13 July 2023 | Marketing
Twitter is… a video platform?
By
Real quick primer on this section of the newsletter:
If you’ve been around here for any amount of time, you know how big I am on collecting inspiration — building your Swipe File.
So on Thursday’s I want to share a specific post or strategy that I’ve noticed on the social timelines, for you to be able to add directly to your toolkit. Make sense?
Now…
Elon Musk has made it clear that he’s trying to lean more into video on Twitter — almost like they’re going to try and compete with YouTube.
We can argue about the viability of this all day long. It doesn’t change the fact that Twitter is rolling out knew features to give more options to video creators.
One of these features is an increase in maximum video length for Twitter Blue subscribers. The limit jumped from 10 minutes all the way to 2 hours.
In turn, we’ve seen podcasters start to upload full episodes to Twitter (I almost accidentally typed ‘YouTube’ while writing this LOL).
Here’s an example post for you to add to your Swipe File from my friend and top-tier podcast, Danny Miranda:
Danny uploaded his full episode with Alex Hormozi — fantastic episode btw — straight to Twitter.
A few takeaways for marketers here.
TAKEAWAY #1 – Native content wins on social. Stop fighting it.
Long gone are the days of copy-pasting links to your timeline and hoping your community cares (they don’t).
Instead, give the value away on platform. Post the full episode. Share the full YouTube video. If the content is great, people will watch.
Remember, loyal viewers will go seek out your YouTube content anyway. Your goal on social is to get new viewers into your content funnel.
Why would you make that initial interaction harder by adding the step of jumping between platforms?
Instead, post the full piece to the timeline.
This is such a low-risk move that is now open to companies who posting anything on YouTube.
(Btw, you can still include the link in the second tweet like Danny did here)
And of course, you can (and should) still post short form clips, tweets, etc. to distribute the content alongside the initial full-length post. It all works together in the Distribution Flywheel.
TAKEAWAY #2 – Make consumption frictionless
In a way, this point is derivative of the first one.
Danny starts his tweet by sharing his biggest takeaway in the copy (immediate payoff for the reader), and then lists out all of the timestamps — both elements make it clear what value the Twitter user is going to get by stopping their scroll to watch.
MrBeast uses a similar approach in his YouTube content. He delivers on the promise in the thumbnail within seconds of the video starting — hooking the viewer in.
Now, let’s examine the timestamps. Their obvious benefit is making the video easier to navigate. But, there’s also a secondary benefit:
The section titles drive even more curiosity. For example — assume you notice the section “Learning How to Learn.”
Hmm. What does that mean? That sounds interesting… now I need to click to that section to watch… and now I’m into the content funnel.
Wait. There’s more.
TAKEAWAY #3 – Length leads to Bookmarks.
The sheer length of the post (both the copywriting and the video itself) make it likely for an interested Twitter user to bookmark the tweet.
This tweet was bookmarked 282 times.
We see a similar phenomenon with content formats like Instagram carousels — relevant, information heavy content often gets saved. If you want to generate more ‘savable’ content, you’ll want to lean into this.
For these 3 reasons, this post is going in my Swipe File. I plan on testing this format for myself and clients when distributing a long form video on Twitter.
By the way, if you want to grab my exact Swipe File template I use to keep track of inspiration and never run out of content ideas, check it out here.
IN THE ARCHIVES
Inside Look at McDonald’s Ultra-Viral ‘Grimace’ Campaign
If you were on TikTok, IG Reels… really, any social platform in the past 2 weeks — you’ve seen a variation of the ‘Grimace’ trend.
I honestly don’t even know how to explain it. So here’s an article.
TLDR, according to the piece the trend was “people pretending to pass out in a purple puddle after consuming the berry-flavored beverage.” This is the understatement of a century, LOL.
Anyways, the campaign was a massive success, and Guillaume Huin (Marketing Director – Brand and Content @ McDonalds) wrote a piece detailing the thought process behind the campaign.
He also walks us through how the McD’s team thought about responding to the insane TikToks.
By the numbers, according to Guillaume:
- “Billions in reach, millions in engagements, millions of mentions
- Top trend at least 8 different days on twitter
- Top 3 hashtags on tiktok and trend on snapchat for multiple days”
My favorite quote from his recap (when discussing how the PR team thought about engaging with the trend):
“We then discussed what was the right thing to do about the trend : saying nothing felt disconnected, encouraging it felt self-serving, so we just decided to show our fans that we see them and their creativity in a sweet, candid and genuine way, as grimace would.
The same way you would respectfully and gently nod at someone, without repeating what they said to show you agree with them and stealing their thunder.”
Check out his full breakdown here. It will make you a better marketer.