Slate

A winning social video strategy isn’t about trying to go viral every day. It’s about building a deeply engaged audience over time. If I were a brand CMO, these are the metrics I’d have my team focus on to try to build true engagement: - Average watch time - Percent of full video watched - Retention rate Big numbers still matter, and my north star metric would be video views. But I’d take a consistently engaged audience long term over a few random viral posts any day. One metric I wouldn’t focus on? Follower count.

Don’t feel pressured to follow every trend on social. Just because some other brand is crushing it with memes or off-the-wall content doesn’t mean your content has to be that. What works for them may not work for you. Your brand's strength should come from what makes you unique. Lean into your voice and listen to your audience. It’s not about being louder, or weirder. It’s about being authentic.

Don’t feel pressured to follow every trend on social. Just because some other brand is crushing it with memes or off-the-wall content doesn’t mean your content has to be that. What works for them may not work for you. Your brand's strength should come from what makes you unique. Lean into your voice and listen to your audience. It’s not about being louder, or weirder. It’s about being authentic.

This is a great opportunity for anyone one sports social!!

Michael Horton shares some insights on the journey and growth of Slate, and how it's become a vital tool for content creation for some of the biggest brands in the world 🚀 📲. Tune in 📽️ ⬇️!

Video views matter more than followers on social media. But creating engaging content that also aligns with your brand is a challenge. Five ways I’d approach video on social today as a brand marketer: - Lean into mobile & real-time: The best social content teams are nimble and reactive. Using mobile-first formats and capitalizing on real-time moments that align with your brand as often as possible can be a game changer. - Commit to brand integrity: Let's face it, it's hard to be original. Many brands will use the same video formats, jump on the same trends, take part in the same memes... In a sea of sameness, your brand becomes your differentiator. Still experiment with different formats. But I'd always aim to bring your brand’s unique look, voice, and emotion to every piece of content. - Monetize through engagement: Great content drives engagement, and engagement opens doors to monetization. The focus should always be on creating content that people want to interact with, then layer in sponsorships, shoppable links, and more. - Humans make great content, not AI: AI tools can speed up the process, but they shouldn’t replace the human touch. The best tools empower the creators that live and breathe your brand to do their best work, not replace them. - Empower more employees to be creators: Remove the video bottleneck. Equip more people across your teams to create/submit vertical content. The right tools make it easy for anyone—no matter their skillset—to contribute video for your brand. That’s what we’re building at Slate! What'd I miss?👇

These days, with so much content to scroll through (this post included 🤣), one area we at the Portland Timbers felt we needed to maximize was how we appeared on our audience’s screens. From Instagram stories, to reel covers, to captioning, we have been so intentional on every piece of content that comes out of the club, hoping to catch the eyes of our audience in a way that elevates our brand. To our surprise last week, the team was featured in Slate’s Things We Love newsletter with some of our work from this season 👀 Massive shoutout to Zachary Harris, Eric Riley, Craig Mitchelldyer and the rest of the creative team and also Janice Rubbert and everyone at Slate for providing us the tools we needed to see this vision through! Just getting started 📈

The NFL is winning on Instagram this season. Anyone running social—in sports or otherwise—can learn from what they’re doing. They’re really leaning into carousels for video. They’re prioritizing bold, on-brand fonts and colors to create engaging hooks over lo-fi video screenshots. This combination is driving high engagement and video views. It just makes you swipe! It’s impressive how they maintain their brand’s unique visual identity without overproducing content. They don’t shy away from creating content that looks uniquely NFL in favor of native elements. On Reels, they’re using split-screen layouts to mix interviews with relevant highlights, turning normally dull content (like postgame interviews) into something much more engaging for social. Plus, it’s an easier format to create quickly than having to edit in b-roll throughout a timeline. A win-win! The league handle is always an account to watch if you’re in the social space.

Penalizing social media teams for using third-party apps to create content is wild. Is TikTok really throttling your content if you don’t edit video or add fonts natively? I don’t think it’s true. Everyone I speak with at TikTok says this isn’t happening. They want creators to be creative, even if they use a third-party tool that isn't CapCut. It’s more about avoiding overly produced content, which can happen when editing outside the app. TikTok’s algorithm even reads burned-in fonts/captions for searchability. But it’s hard to shake this belief when you can’t A/B test the exact same video made elsewhere vs. natively on TikTok. What’s your experience? Do you think platforms like TikTok really throttle performance if a video isn’t edited in-app?

Social media teams don’t trust AI tools to make real content decisions. I’ve spoken to 25+ social teams in the past month as we build our next product to help video teams create short-form content. Here’s some of what I’ve learned: 1. Social teams want tools to handle the tedious parts so they can stay creative. They need help with the time-consuming tasks, not automation of the creative process itself. 2. AI “virality scores” are seen as a joke. No one trusts AI to predict what will go viral—it just doesn’t work. 3. The video burden is real. Scrubbing through long-form content to find social-worthy clips takes too long. Great content is getting missed because teams don’t have the time to sift through every podcast, webinar, feature, etc. 4. Everyone’s a creator now. Social teams are expected to churn out content faster than ever, with every team member contributing to the process with some video editing and design. 5. Most products miss the mark. There's a million quick editing apps that all seem the same: Built for solo creators, not for social teams managing brands, multiple platforms, and complex workflows. Useful for certain tasks, but missing the mark as the one tool they can rely on. Takeaway: Social teams need AI tools that speed up the creation process without sacrificing the creative one. AI can/will make things faster, but it should not aim to replace the human touch that makes social content great.