Every year we get a new “state of social media” report from Pew Research and every year the headlines scream disruption, innovation, a new platform rising to dethrone the old guard. But if you read the latest Pew Research data carefully (and you should), a very different story emerges: Social media isn’t exploding. It’s settling.

• YouTube sits at 84%
• Facebook at 71%
• Instagram stuck at 50%
• TikTok hovering around 37%

These numbers barely move year to year. In fact, Facebook has essentially been flat since 2016. YouTube gained a whole two percentage points since 2023; barely statistical noise.We’re not witnessing a revolution.

We’re watching a plateau.

And when you zoom into age groups, the picture becomes even clearer. Among 18–29 year olds, the group that supposedly defines the future of culture, almost everyone uses everything. Around 95% use YouTube. 80% use Instagram. 68% use Facebook. 63% use TikTok. 58% use Snapchat.

This is not a battlefield with a single winner.

It’s a crowded food court. People wander between stalls, nibble from each plate, and commit to none.

Meanwhile BeReal, remember that hype cycle? Sits at 3% adoption. Proof that novelty without a real use case burns out faster than the venture money funding it.

All Platforms, Same Features

Pew’s dataset confirms something we’ve all felt intuitively: every platform now looks like a remix of every other platform.

Feeds. Stories. Short-form video. Messaging. Shopping.
Algorithms pushing content you didn’t ask for, trying to keep you inside their world just a little longer.

The result? Commodification.

When the feature sets converge, the differences between platforms stop being strategic and start being aesthetic.

YouTube keeps winning because it solves an actual problem: hosting, archiving, and discovering long-form video (and Imaginario AI can help you transform those YouTubes for other platforms). That’s hard to replicate.

TikTok’s insane rise: Mostly novelty and a powerful recommendation loop both of which competitors have now cloned.

Facebook? The data is brutally consistent: it hasn’t grown in almost a decade, despite owning half the social internet. More apps don’t mean more engagement. They mean more fragmentation.

Even among older adults, supposedly the “offline” generation, YouTube still has around 64% adoption. That’s higher than TikTok gets with any age group. A quiet reminder that usefulness > trendiness.

What This Means for Anyone Trying to Reach an Audience

We’ve been conditioned to chase the “next platform,” the “next format,” the “next wave.” And for a long time, that made sense, the land grab was real.

But now?
The land is fully owned. The borders have been drawn.

Audience behaviour has crystallized around four core modes:

YouTube → sit back, learn, watch something meaningful.
Facebook → talk to your existing community, stay in touch.
Instagram → aesthetic discovery, curated-self world-building.
TikTok → quick dopamine hits, novelty, entertainment in fast motion.

Marketers (and founders, creators, journalists, anyone who publishes anything) don’t win by being everywhere. They win by understanding why people are where they are, by creating distinctive niche content, and tailoring the message accordingly.

YouTube users want to learn or be entertained.
Facebook users want to talk to someone they know.
Instagram users want things that look good.
TikTok users want to feel something immediately.

Once you internalize this, something shifts: you stop chasing platforms and start designing stories.

Because here’s the real truth in all this data: The platforms are no longer the differentiators. You are.

What you say, how you say it, how well it resonates, that’s the new advantage.
Platform choice is basic hygiene.
Message-market fit is the edge.

About Imaginario.ai
Backed by Techstars, Comcast, and NVIDIA Inception, Imaginario AI helps media companies turn massive volumes of footage into searchable, discoverable, and editable content. Its Cetus AI engine combines speech, vision, and multimodal semantic understanding to deliver indexing, simplified smart search, automated highlight generation, and intelligent editing tools.

Always remember that variety in content creation does not just help you connect better with your audience — it is necessary. People have different learning styles and this will impact how your content impacts them as well. By converting your original content across different types of media, you can reach a broader audience effectively.

For example:

• Visual learners respond well to images and diagrams. If you want to tell someone how to manage a project, show them a Gantt chart instead.
• If your learners are auditory, they would prefer discussions and podcasts. A live webinar would probably hit home where a written manual might leave them cold.
• If your learners are reading or writing-oriented, they would prefer text-heavy formats, so blog posts, newsletters and articles would be your go-tos.
• Kinesthetic learners would prefer to be allowed to do something practical related to the content, maybe in the form of interactive workshops or simulations.

The flexibility of content repurposing is that it can actually apply to these different needs. For example, a long-form webinar can be turned into snippets for TikTok (Imaginario AI’s 1-click Magic Clips is great for this) and a blog post for the visual learner or made into an actionable guide for the kinesthetic learner.

