YouTube tests a new custom feed just like Instagram and TikTok, Shorts AI Creation Tools get updates, and I experiment with speeding up Lauren to see if that helps. Also the Head of Instagram stops by to explain that reposting your own content to Feed really won't do much, and the team at TikTok shares some stats around using Creators to make content for brands. After the music, I do Wednesday Waffle talking about a book I read recently.

Links:

YouTube: Testing "Your Custom Feed" (Google Support: YouTube)

YouTube: New Communities Features, Expansion of Shorts AI Creation Tools, and Handles Update! (YouTube)

Instagram: Does Reposting Your Content To Feed Help? (Instagram)

TikTok: The Creator Advantage: How creators drive real brand impact on TikTok (TikTok)

TikTok: TikTok One - Creative Academy Videos (TikTok)

Wednesday Waffle:

Book: Wrong Place, Wrong Time - Gillian McAllister (Amazon)

Transcript:

Daniel Hill: Welcome to the Instagram stories for Wednesday, November 26th. I'm your host, Daniel Hill. There is a lot of social media news to talk about today. The YouTube team has expanded their shorts AI creation tools. The head of Instagram explains whether or not it's worth it to repost your own posts and if that'll help you get more engagement. The team at TikTok shares some data explaining why it's so important to work with creators if you're a business and how that can drive brand impact. for your business. We'll get into that along with some video guides that the TikTok team has made to help you make better content. And after all the social media news, I will do a Wednesday waffle where I talk about a topic that may or may not be related to social media. All of that and more on today's episode. But first, here's a quick word from our sponsors. Welcome back. Let's start with the YouTube news. Before we dive in, a little bit of context. I've been talking on the show recently about how Instagram is going to allow you to customize what you see in your for you feed based on what you are personally interested in and you can pick which topics you're interested in, which ones you're not. Tik Tok has had that for a long time. There are sliders that you can move to indicate which kinds of content you want to see more or less of. And they recently added the ability to adjust what level of AI content you see in your feed. Now, YouTube is copying that and they shared yesterday that they are testing something called your custom feed. They say, quote, "We're experimenting presenting with a new feature called your custom feed that lets you customize recommendations for your home feed. If you are part of the experiment, you will see your custom feed appear on your homepage as a chip beside home. When you click into it, you can update your existing home feed recommendations by entering a single prompt. This feature is designed to give you an easy to use way to have more control over your suggested content. If you see it, check it out and share your feedback". I will link to this post in the show notes so that you can see it for yourself. All right, moving on. Since we're already talking about YouTube news, let's move to Lauren from the YouTube Creator Insider team with her updates talking about how the Shorts AI creation tools are being expanded and an update to the way YouTube handles channel names versus handles. Here's the clip from Lauren. Uh, one quick thing before I play the clip. I was reading the feedback that I got about the show and some of you mentioned that Lauren's updates can drag on a little bit and I agree. So, I'm going to experiment with speeding up Lauren just a little bit. Hopefully, it's enough that it goes faster and you don't feel like Lauren's dragging, but you can still catch what she's saying.

Lauren: What's up, insiders? I'm Lauren, a program manager working on our product team here at YouTube and the producer of Creator Insider. Up until now, channel names were used as the identifier for channels across live chat and channel memberships on main and YouTube studio. Now, a creator's handle will be shown across these services as their identifier. For moderators of live chat, you can still navigate to a user's channel by tapping on their handle. Let us know if you have any questions. In June, we talked about new AI powered shorts creation tools. If you missed the update, we'll leave more information in the description. We're happy to share that we're expanding standalone clips, green screen backgrounds, AI playground, and phototovideo to new markets around the world for creators with their YouTube language settings set to English. We're also leveling up the photo to video experience with new prompt capabilities. Now you can create a prompt from scratch, watch your memories come to life, and even add speech to give your video a voice. We're also introducing new Genai effects that transform your sketches into captivating videos powered by VO. These effects are now available globally. Additionally, speech to song and the ability to add lyrics and vocals in Dream Track are now available to creators in the US. These features will be rolling out this month and we'll keep you posted as we add new features. We're also bringing the power of Google DeepMind's V3 model to shorts, available for everyone on mobile. This upgrade from V2 lets you create videos up to 8 seconds long, previously six, now with synchronized sound effects, ambient audio, and speech. We'll leave more info below. Next, updates for communities. If you're still on the fence about enabling communities, an internal experiment in early September 2025 found that channels with YouTube communities enabled saw on average an increase in post impressions and likes on their channel.

Daniel Hill: Okay, I'm going to stop it there because the rest of the update is about communities and I don't think it's very interesting. But if you do want to check out the whole post, I will link to it in the show notes so you can watch it for yourself. Hopefully the increased speed with which Lauren explained those things still let you understand what was going on and hopefully kept her a little bit more brief than usual. Okay, now let's move on to the Instagram section, the head of Instagram answered the question about whether or not reposting your content in your own feed does anything. So, you have the opportunity to share content that you've made from your feed to your story, for instance, but now you can also repost it to your feed. If you posted a piece of content and it didn't really do that well, it might be tempting to repost it to your feed so that your followers have another chance to see it. The head of Instagram explains it's not really worth it to do that. Here's the clip.

Adam Mosseri: Since we launched reposts a couple months ago. I get the question a lot. Should I repost my own content? And you can. It might help a little bit on the margins, but it's not going to meaningfully change the amount of reach that you get. If you want to try and help your post go a little bit farther, I'd recommend instead going into the comments, responding to some people, liking some comments, and interacting with the people who've taken the time to actually like or comment on your post. This will help more than just reposting something that you've already posted. But I understand why people try. And this not going to hurt you to do so, but it's not going to actually help. So, I wanted to answer that question definitively once and for all. Hopefully, this helps later.

Daniel Hill: So, there you have it. Not really worth a lot of time and energy. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, some information from the Tik Tok team about how creators can help to drive impact for brands and additionally some videos from the Tik Tok team helping you to make better content. Stick around. Welcome back. Let's continue with the Tik Tok news. The team at Tik Tok made a long blog post sharing some data about how much creators making content and having brands push that content can impact the business that the brand does as opposed to the brand just making content on their own or hiring a marketing company. The importance of this cannot be understated because the content comes across as more authentic. They share some stats explaining that creator ads meaning an ad that is based on a piece of content that a creator made that creator ad can drive a 70% higher click-through rate and 159% higher engagement rate than noncreator ads. Okay, so why such a big difference? Three main reasons. First, when creators are making content, they're doing it through the lens of Tik Tok culture. They're familiar with the platform, not from the perspective of trying to sell a product or service, but rather just being familiar with the community. Additionally, creators can make a lot of good content very quickly. We are all used to sitting down to come up with an idea of something that we think could potentially work, coming up with what we need in order to make that piece of content, whether it's a script, finding a location, then filming it, editing it, and publishing it, and doing that for ourselves. So, when brands are working with creators, they're tapping into this system that we are all doing all the time. Anyway, another key thing to remember is that when brands partner with creators, th