James: James Schramko here, SuperFastBusiness.com, chatting with Kan from SocialWave.com.au. Hello, Kan!
Kan: Good day James, thanks for having me.
James: Tell me about short videos, Kan, I’ve been putting some reels on my Instagram and I get a lot more views than when I just put a post. I’ve been seeing TikTok for years, even people sort of rebranding their TikToks and putting it on other platforms – because I’m actually not on TikTok at this point in time – but I do see the TikTok watermark in both YouTube videos and Instagram. I know they’re shorts for YouTube. They used to have to hashtag it as shorts. But I think now, you don’t have to do it, it just has to be short. But can you tell us like, what is the current situation with YouTube and their version of these short videos and how we can use that for our own marketing?
Kan: YouTube shorts is a direct feature that’s trying to compete with Instagram reels and TikTok. It’s sort of, I guess, the idea is that people now just want bite-sized pieces of content rather than the long-form content, which is a little bit strange, because YouTube’s always had a high, I guess, viewership and retention rate when it comes to watching videos, one of the longest besides podcasts, but I think they understand the threat behind TikTok. So that’s why they’ve brought out YouTube shorts, which, like you said, you used to have to hashtag it shorts. But now you no longer have to do it, you just need to actually set it as a YouTube short, so it does appear as YouTube shorts.
Especially on your phone, if anyone uses a YouTube app, which is most people on the phone, you’ll see down the bottom on your menu, there’s actually a shorts section, which you won’t actually see on the YouTube browser. And that’s where you go and watch shorts as well, when you get in it. It looks very similar to a TikTok feed where it’s sort of like just this infinite scrolling of videos that you can go check out. But because it’s a new algorithm feature, or it’s a new feature that YouTube wants you to use, there’s really strong organic reach right now. So there’s a lot of businesses out there or channels out there that are growing massively by creating a whole series of YouTube shorts videos, because it’s getting reached out to audiences that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to.
James: Yeah, I’m into little, snackable content. When I started doing little snacky content, even on our own website, we noticed people will just go on to the next and the next and the next, it’s like, they’ll just let it run. And I noticed if you go on to Instagram, go up to stories, they’ll just keep filing through. If you leave your phone, they’ll just keep going through forever. So it seems like the easiest possible way for someone to access a market, is to just put themselves in front of it.
To that point, do you take the same videos and repurpose them across different platforms?
Kan: We do, partly because it’s more efficient for us as well. But if we had more time, and particularly the clients who have ones that we work with, who are very hands-on and willing to actually film themselves, would you recommend you go out and actually record your own content? I mean, if you look at TikTok, and even Instagram to a certain extent, a lot of that is original shorts and real content. It’s not repurposed content as well. So we definitely feel like there is an opportunity for you to go create new content.
But for those of you who, you might be running really busy business, and you don’t have enough time, like we’ve got a lot of clients who we’ve been trying to say, get them to film themselves, it’s been an uphill battle for a lot of these clients who are time-poor. So repurposing old content, and then finding out the best bits that you can turn into 10, 15, 20 seconds or 30-second snippets for shorts is super useful. Although I would say it’s probably not enough for you to just take that sort of snippet and then put it on as a short. You kind of want to cut it up and you know, jump cuts, add in some emojis, add in some text. You know, if you look at TikTok videos, they’re very much like this, because that keeps engagement high and again promotes the algorithm to go and recommend your video to other people as well.
James: Now you’re talking! And you help people with this, Kan at SocialWave.com.au. Thank you so much for your information today.
Kan: No problem. Thank you, James.
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