of your settings inside of YouTube Studio and you can basically self enroll if you want to try it out. I turned it on on mine. I haven't got back to listen to anything. But you can dub your videos into all kinds of other languages all right there within YouTube. And then there's also some approval settings which are helpful so you can review them beforehand if you want. You can also there's a setting where instead of just saying you want to review all of them, essentially you can say I want to review the questionable ones. Like if you didn't feel like you maybe did a good job on this. Now as somebody who really only speaks one language fluently, I'm not sure exactly what I would do if I went in and it's I'm reviewing it and I'm like, yeah, I guess that sounds like what I learned in high school Spanish. But certainly for people that are really trying to expand and reach new markets in other languages, that's where it would be great to have somebody on the team. Or I wonder if we'll even get to the point where obviously you could have AI do it as well, but AI is of course doing the translating in the first place. So they are working to expand this feature to more creators in the future. More people being able to access our videos obviously means more potential audience. So couple of playlist search enhancements and playlists are this feature on YouTube that I think a lot of us forget about. But I think there's a few channels that use it all the time. And so one thing they're doing is they're improving functionality on the Playlist tab inside of Studio desktop by expanding search capabilities. So if you went into YouTube studio and you clicked on playlists before, you could only search by the playlist title. You've got a lot of playlists. Maybe you don't remember what the title is. Well, now you'll be able to search by description as well as visibility. I really like that visibility part because then you can literally just see, okay, which of these, you know, just show me my private playlists or just show me my public playlists. For example, another playlist feature, this one I did not see coming, is what they call collaborative playlist viewer voting. So essentially you can have a playlist and then viewers can go in and upvote or downvote videos to influence the order of the playlist. So voting's anonymous, but you do have to have a YouTube account. Like they have to be signed in to do it, which of course gives them more data about people as. As everything on YouTube does. But playlist owners, you know, if for your own channel, you can disable the vote based sorting if you want. I haven't seen this on my channel yet, but it's an interesting way to get people to engage with the channel. I was thinking even more actively than just letting it sit there and see what happens. You could actually go in and encourage people to vote. Like maybe you've got a list of product videos and if you have passionate customers, you could have them vote their favorite ones up. I don't really like the negative voting so much, but you could have people vote products down as well. You'd want to be careful of competitors, I suppose, sneaking in there. But again, it is your playlist, it's all your products. If everybody loves our products at different levels, but they all love them all, then that's not so bad. I was also thinking too, it would be fun to do like at the end of the year, you know, for some channels, might be cool to have people vote for their favorites of the year. So maybe, hey, these are the top 10 most popular videos of the year. Vote for your favorite and then we'll make another one like it or we'll do a big giveaway or a discount on the whatever's in that video or whatever it might be. So it is available now globally across YouTube's main app, Music apps and web platforms. I think the main thing we need to keep in mind as marketers is keep an eye out for it because I don't know if things start getting voted, I assume we'll still be able to manually sort our videos the way that we want, right? Especially if it's something where people are supposed to watch in a certain order. So another test that's expanding that I'm excited about is voice replies to comments. So I remember YouTube is my primary platform and I remember the weekend where I was spent three hours answering comments on YouTube after my channel got to a certain point and my wife popping into the office at our house and going, hey, are you going to do anything else today? And it was this moment like, oh gosh, like I'm neglecting my family. I can't keep up with YouTube comments anymore. So if you manage a channel the big or you have a channel that's, you know, like that can be a lot. Well, I love voice replies. Like if somebody asks me a question via messenger, I'm like, oh sure, let me, you know, I replied during hiking and things like that. And so they've now expanded this to comments for Android users. Previously it was just for people with iOS devices. So essentially you can reply with a voice message. Now it'll be interesting to see if consumers actually catch up and, you know, pick up on it. Because I know for years when I was able to answer questions or things like that, sometimes I would reply to take the time to reply to somebody's question with a follow up and trying to get clarity and they never came back. So I always wonder when we're replying, is anybody coming back? Anyway, all right, this next update has been out for a couple of weeks, but it left a lot of people really frustrated. So I want to make sure that you are looped in on it in case you're going to be one of these people. So they have had editing features for years on YouTube. You can go in and you can edit your videos, right? You can blur things out. Like if something got in there that shouldn't have an address or a face or a license plate or something like that, you can trim stuff, you can take