Will Short-Form Video Take a Back Seat in 2024?

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[00:00:56] It is Wednesday, December 13th. Today, how advertising may have killed the growth of Short-Form Video. Threads and Mastodon are joining forces. Instagram makes going live much easier. Why has chat GPT gotten lazier? And a big announcement about the future of this very podcast.

[00:01:18] I'm Tod Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. Didn't think I'd see this coming, but one respected industry watcher says the social media platform's obsession over Short-Form Videos will cool a bit next year.

[00:01:32] E-Marketer says the sites may talk a big game, but they're still trying to figure it all out. Quoting a report they put out today, Reports hint that Meta is struggling to convince advertisers that Reels can drive performance.

[00:01:46] In Q3 earnings, Meta suggested it will pivot its strategy from Reels to Video more holistically. Meanwhile, Alphabet's Q3 earnings implied that YouTube's Shorts had trouble growing beyond the 2 billion users it announced in Q2.

[00:02:01] Even TikTok is toying with 15 minute videos and by ending its creator fund, the app will only pay creators for videos longer than 60 seconds. Another sign of short video monetization problems. So what will be on the upswing? Well, the continued shift to closed circle sharing, specifically group chats.

[00:02:23] Videos are still getting shared, but increasingly via DMs. That's a problem for advertisers since there's not really a video stream to interrupt there. Videos shared privately are usually just watched on their own. Where do you put an ad? Before they watch? No, they'd hate that.

[00:02:41] After? No, they'd just turn it off. E-Marketer suggests this might be why Meta is prioritizing its business messaging tools in WhatsApp and in its other messaging apps. In the end, they think longer form videos could get more attention next year than short form.

[00:03:00] Quote, platforms, advertisers and creators would all benefit. Longer videos means greater time spent, more ad space and fewer excuses not to share ad revenues. But this isn't the first time the platforms have tried. TikTok's attempt at 10 minute videos was deprioritized and IGTV and Facebook Watch were abandoned.

[00:03:21] Plus, the platforms must contend with the reality that consumers still love short videos. Many short form creators will have a learning curve in a pivot to longer form content and viewers are already starting to max out on social video time.

[00:03:36] E-Marketer's report is called Top Trends to Watch in 2024. We have a link to it in today's newsletter if you'd like more information. There are a bunch of apps vying to fill the hole left by Twitter and soon the two most popular will be connected and interoperable.

[00:03:58] Mastodon uses a protocol called Activity Pub that lets independent servers share content. So for instance, there is an independent version of Instagram called Pixel Fed. Both Pixel Fed and Mastodon use this Activity Pub protocol.

[00:04:13] And that means you can follow someone's Pixel Fed account even if you don't have one. You'd follow them and see it in your Mastodon account. To translate, imagine if you could get YouTube shorts from your favorite YouTuber while scrolling through your TikTok feed

[00:04:29] or subscribe to a Reddit post's comments and get updates in your Messenger app of choice. That's Activity Pub. A bunch of platforms used by marketers already support it, most notably WordPress, which powers most of the websites on the planet.

[00:04:44] And now, Threads will hook itself up to the growing protocol as well. This is something Meta announced when they launched Threads, but if I'm honest, many people expected this to be something they would just drop. But today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said they're already testing it. Quote,

[00:05:11] So here's how it would work. If your brand has a Mastodon account, people on both Mastodon and Threads will be able to see your content, follow your account, engage with your posts, and see your profile. So which should you choose?

[00:05:27] Honestly, if you're still on the fence about where to start a post-Twitter personal account, I personally think Mastodon is the place. There are no ads, which Threads of course will get. You get a true chronological feed without any of that suggested posts nonsense.

[00:05:41] And there are lots of different apps you can use to access it. And it has an API that's supported by some third party platforms like Buffer. Most importantly, you have account portability there.

[00:05:54] On Meta's platforms, if an AI enforcement bot bans your account, well, you'll probably never get it back. On Mastodon, you just pick up your account and move with all of your followers to another account.

[00:06:07] But regardless of where you choose, having the two platforms become interoperable is definitely a win-win. It's already been a busy week at Instagram with three reports to update today. First, they are rolling out new tools to catch and stop spam.

[00:06:26] They say they're getting better at detecting what spammy and the automated filters in your brand's Instagram account will become a bit more accurate. There'll also be more granular introducing a new potential spam bucket that you can check in on from time to time.

[00:06:39] Second, they're updating their notes feature to let you post videos. Notes are tiny little status updates you can put on your profile photo. Until now it's only been text or emoji, but now you can post a two-second looping video.

[00:06:52] Of course, it's not meant to be a video people would watch that would give them any information about your brand. Think of it more like an easier way to put in an animated GIF. Plus you can't upload a video. You have to use your phone's front-facing camera.

[00:07:05] Definitely more a user feature than a marketer feature, though I'm sure the clever of you will find a way to use this. And third, they've made a big update to live streaming.

[00:07:15] You can now use popular third-party tools like OBS or Streamlabs to send a live feed to your Instagram channel. If your account can go live, you'll find a special code called a key in your settings.