The most important thing is not to get to every individual with one piece of content but to diversify the formats so the message stays accessible to anybody one way or another. Creating content for all types of learners doesn’t have to be an overwhelming task. With a strategic content repurposing plan and powerful AI tools, you’ll be able to reach and re-use content for every type of learner, thus exponentially expanding your reach and influence.

Always remember that the essence of good communication is the message and how you package it. Serve a wider and more varied audience by the content of their preferences in learning and the content will penetrate, resonate, and be of relation to them.

Visualize it this way: an infographic broken down point to point can inform a visual learner in a way a heavy-text document never could. Similarly, turning your blog post into a podcast can appeal to auditory learners who are usually more responsive to information from listening.

Learning Styles

Let’s dive into the seven learning styles that are crucial to content strategy:

1. Visual: People who perceive and understand best visually. Use videos, charts, images and slides in your presentation to most appeal to them.
2. Auditory: They prefer listening. Replace training manuals with podcasts or engaging videos full of discussions.
3. Verbal: Discussions and debates are their jam. Think interactive Twitter Spaces or Clubhouse sessions instead of static LinkedIn posts.
4. Physical: Hands-on experiences are key. For example, interactive e-learning modules with simulations could be more useful than webinars.
5. Logical: They love patterns and reasoning. Replace vague explanations with systematic, data-driven blog posts and information supported by graphs and statistics.
6. Social: They prefer to learn in groups. It would socially be all right for them to go through public webinars, Discord or Reedit communities rather than one-on-one coaching sessions.
7. Solitary: Independent learners thrive on self-paced online courses over crowded workshops.

To address all these various needs, content repurposing is your secret weapon. This is not about just dropping the same content over every channel; it’s about customizing the message to fit different learning preferences and media formats.

For example, a leadership workshop might be transformed into an impressive eBook for independent learners or a set of Instagram 1×1 infographics for those who tend to process information more from visual representations.

Equivalently, a detailed analytics report can be turned into a podcast episode with a relevant guest, dissecting all the trends for auditory learners. After that, always make sure to suit your style to the kind of learning your content serves, and repurpose it towards another style (e.g. ask ChatGPT to make it more casual for Instagram and more professional and concise for LinkedIn). This will make your message accessible and easy to understand for the audience, sparing his efforts and making the learning experience better.

This content strategy is a true game-changer. Remember: the easier you make it for your audience to learn from your content, the more value they get from it, and the more they will engage, share, and convert. Repurpose with purpose and watch your influence grow.

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Article credits

Posted by

Jose Puga

Originally published on

March 17, 2024

Filed under

Social Video

With image generation from

OpenAI

And TikTok creation from

Imaginario AI

When they say content is king, it probably makes video and audio the crown and sceptre. If you have been keeping a close eye on content marketing trends, then you might have noticed that video marketing has become an indispensable part of any successful marketing strategy over the last decade.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that 68% of your customers have adjusted the amount of video they watch since 2020, with 96% saying they now watch more videos. It might even have to do with customers spending 88% more time on your website if it has videos. If the UK indicates global trends, audio is also hot content. In 2021, 75% of all UK residents had used online audio every month.

Regardless of the reason creative marketers and business owners are doubling down on video and audio because it works. Even though video and audio are often more expensive to produce than other content types, most marketers acknowledge that it gives a great ROI.

That said, I’m sure we have all had a time where we wished we could have done more with those hours of content that we painstakingly recorded, only to reduce it into a couple of minutes of the juicy bits; what a waste. The good news is we actually can do more with all that content if we repurpose it.

In its most straightforward form, repurposing content is making use of all or elements of content to extend the content’s usefulness. Depending on how you decide to implement it, repurposing content can work out in several ways.

You might choose to: use the same piece of content on a different platform, use an already existing piece of content as the basis for another, breathe new life into a piece of content by using different sequences or any other combination of those.

If you haven’t already started repurposing your video content, maybe it’s time you give it a go. Still not sure? Well, here are five reasons why you should be repurposing content.

Repurposing video saves you money

Not to start with the obvious, but when you repurpose content, you stretch out the lifespan of the content you already have, and by doing so, reduce the need to create new videos. You know as well as I do, marketing budgets are often spread thin, and we all can use all the cost savings we can find, especially if you have a small company.

Producing original videos can be very expensive. Make sure you do it once and then re-use the best moments to make the most of it, and save money and time in the process.

It also saves you time!

For any business owner, your time is the only asset more valuable than your marketing budget. Guess what? Repurposing video content saves you both!

When you make use of the best long-form content you already have, it means you don’t have to spend hours upon hours coming up with new ideas and then creating more original content. With everything else going on, who has the time to consistently come up with great content ideas, execute them, pay for freelancers or agencies, do everything else on the to-do list, and still be home in time for dinner?

