In today's fast-paced digital world, the importance of snappy, eye-catching content has never been higher. There is intense competition for both people's time and attention, which content creators must understand. Creators’ must determine how to direct their content to their intended audiences. Smartphones have now overtaken television as people's primary source of “screen time”, with social media doing the same to traditional broadcast media.
Content and marketing expert Xavier English explains that short-form content, such as videos of around 20 to 30 seconds long is paramount to contemporary landscapes. However, simply producing content is not enough. Social media platforms operate using closely-guarded algorithms, and creators' content must “earn” its place on these algorithms to reach their target audience.
English has always been interested in producing content. As a teenager, he worked on the 2017 federal election campaign of one of New Zealand's two major political parties. He worked alongside one of New Zealand’s leading advertising and marketing agencies. Later, he worked as a senior partner for a New York-based, Gen Z-focused marketing brand, and he has helped several Fortune 500 companies leverage content.
“Everyone wants to influence people. Companies want people to buy their products, politicians want people to believe in their idea of governance, and podcasters want people to subscribe and consume their content,” English states. “The way to influence people is to get in front of them when and where they're paying attention. You need to go where their eyeballs are and today their eyeballs are on short-form content.”
According to English, organizations previously relied on well-produced and expensive print and television ads to get their messages across. While this form of content has not completely died out, more people today, especially the younger generations, are more prone to consuming short-form content on social media. These videos are usually shorter and less-polished, giving them a feel of “authenticity”, which audiences can relate to.
“With short videos, you can create more of them, but social media platforms are algorithmically-serviced. This means that if your video is interesting to people – if they're clicking, watching, and engaging with it – it gets shown to more people. But if people are ignoring it, the algorithm will classify it as uninteresting and will show it to people less often.”
To help their short-form content scale and optimize the algorithms, English says creators must post consistently and by volume.
“You will hear a lot of the best creators talking about the importance of consistency. They'll say things like creators have to post two times a day, no matter what. Even if your posts aren't getting any views, just keep posting, because that's how the algorithm works. It rewards consistency, and something will eventually stick.”
An efficient way to do this is clipping long-form content pieces, such as a 1-hour video podcast, into multiple short-form videos. This was previously done “manually”, with an editor reviewing the long content and deciding where to edit, costing a significant amount of time and money.
To help content creators more efficiently create short-form content, English co-founded Supermix.io, an all-in-one content creation agency that works with several top podcaters and brands. Aside from creating new content from scratch, Supermix uses AI to repurpose existing content to create shorter form videos. Their AI tool scans complete podcasts, selects snippets of content and creates 20-second highlight videos. According to English, an average of 10 highlight videos can be created from a single hour-long podcast, which makes the job easier for creators and editors.
“Through AI, we now have a system for efficiently producing lots of content. Each of those highlight videos can gain hundreds of thousands of views, sometimes even millions. This is much easier than producing a new podcast every time.”
English believes that AI is going to revolutionize and increase content creation. While current technology has not yet perfected the process, he believes that AI will soon be able to determine the most interesting sections from a podcast or a video, based on prompts provided by the content creator. Further, AI can also do research and generate scripts for videos.
“It's not going to be long before we can use AI to actually select the most relevant moments from a podcast, and then add animation and videos on top of it. AI has such huge implications for content and marketing, and I am incredibly excited to help the next generation of content creators harness this powerful tool.”
About Xavier English
Xavier English is a content and marketing expert with extensive experience in handling campaigns across various forms of media. He has contributed to national-level political campaigns and worked with Fortune 500 companies, helping them refine their content strategies. He is a co-founder of Supermix.io, a podcast-focused content creation agency that uses AI to help creators scale their content.
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Name: Xavier English
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