stuff out of a video. So for example, maybe you had a limited time promotion and you just wanted the first two weeks of views to have that and then you can take it out. I know some people who edit out chunks of their video when the retention graph dips. It's like, okay, well clearly we're losing them there and we don't need that part in there. Well, in the past we've been able to go back and essentially undo anything that we wanted going forward that's not going to be available. So any edits that you make will essentially be gone. And so if you want to retain the original versions of your content, like as of right now, you still can. They suggest you go and download the videos before editing going forward. Or use Google Takeout, which is Google's thing where you can get all of your content and export it. Now all I've said is it's coming in the coming months. Like this is going to change in the coming months. So just something to be aware of there, but we are still going to have the ability to edit our videos. All right. Some YouTube ads updates, some cool things going on with YouTube ads on one of them is side by side ads in live streams. So they're launching side by side ads for live streams on TV and web platforms. So people watching in a browser allowing ads to play alongside the content with minimal disruption. So on the creator side they say so then creators can still earn revenue. But I think this is a great opportunity for us as marketers. I feel like I don't watch a lot with commercials anymore, but when my son and I watch sports, when the ads come on, I usually leave the room, go do something and he usually stares at his, you know, phone in that moment. And if there's an ad though, that's showing simultaneously with the game in the corner, we stay there, right? We see those ads. So that's potentially something that could be really, really cool. So we'll watch for that. Also some premium ad products announced. So sometimes you want to get your brand associated with really important events. Right. So they're talking about these as cultural moment sponsorships for high visibility brand integration during major events. Speaking of sports, so they're using Gemini to identify optimal ad placement during peak engagement moments for these events. So pretty smart the way that all of this stuff is going together. Another update for ads on connected TVs. Basically when somebody watches on TV, we know that's growing for YouTube like crazy over the last couple of years. One is immersive masthead design where you'll be able to essentially take over the TV and offer edge to edge advertising. And then another one is shoppable connected TV functionality so that people will be able to, as they're watching YouTube, actually browse products from their TV screens. So they're obviously figuring out how to do this even though you can't generally tap on the screen or anything like that, like you can on a mobile device. Obviously with your finger or with a mouse on a computer. Also, Google announced major updates to Display and Video360, also known as DV360ADS, that expand opportunities for YouTube marketers using that connected TV format and programmatic ads. So the idea is that it's going to make it easier for us to scale video campaigns, align ads with purchase behavior and optimize with AI driven insights. So this is essentially AI coming in through all of this, right? You're going to be able to connect your YouTube ads with commerce intent using retail media and shopper insights from brands like Costco and United Airlines to enable end to end measurements of sales impact across online and in store purchases. So that's something that for the right brands could be really, really powerful. And essentially Google AI is now deeply integrated into DV360. So that means smart inventory recommendations, that means instant reporting as they're calling it, and then real time troubleshooting support when a campaign is not working. Okay. And then another update that is part of ads but also branches out to partnering with creators is they've announced some new tools for partnering with creators. And I think this is always helpful, especially if we're a marketer or a company, a brand that is just trying to start working with creators. So several new tools designed to help us tap into the influence and trust of YouTube creators to drive stronger campaign results. So first there's a new creator partnerships hub, so it's easier to discover sponsored videos, search for creators and then track both paid and organic performance. So that's going to be part of it. Also, they are developing some new APIs where other tools can connect on the back end. So for certain eligible influencer agencies and SaaS platforms, you'll be able to access creator insights, enhancing their tools and strategy in other tools, which is always nice. So there's a lot of stuff going on here, which is really, really great. Another one thing they talked about was new creator led takeovers to allow videos to start with personalized messages and to increase viewer engagement, which is nice. So obviously Google just had their big event, they made a ton of announcements about AI and a lot of these are directly affecting YouTube as well. All right, just a quick reminder. Learn more about becoming an AI powered marketer now. Stay ahead of the curve. Go to social mediaexaminer.com aibusiness again social mediaexaminer.com Aibusiness and if you want to add another podcast to your listening lineup, a couple for you to check out. First of all, the AI explored podcast where we talk about a lot of those same topics, as well as the Social Media Marketing Podcast. Until next time, May you be wise with your marketing decisions. Thanks everyone. Take care. The Social Media Marketing Talk show is a Social Media examiner production. For more social media Insight, visit social mediaexaminer.com.