If you quickly repurpose long videos and podcasts you can save between 1-2 days of your week that could go into ideating, planning, publishing and analysing the performance of new content. Also new content does not guarantee success, proven content does.

You can reach a wider audience

Each medium and social media platform you use to engage your customers requires a unique content style and taps into a different audience. You can’t publish the exact same videos on YouTube and TikTok and expect the same results.

Ideally, you want to create content for each audience you want to engage, but that might not be possible in most cases. The next best thing would be simply taking the content we already have and tweaking it to meet the unique audience and platform’s content requirements. That way, you can reach more audiences and tap into more markets with fewer resources and much less time.

Generate more value from premium content

Some content ideas perform better than others, and it’s often quite hard to get an idea that yields the level of engagement and performance you want. If you have been creating content for a while, then you probably already know that content creation is part science, part guesswork, and when you stumble on a great idea, you need to milk it for everything it has.

Repurposing content allows you to do exactly that. When you do this, you give the same brilliant idea nine lives, allowing you to drive your marketing goals with much less effort.

Repurposing content embeds messages

When we repeat a message, it makes it easier for our customers to remember our brand, product, or service and begin to like what we are selling to them. Psychologists call this the mere exposure effect.

The flip side of the mere exposure effect, as psychologists John Cacioppo and Richard Petty found out, is that if you repeat the same message over and over again, it eventually leads to scrutiny of the message and a general sense of skepticism.

So to get the best out of the mere exposure effect, you would have to communicate the same idea using a wide range of formats, sequences and moments. You also want to avoid feeding your audience the same video repeatedly. Repurposing lets you develop a wide range of content from the same original source material to drive the same message without boring your audiences.

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Article credits

Posted by

Jose Puga

Originally published on

March 6, 2024

Filed under

Social Video

With image generation from

OpenAI

And TikTok creation from

Imaginario AI

Those words across the bottom of the screen when you’re watching a TikTok – what do you call them? For some people they’re subtitles, for others they’re captions. You might also know them as Closed Captions – that’s what the little CC button means on some video players. But why are they closed? Why is this all so confusing?

Lets start with the cold, hard definitions and usage.

Subtitles

Usually seen in cinema and TV, subtitles are translations of dialogue, primarily intended for viewers who don’t speak the production language of the movie or show.

Ever watched a Chinese kung-fu movie, or a moody nordic crime thriller? You were reading subtitles. Subtitling is the classier sibling of dubbing, which replaces original dialogue with the voice of actors speaking lines in a different language.

The connoisseurs among us will prefer subtitles, as it preserves the screen actors’ original performance while still letting us understand what’s going on.

So if you’ve ever been watching a Netflix show with subtitles on and seen phrases like [suspenseful music continues], you’re actually using captions!

Captions will also usually denote who is speaking, and describe extra auditory details that aren’t visually apparent, like thunder rolling in the background or cars approaching. Try watching your favorite show with the audio muted and captions on, and you’ll quickly get a feel for how useful they are.

One of TikTok’s most famous features is auto captions, launched in 2021, which uses voice recognition to convert dialogue to text and add it to your videos. But if you’ve ever watched a TikTok with captions, you’ll know it’s only dialogue being added. So, actually, they’re subtitles. And, by the way, they’re non-removable, so TikTok captions are actually open subtitles.

It’s a similar story on Instagram, where the captions sticker also provides open subtitles – it doesn’t describe any other audio details.

YouTube, meanwhile, is a complete mess. Voice recognition is used to generate subtitles which is called “automatic captioning”, but is controlled in a YouTube Studio section called “subtitles”, and can be toggled on and off using the player button labelled “Subtitles / Closed Captions”. Hey, at least they got the closed part right!

With AI person, object and action recognition for video improving leaps and bounds in the last few years, its possible we may soon get to a point where actual captions can be generated for digital video, but for now the feature most social networks refer to as “captions” is actually subtitles.

Of course, for the majority of people subtitles and captions are used interchangeably, especially in the context of TikTok and Instagram Reels. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, in fact there’s a school of thought that the increasing prevalence of social subs has contributed to an increase in adoption of captions and subtitles in long-form content). But, we should always keep in mind that captions were originally introduced to help the deaf or hard of hearing enjoy TV and movies, and have a specific meaning for those groups of people.

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Article credits

Posted by

Jon Norris

Jon has been working in video, journalism, marketing and social media for over 15 years.

Originally published on

February 13, 2024

Filed under

Social Video

With image generation from

OpenAI

And TikTok creation from

Imaginario AI