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Today is 🏹 Archery Day, Reader... Shout out to 🌳 Robin Hood!

In today’s edition:

• Today's 👉 Tip of the Day is for UGC strategy

• 🌟 Optimizing video podcasts for ▶️ YouTube

• Instagram ✂️ Cutout stickers

• Create your own 🎶 song with TikTok

You know user-generated content (UGC) is trusted by consumers, but not all social media users are gifted content creators. Even your most enthusiastic customers may fail to produce quality content for your brand. However, there's a "sweet spot" for UGC.  

Opt for Creator-Generated Content

Instead of trying to use content from less media-savvy fans or highly expensive top-tier influencers, consider using "creator-generated content"—natural-looking videos from social media users with decent followings who appear comfortable on camera and know basic production techniques. 

Their content looks professional yet organic and is perfect for your ads.

These creators will make content that truly resonates with your target audience and will deliver assets you won’t have to fully edit, saving you valuable time.

Today's tip is inspired by Dara Denney, a featured speaker at Social Media Marketing World.

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How to Create YouTube Video Podcasts That Perform

Want to put your podcast on YouTube? Wondering how to adapt your show for video viewers?

Podcasting has become an extremely popular media format, with millions of listeners tuning in to their favorite shows every day. However, the podcast landscape is becoming increasingly competitive, making it difficult for new shows to break through and attract a large audience. 

Transforming your podcast episodes into video content optimized for YouTube viewership growth offers an effective alternative to reaching new audiences.

The platform's algorithms actively promote videos to new viewers in a way that podcast apps don’t. The more people engage with a video, the more YouTube will recommend it to prospective new viewers. This gives videos much more exposure potential.

However, you can’t simply repurpose audio content. Success requires optimizing your show for the YouTube environment.  

For example, stagnant side-by-side talking headshots or basic graphic overlays over audio don’t take advantage of the visual format that YouTube viewers expect. Without attention-grabbing packaging, intriguing titles, and compelling openings, most viewers will quickly click away from podcast videos since they don’t know the hosts or guests.

Think About Your Podcast Video Before You Begin an Interview

First, consider visual-first creative packaging possibilities before your interviews, not just as an afterthought. Avoid wide-ranging interviews that loosely touch on multiple topics and instead, figure out what core topic or ideas you can deeply explore through a podcast episode.

Lead the interview with one core concept that will attract and retain viewers because the content delivers what the title and thumbnail promised (this also applies to audio-only podcasts).

Then, you can design video packaging around teasing and delivering on those narrow ideas.

Package Your Video Podcast for YouTube

On YouTube, you compete with all creators for viewers' attention. Though you may not directly compete with the biggest names, you do compete with the 7–8 videos the platform recommends based on what they think each viewer will find interesting. 

Most YouTube views come from recommendations, not searches. So, your thumbnail, title, and video idea must stand out among other suggestions. There should be alignment between the title, thumbnail, and the content itself. This helps attract an audience on YouTube who likely has not learned about you or the guest.

There are two packaging approaches: leveraging the guest's fame or highlighting the ideas covered. If your guest is unknown to many YouTube viewers, emphasize ideas in the packaging. You can use your guest's name in the title and face in the thumbnail if your guest is known.

Pro Tip: Rather than publishing every podcast episode to YouTube, consider selecting just a few standout monthly interviews. This gives you more time and effort to package those for impact over volume.

Optimize Video Podcast Production

Remote interviews are typical for podcasters. Unfortunately, many creators upload these visibly lackluster, split-screen interviews as unmodified Zoom calls on YouTube. These videos rarely get recommended because they perform poorly. 

Instead, you must enhance the viewer experience over audio-only to justify the video format. You must engage viewers throughout interviews in creative ways. 

Instead of a static side-by-side interview, switch between speakers so that whoever is talking dominates the viewer's attention.

Add graphics to highlight key insights, such as visual elements like virtual notepads. The goal is to maintain the visual stimulation expected from platforms like TikTok while conveying tactical, actionable advice. This makes the YouTube experience better for the viewer than passively listening. 

Maintaining visual dynamism from start to finish makes your YouTube video feel additive and enhanced versus just a repurposed podcast.

Today's advice is provided with insights from Jay Clouse.

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🗞 Instagram Cutouts: Instagram has introduced a new feature called Cutouts that allows users to create custom stickers using photos from their camera roll or eligible public images on Instagram. This provides more creativity options for Stories and Reels. Users can only generate stickers from Instagram images that are public and where the poster has enabled permissions to reuse content. If an Instagram post that a custom sticker is based on gets deleted by the original poster, then the user's content containing that sticker will also be deleted. Similarly, users' own public Instagram posts are eligible to be made into stickers by others unless reuse is disabled in their account settings or on specific posts. Instagram notes that users maintain control and can disable sticker creation permissions entirely or selectively to protect their content as desired. The Cutouts feature ultimately gives users more tools for unique and engaging content while also providing controls around how their own images can be reused. Source: Instagram

🗞 TikTok AI Song Experiment: TikTok has introduced an experimental feature called AI Song that uses artificial intelligence to generate original songs based on text prompts entered by users. The lyric generation capability is powered by Bloom, TikTok's large language model that applies machine learning to produce text. TikTok cautions that the AI-generated lyrics may contain errors and that the same lyrics could be generated for multiple users prompting the model with similar inputs. The goal of releasing this feature in an experimental capacity is to obtain user feedback that will allow TikTok to improve the AI songwriting over time. Source: @jonahmanzano via Threads

Did You Know?

The internet officially opened to the public 30 years ago, in 1993.