Viral AI Video Technique + TikTok's Big Creator Changes

Welcome back to The Signal, a weekly letter where I share stories, trends, strategies and insights to help you level up as a creator and win on the internet.

Today’s topics:

• Viral AI Video Technique

• Instagram’s New High-Signal Insight

• TikTok’s New Creator Changes

Viral AI Video Technique + Tutorial

I posted a video that is going viral on Instagram featuring some unique visuals - with a huge assist from AI.

It’s a great format to use to quickly grab someone’s attention, and a good visual technique to help tell a story.

Here’s how it was done:

1. Generate an image with your favorite image generator. This was the prompt that I used.

2. Upscale the image. My favorite AI image upscaler is Magnific. You can see in the video tutorial below how effective it is.

3. Manipulate the image in Photoshop and create different image layers. This is where it can get tedious, depending on how creative and crazy you want to get.

4. Sequence in your favorite video editor, add sound fx, overlays, color grading, etc.

In the video below, I show you how to do it.

Instagram’s New Insight

Instagram has added a really helpful new metric to your post insights – followers.

Now you can see how many followers a particular reel or post brought in.

I think that the follower per view % is one of the highest signal metrics to optimize for.

Think about it, how many pieces of content do you consume on a weekly or monthly basis? For most of us, that number is probably embarrassingly high.

This insight allows you to understand if the views that you are getting are impactful, or empty.

After analyzing my content – I can tell you two things for sure.

1. People love to be educated and discover new things

and

2. Storytelling is king. Learn it. Master it. Lean into it.

TikTok’s New Changes for Creators

TikTok is leaning heavily into search, and rewarding creators to help it do so.

The platform has unveiled a new creator monetization program called Creator Rewards that uses four core metrics to determine payout: originality, play duration, audience engagement and search value.

The days of the TikTok spammers/clippers might soon be over since TikTok will only financially reward original content. That is a welcome change.

Otherwise, if you’re creating for TikTok, the ability to meet the needs of what people on the platform are searching for will heavily increase your creator payouts.

They’ve also launched a new search tool that helps you understand what people are searching for, including your specific audience.

You can also sort by content gap, which essentially shows you demand that hasn’t been satisfied by supply. Very interesting.

To access these insights, search for “creator search insights” on TikTok.

Quick Hits

This section includes things I have found interesting and helpful this week.

‣ Zuck just announced that Threads is testing swipe gestures to help train the For You algorithm. It’s like Tinder for content.

‣ Katie describes how Instagram got its mojo back, beating out TikTok in growth and downloads in 2023.

‣ Shaan shares how to get laser-focused in 2024. Fantastic video.

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Cheers,
Roberto