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After 13 years, we are making a bold move. We've been hosting thousands of marketers in San Diego, California since 2013 for social media Marketing World and it has been epic. Here's the news. We're making a bold move to Anaheim, California in 2026. The decision came down to three very compelling factors. First of all, the location advantages are incredible. Orange County's central location means easier access for our growing international audience. There are five different airports that service the area, including the Los Angeles airport, which means it's a lot more economical for you to get here. Second, the weather. April in Anaheim is absolutely perfect. 75 degrees, sunny skies, less chance of the random rainstorms that sometimes surprise us in San Diego. And third, this is really the big one. And Disneyland. It's only a 20 minute walk away from our venue. Imagine being able to experience Disneyland with your new friends that you make at the conference, literally after the event. I did this with one of my brand new employees. It was an incredible experience. Talk about developing lifelong relationships. This is the way to do it. This is the year to finally come and experience the magic that is social media marketing world. Grab your tickets right now because we have a really big sale going on. Visit social mediamarketingworld.info I can't wait 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.

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Hey, I'm so glad you're here. Today we're gonna be exploring some important YouTube updates that as marketers we need to be on top of and some new stuff we can just start taking advantage of, including a new way to get people engaging on the community tab. This is something that's been rolling out slowly. Could be good resource. Time will tell, but we'll give you this update in case you're already using it or this might be the thing that makes you want to use it. Also, some bad AI news for anyone who is publishing videos to YouTube, at least in my opinion. I'll explain what that means in just a second. And a big improvement for driving traffic to your website, YouTube is removing some of the friction around that. We'll explain exactly what's happening with that as well. My name is Jerry Potter, host of the Social Media Marketing Talk show and today we are going to jump right into everything that you need to know all of the news and what it means for marketers like you. All right, starting with YouTube community tab. So the community tab was once a place where only the person publishing on the channel or the brand publishing on the channel could go through and put up posts, kind of like a Facebook feed or Instagram. There are polls, there are images, different things that you could do with that. And it's been a good tool for a number of years. In the last couple of months, they've been rolling out the ability to turn it on a feature where anyone can then post in that community, sort of creating a. I guess I feel like for us as marketers, a Facebook group is the best way to kind of compare to that. And what happens with this is now you have a place where not only you post and they react, but they can also post and you can react or the community can talk to each other. So it's something I think that is. Makes the most sense for bigger channels. But it's certainly interesting to watch this rolling out and seeing exactly what happened. Well, the problem with this a lot of the time is getting your community to actually go in and use it. So if you spent any time with this type of tool or launching anything new, it's always like, okay, yeah, let's try it out, let's see what happens. But when it requires getting your audience or your followers to actually take action, that can be the challenging part. And certainly we could start mentioning, hey, and don't forget to go interact in our community tab in a video that we publish once a week, for example. Maybe over time it would work, but then I don't know about you, but the thing that's in my head all the time is, yeah, but what if I start promoting that in videos and then nobody uses it? You know, then. Then the channel looks bad, right? All the things that we overthink as marketers. Well, new update where YouTube has added the ability to now generate a direct link to the Community tab. Now, I will say I haven't seen this feature and the update was vague, but it sounds like not just a link to the Community tab, but actually be able to link to individual posts. So that is indeed the case. That means that if you have an email list or a bigger following somewhere else, maybe from an Instagram story, you could link to a specific post in your community feed or to the tab itself and encourage people to go and engage that way. Maybe if you really wanted to get it going, you could offer a bribe, a reward, a prize of some sort to kind of jumpstart that. But I know YouTube is my primary platform, and when I first started my channel, after a while I was like, ah, sure, it would be nice to have a community. And I started a Facebook group because this didn't exist then, so I think had it been now, I might have just jumped right in. So we'll see how this feature goes, but some channels are adopting it and seeing some success. The biggest warning I've seen around this is once you start doing this, let's say you do have a big community, that's another community that then requires moderation. So always keep that in mind. You can always shut it off later if you decide it was too much or overwhelming. All right, we've got some other important updates we definitely need to talk about real quick. But the community post image limit is going up. This is sort of just a quick update, but before you can only have five images now you can go up to 10. And you should be able to do this pretty much across all of the different platforms, iOS, Android, tablets, desktop and studio. If you don't see it now, you should see it in the next few days. So almost an opportunity to do more of a photo gallery or sort of YouTube's version of a carousel post maybe. So we'll see what happens with that. Lots going on with AI, including an update that I'm not excited about as a marketer that we'll talk about here in just a second. But if you are looking at the AI world swirling around you, trying to figure out where to get started, how to move forward, but you're unsure where to, or maybe you're already using it, but you know you could be doing a whole lot more with it. You don't have to master everything. Nobody is the master of AI. Even the guy you know, Sam Altman, the guy behind OpenAI, is not the master of AI, right? There's so many different parts. All you need to know is your next few steps. So to help marketers with this, we put together a free three minute assessment to to reveal your AI marketing readiness level and get a 30 day action plan for success. So all you have to do, go through, find out what you need to do next. It makes a massive difference. So you'll find out if you're an observer, an experimenter, an optimizer or a transformer. Takes just a few minutes. Get your clarity. No generic advice, no overwhelming tech speak, just actionable guidance in plain English that you can start using today. So to do this you can just go to socialmediaexaminer.com aiquiz again, socialmediaexaminer.com aizziz all right, the AI news that I think is bad news that I'm not excited about. You may have seen these on YouTube and we reported this when they first started testing it, but the AI video summaries expansion is happening right now. So if you haven't seen these under a video, sometimes it'll basically lay out what the video talked about. And so for me, I will often see a video, especially if the title really grabs my attention. I'm like, oh, I'm really curious, I