[00:07:28] You give that key to the third-party app and then you can use it to broadcast live on your Instagram account. This lets you add things like text boxes, images, overlays, videos, and all sorts of extra items to make it much more of a polished broadcast.

[00:07:42] A former meta executive this week pled guilty to embezzling millions from the company. Barbara Furlough-Smiles worked there from 2017 to 2021 quoting Business Insider, quote, Furlough-Smiles diverted more than $4 million from Facebook by linking payment apps to her Facebook credit card and paying out charges to fake vendors.

[00:08:06] She'd submit the charges as false expense reports, then have the vendors give her the money in cash or by transferring funds to her husband's account. Prosecutors said associates paid cash kickbacks in person and by FedEx or mail, sometimes wrapping the cash in other items like t-shirts, unquote.

[00:08:24] She is scheduled to be sentenced in March. And with you, the most beautiful adventure of your life? The shopping platform Shopify revolutionizes millions of companies worldwide. With Shopify, you only manage your online shop, without programming or design knowledge.

[00:08:53] Thanks to the efficient design and intuitive social media and online marketplace integration, you can sell and sell through Instagram, eBay and Co. It was never easy to reach new target groups. Shopify offers on a single secure platform all tools to build up your online business.

[00:09:12] Test free and present a business of the world. shopify.de, quote, try, visit. Simply enter shopify.de, quote, try and start. Made for Germany, powered by Shopify. You have to synthesize and categorize themes, get the team involved,

[00:09:37] design next steps and make it all a fun, safe space where teammates want to participate. Miro is the visual collaboration platform that helps you run effective, engaging and actionable retrospectives. We use Miro at our agency to map out a client's messaging for our engagement team.

[00:09:54] That can be complicated. A lot of if-bends. But making it visual and sharing it directly with our client, sped things way up. Plus, our side can share spitballing ideas with private mode. The client doesn't get to see our thoughts until we've decided on the approach.

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[00:10:28] If you are still posting on X and have some links to your store or a website or something, you may have noticed those links were not working earlier today. Anytime users tapped a link, they got a page that read,

[00:10:40] I scream, you scream, we all scream for us to fix this page. Which they did after about an hour. TechCrunch had some context about this, quote, If this sounds familiar, it's because something similar happened in March. Taking down links and images across timelines for around an hour.

[00:10:57] Twitter blamed that on an internal change that had some unintended consequences before Platformer reported the bug occurred because of a mistake by the site's single remaining site reliability engineer who was operating solo after Elon Musk instituted massive layoffs.

[00:11:16] If you've been using chat GPT for some of your marketing tasks, you may have noticed it's been getting a little, I don't know, lazier, more uptight. We noticed it here for a while. We had to give us ideas for titles for our newsletter issues

[00:11:35] until one day a couple of weeks ago, it just started refusing to do it until that is we typed in try again and then it was fine. At some point late last month, say some users chat GPT,

[00:11:50] started refusing to do tasks or outputting oddly linked or simplified results. OpenAI posted on social media, quote, We've heard all your feedback about GPT for getting lazier. We haven't updated the model since November 11th and this certainly isn't intentional, unquote. So what's causing it?

[00:12:08] Well, some people believe the AI has some kind of seasonal effective disorder. A low grade depression brought on by the winter months. How would an AI get depressed? Remember, all these bots are trained on millions of documents and posts from around the web.

[00:12:28] Maybe somehow in its vast reading, it's learned that people tend to slow down this time of year. Maybe it's the dark days, maybe it's close to the holidays and people are taking time off. Is it possible that chat GPT has gotten to know us humans so well

[00:12:43] that it is emulating us right down to our moods? After all, some people have tested very human like inputs with it and found that GPT responds. One guy tested telling GPT that it would get a tip if it did well

[00:12:58] and he discovered that GPT for did indeed give longer responses when it thought it was going to get a gratuity. One fellow shared his favorite prompt on social media. It reads, quote, you are very capable. Many people will die if this is not done well.

[00:13:16] You really can do this and are awesome. Take a deep breath and think this through. My career depends on it, unquote. Someone remind me where's that link for the waiting list to colonize another planet again? And finally, a small correction in yesterday's podcast.

[00:13:38] We mentioned some of the leading places that teens were spending their time. Tiktok, Snapchat and so on. We failed to mention the top place which of course was YouTube with 93% of American teens saying they spend time there. Some big changes coming to the podcast in the new year.

[00:13:59] Changes I know you are going to like. One of them, the big one. We are reducing the price of our premium podcast. The premium podcast is just like the one you're listening to now but it has no ads in it. It has better sound quality.

[00:14:13] It has links to the stories that we cover in the show notes, audio chapters so you can quickly jump to whatever story you like, monthly live streams and it comes with access to more than 20 deep dive interviews with marketing scientists plus of course by myself called

[00:14:28] Starting and Growing a Digital Agency. Previously our premium podcast was $10 a month. It is now $5 a month US and that is available right now. So if you like a better version of this show, just swipe over to the show notes in your podcast app

[00:14:44] and tap Go Premium to sign up. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

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