Today's Guide to the Marketing Jungle from Social Media Examiner... | Presented by |  |
It's National Ferris Wheel Day, Alluser... Round and round we go!
In today's edition:
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❎ Today's Tip of the Day is for LinkedIn
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🕶️ Effective Short-Form Video Formats for 2025
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Veo 2 for Shorts
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Meta AI in Your DMs
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🗞️ Additional Industry News From Facebook, Google, Reddit, and More
Looking for a quick and useful way to share more curated content on LinkedIn?
Use the Share Quote Feature
Whether you're on desktop or mobile, open a newsletter–yours or anyone else's, and highlight a short passage.
Click or tap on the Share Quote option to automatically create a feed post that includes your pulled quote with the curated content. Add your own thoughts and hit Post!
Today's tip was inspired by Louise Brogan, a featured speaker at Social Media Marketing World.
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"This is the BEST conference I have attended in over 20 years! I learned so much from quality speakers that I can take back and ramp up our marketing efforts," said Julie Harvey.
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Effective Short-Form Video Formats for 2025
Tired of your content getting lost in social media noise? Wondering how top creators consistently produce videos that get noticed?
In this article, you'll learn a proven methodology for dissecting successful content formats and adapting them to your own niche.
Brendan Kane has developed a systematic approach to creating breakthrough video content. His model, refined through over 10,000 hours of research identifying more than 220 different content formats, consists of five essential steps that any creator can follow to improve their chances of success.
Research and Identify Successful Organic Video Formats
Before you begin your research, you must come to terms with two principles.
The first is that organic social media isn't meant for direct selling. It's intended to get people to know, like, and trust you so they're motivated to buy your product.
The second is that there's a difference between trends and formats. Kane emphasizes that trends like the ice bucket challenge are fleeting, while formats are repeatable storytelling structures that consistently perform well over time. His team has identified over 220 distinct formats through their research.
Now that you know what to look for, here are two ways to conduct this research on your own:
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Pay attention to the formats seeded in your social feeds. The algorithms are already showing you successful content types. When you see something performing well, dive deeper into that creator's profile to study their approach. Is the creator replicating that format over and over with success?
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Use the Explorer feed to search for and surface content relevant to your industry. If you're a nutritionist, search for terms like "food hacks" or "cooking recipes." Coaches can search terms such as "entrepreneurial advice." The algorithms will show you more relevant, successful content as you do this more often.
As you find formats, log each one in a spreadsheet along with its creator.
Examples of Consistently Successful Organic Video Formats
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The Man on the Street: In these videos, a creator interacts with a random person in a public space and captures their reaction; SB Mowing offers free yard transformations.
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Two Characters, One Light Bulb: In these videos, creators play the role of both expert and skeptic to address common industry myths; Erika Kullberg plays both expert lawyer and novice to explain legal rights.
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The Walking Listicle: In these videos, the creator records an informal video while walking. The movement creates dynamic energy and makes the content feel more conversational–almost like a FaceTime call rather than a formal presentation; Robert Croak, founder of Silly Bands, shares business advice while walking.
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The Challenge: In these videos, the creator shows a self-imposed challenge and an impressive result, leveraging natural tension and the story's payoff; John Malecki attempts to build expensive furniture from salvaged materials.
Choose and Analyze a Video Format
Going viral should never be the sole goal. The videos you produce must relate to your expertise, products, or services. The key is finding formats that allow you to showcase your knowledge with a target audience while appealing to broader audiences.
To find the right fit for you, take stock of all the video formats and creators you identified in the research phase. Consider each of them and choose the format that has the best natural fit for you, your personality, and your niche or industry. The format will only work if the video feels genuine rather than shoehorned.
Next, analyze that format to understand the nuanced elements that make the format work consistently.
Go to the creator's social media feeds and use a spreadsheet to log a selection of videos using the Gold Silver Bronze Analysis Method. You'll need 10 videos for each category below:
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Gold Standard: Videos with 10+ million views
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Silver Performance: Videos with 800,000 to 1 million views
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Bronze Level: Videos will less than 300,000 views
Now, cross-analyze these videos, looking for patterns in performance drivers to determine why the Gold Standard videos performed well and why the Silver Performance and Bronze Level videos performed less well.
While Kane's team tracks over 1,000 performance drivers, he recommends beginners focus on these core elements:
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Opening hooks and how they capture attention
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Pacing throughout the video
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Caption placement and style
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Reaction captures and emotional moments
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Environmental factors that impact engagement
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Technical elements like transitions and edits
Strategic Organic Video Ideation
Once you understand a format's mechanics, ideation becomes more structured and effective. If you choose the right format, it will typically drive the ideation process.