wonder what this is going to be about. And I scroll down, I'll see, oh, do they have a summary? Because then I can just skim the summary and not have to watch the whole 8 minute video or 20 minute video. And at the same time, as somebody who publishes videos on YouTube, I'm like, no, please watch our videos, right? So, but I think this is just a, you know, anytime this kind of thing happens, it just means we need to continue to make better videos. Personally, for me, I'm thinking about making videos where the visuals become more important. Just it in my topic selection. I know that's a big part of how I'm getting a lot of traffic right now on my YouTube channel from ChatGPT because it's the videos that the visual really, really helps as opposed to just, you know, a talking head video. So just something to be aware of. And keep in mind that if your whole video is based on a really good curiosity hook, and that curiosity hook can be exposed by AI in three sentences, those videos may not do as well as this continues to roll out. So just be aware that that is growing and growing. Another tool that I think has a lot of potential is also expanding and that is shorts effects. So shorts effects are essentially different effects that someone can add to their YouTube short. And we've mostly seen this with bigger brands, but now with the ability for anyone to create this type of stuff with just some prompts, I think there's an opportunity for small brands to really do some amazing things with this. Imagine creating something like this and it goes viral. Like literally everybody starts using it and it's somehow associated with your brand. It's not going to be named after your brand in most cases, but it might make people think of your brand or at least think of your niche or your category. So this is basically rolling out wider, they're saying, to 85 different regions. It's on desktop and it is gen AI powered effect creation where you can literally tell it what you want. So we'll be keeping an eye on this, but you can see that@effects.YouTube.com all right, creators soon are going to be able to use the YouTube Studio Editor to edit Videos with automatic dubbing enabled. So they recently rolled out this opportunity where we can have our videos show up in other languages automatically, which is great. All you have to do is go in and enable it and you could review them. But now they're adding the ability for us to actually make edits to it as well. So this has been a highly requested feature and we'll start to see that rolling out manual multi language audio track editing is going to be coming later this year as well. And seeing as we're in September, that feels somewhat optimistic. Right? We've only got a few months left in this year. YouTube Create. That is YouTube's video editing app if you've played with that at all. But on Android they've now added video templates so you can jumpstart video projects with pre built structures, royalty free music and a lot more flexibility. Anything that gets the video done and out the door I think is great. This is certainly an opportunity too I think for businesses. If you've got a really visual business, it's probably the sweet lover in me, but I'm always thinking of bakeries, I would say, oh cupcakes. But if you've got a visual business or even just showing that kind of stuff, whip out your phone, film something, you can use one of these pre built templates and all of a sudden the entire thing looks much more professional, you know, potentially much more engaging. But it didn't take you hours and hours to do, just you sharing the thing that you're passionate about in your business or in the business that you are marketing. This is an interesting update. So creators in the partner program can now tag brand partners per video. So this is just another thing that they're rolling out that'll help streamline branded content deals. And as marketers and advertisers we can promote sponsored videos more effectively. So this is part of YouTube's Brand Connect. If you are using that, you can watch for that. A big update for driving web traffic on YouTube. So certainly for a lot of us businesses that's kind of our goal, right? Certainly we want awareness. But off we could just get them to click through and fill out that form. Join our email list, whatever it might be. Well, you know YouTube promote functionality which is essentially the simpler version of running ads on YouTube. It's the equivalent of Facebook boosting rather than ads manager. If you run actually official YouTube ads you have to go through Google Ads. But this is just an ability to promote videos and shorts. Well, they've now added more calls to action when you are Setting up your promotion. So before you had. It's basically as a default. I can't remember if it was learn more. But now you can choose book now get quote contact us download. There's quite a few that are in there. And the reason this is going to be so much more effective for driving website traffic is simply the fact that there's less friction. If the words on the button make sense to the person who's watching your video, then that obviously, you know, is far more effective for actually getting people to go and take that action. So if you're looking to do this though, you can only do this if you are doing the promote the promotion on desktop, at least for now. So just be aware of that. An update for YouTube comment moderation. So this is going to be especially helpful if you have channels that get hundreds and hundreds of comments and you're going through and maybe it's at the point where you're getting spam. Unfortunately that's, that's, that's part of growth. That's one of the things where it's just like, oh gosh, I'm getting all this engagement, you know that. And it actually is not great because I'm also getting spammy comments. Well, now you can go through and you can actually select all comments at once and then remove or report them in bulk. So just an opportunity to speed that process up for you or whoever on your team might be doing that. And then also subscriber only comments. So now you can limit comments to subscribers and set a minimum subscription duration. This is currently something they're testing. It's only available in Thailand, but something that you can be aware of. So imagine that then that way people can't just create an account and then go spamming literally the same day or the same week. Once you kind of had that built in there. The thing I don't like about that in some ways is if you require subscribers to comment, then the potential is there for people to subscribe because they wanted to leave a comment and not because they were actually interested in our video content. So that's the part that I'm thinking about. If you know, on one hand it's like, oh, wow, maybe I could get a lot more subscribers by sending people this video and telling them to comment. And then they realize, oh, I've got a subscribe before I can comment. But if it was the wrong people, that's potentially not a good sign if you're really trying to build a loyal subscriber base. We talk a lot now in 2025 about subscribers not being important anymore. But it's certainly loyal subscribers are certainly still valuable and there's no doubt that the social proof certainly can have an impact as well. When you have a higher subscriber count on a channel and somebody's considering do I want to watch their videos or do I want to subscribe myself? So quick reminder. Get AI ready. Take our AI readiness assessment. It's totally free. Just go to social mediaexaminer.com AI quiz again social mediaexaminer.com AI Quiz and if you like this podcast, another one for you to check out the Social Media Marketing Podcast wherever you happen to get your podcasts. Until next time, may you be wise with your marketing decisions. Thanks everyone. Bye.