Social Network Clip

[Christa Voth]

TheFacebook Collection ads showcase multiple images and a main video above it. This is perfect for displaying multiple products (or various colors of a single product) plus a video. The ad type has been popular so far with retailers and clothing companies as an instant storefront or lookbook.

Facebook Instant Experience ads open up a full-screen experience after the first click, which can be further customized with a variety of interactive features. This can include multiple video experiences, including features to auto-play on loop.

Instagram launched video capabilities in 2013 and quickly saw enough success to start advertising on the platform in 2015. Since then, video only continues to grow as an engaging social format. Needless to say, Instagram videos are absolutely worth the investment.

Since 2015, Instagram crafted its video formats to allow three different styles: landscape, square and vertical. However, like the app, Instagram and how video is presented has evolve. Gone are the days of IGTV and Instagram Video. Video can be natively included as a post or carousel post, or they can be uploaded as Reels, but more on Reels later.

Instagram Stories are short-form videos that display for 24-hours on your profile. Followers and users can access your Stories directly from your profile; followers have the luxury of accessing your Stories directly from their feed, where Stories for accounts they follow display directly at the top of their screen.

Twitter provides two formats of in-feed video content to share with your followers: landscape and portrait. These specific formats are only available for uploading video directly to Twitter, rather than sharing YouTube or other links.

Looking to promote your video through paid ads on Twitter? Luckily, you can use the same exact formats from Twitter organic videos. Stick to the same specs for both organic and paid video to ensure maximum visibility.

As the second-largest search engine behind Google, YouTube is an essential network for video content. For marketers, YouTube is a great space to promote, educate and share video content around your brand.

As YouTube continues to grow as a destination for video content, it hosts everything from short-form promotional videos to full-length movies and TV. This means users are streaming content on all sorts of devices, which could have different levels of zoom or overscan.

Introduced late 2020, YouTube Shorts have recently made its debut as another short-form video feature. These videos are a new way to watch, create and discover short-form content. Because people are watching more short-form videos globally, using Shorts is a new way to reach wider audiences to entertain or educate.

Standard YouTube videos are pretty straightforward, but there are a few video ad formats to learn if you want to advertise on the network. According to data from Google, brands advertising on YouTube with Discovery ads see incremental conversions.

Pinterest allows video upload for business accounts only, so they have specs designed for brands to get the most out of the highly visual and inspirational lifestyle content frequently shared on the platform.

In addition to ads, Pinterest Business Accounts can upload organic video content. There are two formats: standard and max width video. Below are the dimensions for standard width video ads and standard Pins.

This video format is the most common across the channel and is the main way users communicate back and forth through the app. However, your business can post videos to its story so others can see what your business is up to. Just follow these specs:

You can clip a small portion of a video or live stream and share it with others on social channels or via direct communications, like email or text. Clips are public and can be watched by anyone with access to the clip who can also watch the original video. You can find clips you made and clips made on your videos in the Your Clips library page. Video creators can manage clips made on their videos in YouTube Studio.

Clips are public and can be watched and shared by anyone with access to the Clip who can also watch the original video. Creators who own the original video have access to all Clips made on that video in their Library page and in YouTube Studio, and can watch and share Clips of that video. Clips can also be seen on select search, discovery, and analytics surfaces available to viewers and creators on YouTube.

A Spotify autoplay station, for example, most often follows the line of an artist or genre, serving relatively similar content over and over again. But TikTok recognizes that contrast is just as important as similarity to maintain our interest. It creates a shifting feed of topics and formats that actually feels personal, the way my Twitter feed, built up over more than a decade, feels like a reflection of my self.

Even if you are only watching, you are a part of TikTok. Internet culture has always been interactive; part of the joy of Lolcats was that you could make your own, using the template as a tool for self-expression and inside jokes. In recent years that kind of creative self-expression via social media has fallen by the wayside in favor of retweets, shares, and likes, centralizing authority around a few influential accounts and pushing the emphasis toward brands (which buy ads and drive revenue) and consumerism. TikTok returns triumphantly to the lowbrow, the absurd, the unimportant.