Take the "Is it Worth It?" format consistently used by Tanner Leatherstein to build expertise and credibility while entertaining his audience.
He started by deconstructing a Chanel handbag to examine its craftsmanship and determine whether the product was worth the cost. He then expanded to deconstructing products from other luxury brands.
Each video maintains the same successful structure, which removes the pressure to create completely original content for each video.
Single Video Production Iteration
You may be tempted to batch multiple videos using this newly identified format, but Kane strongly advises against batch production when learning a new format.
The challenge and danger of batch-producing a new format is that if the first one fails, even if you figure out why it failed, it's not likely that you can fix that issue in the remaining videos. So you'll publish nine more videos that won't work. If you do one video at a time, you're not overly invested in something that doesn't work.
So, produce one video, then move on to the fifth and final step.
Review and Analyze Organic Videos With Sub-Par Performance
When video content produced with this method underperforms, it's usually due to one or both of these two things:
The first is that you misunderstood the key performance drivers. Maybe you focused on surface elements (like wardrobe) instead of structural elements or missed crucial format components.
The second is sub-par execution quality. Perhaps you had technical issues in production, pacing problems, or a weak story structure.
To find out, you need to do a systematic comparison of your content against successful examples in the same format.
Play your video side-by-side with a gold standard example and analyze any differences, such as subtle execution variations or missing performance drivers.
Finally, plan specific improvements for the next video you'll produce.
By following this systematic review process, creators can make incremental improvements with each new piece of content. Once you've mastered a format, you can consider batch production to scale your content creation.
Today's advice is provided with insights from Brendan Kane, a featured guest on the Social Media Marketing Podcast.
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Firefly AI Subscriptions: Adobe announced stand-alone subscriptions for its AI models and is launching a redesigned website at firefly.adobe.com where users can access these AI models, including the new Firefly AI video model, which is now available in public beta on both the website and in Premiere Pro Beta. The Standard plan is $9.99 monthly, and the Pro plan costs $29.99 monthly. Source: TechCrunch
Google Whisk: The AI image generation tool is now available in 100 countries. Source: Google
Facebook Marketplace Partner Program: Meta will begin allowing competing classified ad providers to list their inventory on Facebook Marketplace. The new Facebook Marketplace Partner Program will display third-party classified ad listings alongside Facebook's user listings and other third-party inventory on Marketplace. Source: Reuters
Google Ads and Display & Video 360 Customer Match List Updates: The platforms will implement a new maximum membership duration of 540 days for Customer Match lists, with the rollout beginning April 7, 2025. This change affects existing lists with no membership expiration or those set to expire beyond 540 days, as they will be automatically updated to conform to the new 540-day maximum. The new policy will apply retroactively to existing members with longer durations, which means list sizes may decrease as memberships expire. Campaigns that target segments that become too small due to these changes may be unable to serve ads and could automatically pause. To prevent campaign interruptions, advertisers should refresh their Customer Match lists before April 7, 2025, either by renewing memberships or replacing expired lists with current ones. Under this new system, advertisers must regularly refresh their lists by re-uploading customer data, as list sizes will naturally decrease over time without updates. Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Meta AI Can Access Messaging Chats: By mentioning using @MetaAI in replies, the AI will access messages and content shared with it, including content that other chat participants choose to share. Users should avoid sharing sensitive information like passwords or financial details in chats, as other participants can share these messages with Meta AI. To prevent message sharing with Meta AI, users can delete chats, remove specific messages, edit message content, or delete chat information. Source: Meta
Reddit's Q4 2024 Earnings: Key findings from the report include: Revenue reached $427.7 million, up 71% year-over-year; International revenue grew 76% year-over-year to $80.0 million, while U.S. revenue increased 70% to $347.7 million; Performance-based advertising drove over half of Q4 growth and represented about 60% of total ad revenue; Daily active users grew to 101.7 million, a 39% increase from the previous year. Source: Reddit
Veo 2 Comes to YouTube Shorts: Dream Screen, which previously allowed users to generate AI backgrounds for Shorts using text prompts, is receiving an upgrade with Veo 2 integration. The update introduces the ability to generate stand-alone video clips that can be added to any Short. Veo 2 produces high-quality videos across various subjects and styles, with improved processing speed compared to the previous version. The model features an enhanced understanding of real-world physics and human movement, resulting in more detailed and realistic output. Users can specify styles, lens choices, and cinematic effects within Dream Screen. To create video backgrounds, users can access Dream Screen through the Shorts camera by selecting Green Screen and entering their prompt. To add generated clips to Shorts, users need to open the Shorts camera, tap Add, select Create, input their prompt, and choose their desired video length. Source: YouTube
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