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It’s National Take Your Poet to Work Day, Reader. Shel Silverstein, Dorothy Parker, Dylan Thomas, Amanda Gorman… so many to choose from!

In today’s edition:

• 🧩 Today's Tip of the Day is for LinkedIn

• 🖱️ A simple way to design thumbnails people will click on

• Meta launches custom offers for Instagram ad CTAs

• YouTube tests Community Spaces

• Additional industry news from Instagram, Pinterest, and more

Want more organic reach for certain posts on LinkedIn? Looking for an easy way to get your staff to share those posts on their personal profiles?

While your company page helps consumers and customers stay in touch with your company, people looking to purchase a service or product typically build trust and relationships with a person rather than an entity. That's why getting your employees to share key content should be an important part of your strategy.

If you're thinking that's easier said than done, LinkedIn has a solution.

Create Recommended Content

1. First, navigate to your Page admin view and select "Page posts" from the left menu.

2. Click the "New Post" button in the upper-right corner and compose your post, including any visual elements like images, videos, or documents.

3. Before publishing, click "Recommend to employees."

Suggesting pre-vetted content makes it easier for employees to quickly share professional updates without spending time creating their own posts. It also ensures that your staff shares information that is aligned with your company's goals and values.

Not only will the post's reach be amplified to a wider audience, but it will also come from a human rather than a corporate presence, making it more relatable and trustworthy.

Today's tip is inspired by Social Media Examiner’s Editorial team.

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How to Create Eye-Catching YouTube Thumbnails With AI

YouTube thumbnails are crucial for getting people to click on your videos. But creating, testing, and optimizing thumbnails is a time-intensive process.

By using these AI-powered techniques, you can create professional-looking thumbnails that accurately represent your content, leading to better engagement and watch time for your videos.

Use ChatGPT for Thumbnail Ideation and Creation

Before creating your thumbnail, you need to generate inspiration for visuals that might convey the main topic of your content to your audience.

If you don't have any ideas, you can give ChatGPT your video topic and ask for at least 10 thumbnail suggestions. Alternatively, you can feed your video transcript or outline into ChatGPT and ask for thumbnail ideas based on the content. This helps ensure your thumbnail accurately represents your video.

When guiding your AI with image creation, describe the scene you want as specifically as possible. Tell the AI what people are doing and communicate any important details you want to appear in the image. 

Don't Say: "Show a man on a beach."

Do Say: "Show a close-up of a man's head and shoulders, holding a tropical drink on a sunny beach, with palm trees in the background."

Remember to keep your thumbnail in a 16:9 aspect ratio, the standard for YouTube. When using Midjourney, you can specify this using the "--ar 16:9" tag in your prompt. For example, your full prompt might look like this: "close-up of a man's head and shoulders, holding a tropical drink on a sunny beach, palm trees in the background --ar 16:9."

Pro AI Tool Tips

Create a Character Illustration of Yourself: Use Midjourney's character reference feature to create a character that looks similar to you. Simply upload an image of yourself to your website, then enter "--cref [URL]" into Midjourney with a prompt to create a character based on the person in the image.

Change the Color of Clothing: Both Midjourney and DALL-E 3 allow you to edit specific parts of the image, such as changing a person's shirt color or pattern or adding objects to the background. Select the area and tell your tool to make the change you want.

Brighten Specific Image Elements: Adobe Photoshop's Generative Fill feature is particularly useful for making minor tweaks or removing unwanted elements from your image. For example, if the face in your image isn't well-lit, you can use the Exposure Brush to paint over the face and brighten it up.

Add Thumbnail Text: Use Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Express to add text to your thumbnail.

Add Your Face to a Thumbnail: Replicate is easy to use and offers no-cost face swap options. 

Step 1: Go to replicate.com and create an account (requires GitHub login). 

Step 2: Search for a face swap model on the site. 

Step 3: Upload a clear, front-facing photo of yourself as the source. 

Step 4: Upload your AI-generated thumbnail as the target image. 

Step 5: Run the face swap process. 

Step 6: Review the result and download it if you're satisfied. If not, try adjusting your input images or using a different model.

Other options for face swapping include InsightFace (available as a Discord plugin) and more advanced tools like FaceFusion or Stable Diffusion with DreamBooth; FaceFusion works very well but requires some code knowledge.

Today's advice is provided with insights from Mike Russell, a featured guest on the AI Explored podcast.

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🗞 Instagram’s Variable Image Size Carousels: Instagram has introduced variable image size Carousels but is restricting their promotion. Posts containing full-screen images cannot be boosted, as users receive an error message when attempting to do so. Source: Social Media Today

🗞 Meta’s Custom Offers for Instagram Ad CTAs: Meta is launching a new feature for Instagram ads that displays custom offers directly on call-to-action buttons. The system can show up to 20 offers per ad, dynamically sourced from the ad's website URL, and predicts which offer is most likely to convert. Currently limited to single-media ads in Instagram Stories, advertisers can set it up through Ads Manager by selecting eligible objectives and entering their website URL. This feature is not yet available to all ad accounts. Source: Meta

🗞 Pinterest’s New Pinterest Canvas: Pinterest has developed a new AI model called Pinterest Canvas to enhance images on their platform. This text-to-image model can generate photorealistic backgrounds for products and is conditioned on product masks and style images. Built on a latent diffusion architecture and trained on 1.5 billion text-image pairs, the model was fine-tuned for inpainting and background generation. Source: Medium

🗞 TikTok Improves Project Clover: TikTok is improving data security for its European users through Project Clover. New security measures prevent China-based employees from accessing sensitive European user data. The company is building three new data centers in Europe, one of which is already working in Ireland. TikTok is also now storing European user data in a secure "European enclave." Source: TikTok

🗞 X Tests Post Reply Sorting: X is preparing to launch a new reply sorting feature that will allow users to highlight personally relevant engagements on posts. The functionality will enable customized replies to be displayed. X is expected to begin live testing soon. Source: @xDaily via X

🗞 EU Finds X in Violation of DSA: The European Union Commission has ruled that X's sale of verification ticks violates the Digital Services Act, citing concerns about misinformation and user confusion. The platform also faces criticism for lack of advertising transparency and restricted researcher access. Source: European Commission

🗞 YouTube Tests Community Spaces: YouTube is beta testing Community Spaces, a new feature allowing creators to share posts and interact with their audience in a dedicated area. Source: @lindseygamble_ via Threads

🗞 New YouTube Music Features: YouTube Music is launching two new features for song discovery. An AI-generated conversational radio tool, currently testing with select United States Premium users, allows the creation of custom stations based on text descriptions. A new song recognition feature, now available to all iOS and Android users, can identify songs from singing, humming, or playing snippets. Source: Tech Crunch

Did You Know?

The Beatles played at Red Rocks Amphitheatre on August 26, 1964. The event is typically acknowledged as the first full-scale rock concert at the venue even though Ricky Nelson and Peter, Paul & Mary played previously.