I appreciated learning more about TikTok in your evocative piece, which I received through a curating service from Atlantic writer Conor Friedersdorf. I also appreciated your concluding reflections on passivity, addiction, and potential exploitation--which, after reading your ekphrasis, I was prepared for but still disturbed by.

I had covid last week and was too tired to read but too restless to sit in bed. So I watched a lot of YouTube Shorts for the first time and it reminded me of this essay. But I think that hypnotism isn't quite the right description--it was more like I was getting the promised pleasure of thinking--the emergence of a new idea, the pleasure of connecting two ideas, the thrill of recall--except that it was augmented by an external system. In that way, I felt like I was actually outsourcing part of the act of creating my stream of consciousness!

Hi! This is a 3,400-word essay about a technology that was totally new to me as of a few weeks ago. You can click the headline to read it in your browser. It\u2019s a total experiment, so please let me know what you think.

For someone who writes about technology, I\u2019m not really an early adopter. I don\u2019t use virtual-reality goggles or participate in Twitch streams. Like everyone on the internet, I heard a lot about TikTok \u2014 teens! short videos! \u201Chype houses\u201D! \u2014 but for a long time I didn\u2019t think I needed to try it out. How would another social network fit into my life? Don\u2019t Twitter and Instagram cover my professional and personal needs at this point? (Snapchat I skipped over entirely.) What could TikTok, which serves an infinite stream of sub-60-second video clips, add, especially if I don\u2019t care about meme-dances, which seemed to be its main purpose?

Then, out of some combination of boredom and curiosity, like everything else these days, I downloaded the app. What I found is that you don\u2019t just try TikTok; you immerse yourself in it. You sink into its depths like a 19th-century diver in a diving bell. More than any other social network since MySpace it feels like a new experience, the emergence of a different kind of technology and a different mode of consuming media. In this essay I want to try to describe that experience, without any news hooks, experts, theory, or data \u2014 just a personal encounter.

The literary term \u201Cekphrasis\u201D usually refers to a detailed description of a piece of visual art in a text, translating it (in a sense) into words. Lately I\u2019ve been thinking about ekphrasis of technology and media: How do you communicate what using or viewing something is like? Some of my favorite writing might fall into this vein. Junichiro Tanizaki\u2019s 1933 essay \u201CIn Praise of Shadows\u201D narrates the Japanese encounter with Western technology like electric lights and porcelain toilets. Walter Benjamin\u2019s 1936 \u201CThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction\u201D shows how the rise of photography changed how people looked at visual art. By describing such experiences as exactly as possible, these essays become valuable artifacts in their own right, documenting historic shifts in human perception that happened as a result of tools we invented.

We can\u2019t return to the headspace of buildings without electric lights or a time when photography was scarce instead of omnipresent, but the texts allow us a glimpse. So this is my experiment: an ekphrasis of TikTok, while it\u2019s still fresh.

When you begin your TikTok journey, you are not faced with a choice of accounts to follow. Where Twitter and Instagram ask you to build your list yourself (the former more than the latter) TikTok simply launches you into the waterfall of content. You can check a few boxes as to which subjects you\u2019re interested in \u2014 food, crafts, video games, travel \u2014 or not. Then there is the main feed, labeled \u201CFor You,\u201D an evocation of customization and personal intimacy. Videos start playing, each clip looping until you make it stop. You might start seeing, as I did, minute-long clips of:

The videos are flashes of narrative, many arduously constructed and edited, each self-contained but linked to the next by the shape of the container, the iPhone screen and the app feed. It\u2019s like watching a montage of movie trailers, each crafted to addict your eye and ear, but with each new clip you have to begin constructing the story over again. Will the cat do something funny? Will the couple break up? Will this guy chug five beers? Or it\u2019s like the flickering nonsense of images and text as a film spool runs out.

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