It’s something we all struggle with as marketers — adapting our strategy, our creative, and our organic content to whatever new trend shows up.
Many of us are caught in that right now, as all the major social apps move to a vertical video format. TikTok led the charge, then came Instagram and Facebook Reels, YouTube Shorts, Pinterest Idea Pins, Snapchat Spotlight, and more.
That job, for us, is more than cropping your existing videos and slapping them online. It’s more of a mind shift.
It’s a mind shift that Jon Loomer recently went through. Jon has been a Facebook ads trainer for more than a decade. He runs the Power Hitters Club community for people who buy ads on Meta’s platform.
Recently Jon has embraced the new format — I spoke with him last week, we chatted about his current workflow which tries to balance simplicity with platform realities, like those which might punish you for not uploading directly to them.
JON: The only platform I'm convinced there's the true penalty on is YouTube. Because I was using a third party app to schedule everything to YouTube Shorts, and I was just getting hurt. I still don't get great numbers. But everything was like 30 or 40 views on it.
And then the minute I changed to publishing it or scheduling it [directly on] YouTube, I was getting stuff pretty consistently in the hundreds.
But the others, I don't know that there's that it matters that much.
It ends up being so disjointed anyway that I can't do everything in one place, that I often just go to the the actual platform itself to schedule.
But of course, that's complicated, too.
- LinkedIn I don't have any scheduling ability through, like some people do. I use Agorapulse to schedule to that.
- With Facebook and Instagram, I use Business Suite on desktop.
- With TikTok desktop you can schedule mobile
- But for Pinterest, you can't schedule from desktop, but you can schedule from mobile.
TOD: Can I give you a workflow that I use that's been phenomenal?
JON: (laughing) This doesn't sound efficient?!
TOD: No it does not. (laughs) I got this tip from Jill Saskin Gales who is an amazing Google Ads trainer. Here's what she does, and I do it now and it has saved me a ton of time.
I record on TikTok in the TikTok app, I record to camera, front facing camera. I record it as if I'm just making it TikTok.
Then I use repurpose.io, which is a paid service that watches whatever platform you want (in this case it watches my TikTok account) and whenever it sees a new video on my TikTok account — unless I put in a specific “do not use this” hashtag — every video I upload to TikTok it will then download without the watermark and automatically upload to Facebook Reels, Instagram Reels, Pinterest, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn page, LinkedIn profile, Facebook group, Facebook page… it hits like seven or eight different places all at once and it's like, I don't know, 10 bucks? 20 bucks a month? It really is phenomenal.
Our full conversation covered much more about the shift to vertical, we also chatted about why Meta's Audience Network might be a gem in the rough, and the future of marketing in a ChatGPT world.
That conversation is available on our Premium Podcast Feed — you can sign up at TodayInDigital.com/premium or by tapping the link in the show notes.
