The Clipping Strategy Every Brand Will Copy

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So we've kind of talked about this, but I want to go into how it's applying to tech companies. Okay. All right. So lovable, uh, is they have a, like a clipping channel that's clipping their CEO ramp got 85 million views with the offices.

Um, i think it's the kevin from the office the um the bald guy do you remember what i'm talking about do you want to office i didn't watch the show you would love it um you would love it and then and so rap got 85 million views and used five dedicated cameras okay replet has a clipping channel clipping their ceo uh cmo and getting hundreds of thousands of views okay whisper flow so basically a lot of tech companies are starting to do this now um And we're starting to see this a lot more. So here's what I'm going to say.

So when he talks about clipping, by the way, I see the clipping as more horizontal videos or more vertical videos. You know, the ones that come straight down. Yeah. I think the clipping that works for people like you and me is more so the horizontal ones, the ones that go to the side.

Because I've actually looked at my X analytics, the ones that are straight, like vertical, they don't perform nearly as well as the horizontal ones. Same thing for LinkedIn as well. So I think if you go... Two to three minutes, two to 10 minutes or so mid-form content, horizontal, that works a lot better than just the short form.

So I think, sure, a clip away, but when we're talking about B2B, at least from what I've seen, that performs better. So from B2B, we haven't seen any patterns with vertical versus horizontal.

We see more so the content type. When I mean content type, like the subject, the topic, is it trending, is it not, is it hot? That impacts views more than anything else. So...

to continue on this piece um so it says the bottleneck is source content so what neil and i are actually filming right now is source content so even though this is a podcast here you'll get the long form the way we look at this is this is building a content factory right and you want to engineer the content for clipping so in this this episode actually we actually created a lot of classics it's only that i didn't know neil that was going to contribute today and so i

Usually he doesn't. And so what happens is when I contribute and I ask my bot to do the work, it will actually look at all the links and look at all the titles and I'll add a hook for each one. That's an example of engineering the content for clipping because you want to have like a strong hook to be able to lead to it and to get people's attention for the first one to two seconds or so. Otherwise you're going to lose them.

And then you have to make sure that you're curating the content and then making sure that they're going to the right channels. And then you want to make sure that you're tracking everything. We use Metricool. You can use an API for that.

And then you double down on what's working and what isn't working. And then you just continue doing that. But I think you're seeing more and more people do it. And we've been adding basically mid-rolls to the end of our clipped content.

And I would say, yeah, it's been working pretty well. So anyway, all that to say is we're going to see a lot more of this. Sure. It's just the meta. It's the way of playing this right now.

With B2B, when you mentioned vertical versus horizontal, I think one differentiator here is the vertical content tends to be shorter. And B2B, depending on the topic, a lot of people want more in-depth content because B2B can be very technical in some aspects. The horizontal content instead of vertical, right? Think of vertical as like shorts or Instagram reels.

Think of the horizontal content as like a long form YouTube video. um you know and i think that's what uh tends to do better in b2b is when you just go more in depth on a topic versus just covering it for 30 or 60 seconds yeah even when you go by the way um

Shout out to Overlap, by the way. Overlap's been great for clipping. Overlap, I think, has a limit on these horizontal two-minute videos. And two minutes is actually not that long, right?

And those actually perform pretty well on X. Because yesterday or the day before, I was just scrolling through my X and I was looking at all the horizontal ones from the past. And the moment you, every time it jumps from like a vertical one to a horizontal one, it just performs a lot better, the horizontal one. But is the horizontal one longer in length?

It's like two minutes versus one minute. It's not much longer. It's double the length. It's double, but you're getting like a multiple of the views. Yeah, but you're also getting more engagement.

If someone's watching more, it keeps them on the platform longer. So the algorithm is probably pushing it harder. You are. Here's what I'll say to you.

If you have a really good topic that performs well, like obviously these algorithms are different. But when you're talking about like something that crushes on Instagram, you push it on an X. It just doesn't move. Right.

And so. We don't know. I mean, technically, we do know how their algorithm works because he open sourced it on GitHub. Right. And he has the in the algorithm.

I actually asked my Hermes agent. I was like, hey, tell me about this agent. And it's like, oh, it's like this algorithm really likes videos. And so anyway, all that to say is whenever we try doing the short form and Neil has a point there.

I'm just saying from what I'm seeing right now, I'm staring at it. Yeah. Big difference. Yeah, and I think, you know, it comes all down to... Dude, we have a horizontal one.

Okay, 42 seconds, 124,000 views. Horizontal. I really do think it comes down to the topic more than if it's horizontal and vertical. I don't think their algorithm cares that much if it's horizontal or vertical.

I would be shocked if it does. I think it cares. Yeah, because here's something else I'll say. I talked to a guy that has a startup that specifically helps LinkedIn companies and they say they have a lot of data.

They're like, yeah. So he's criticizing me, right? During the call, he's like critiquing me. He's like, dude, you should stop posting horizontal. I'm like, what data do you have to back that up, right?

He's like, I'm telling you, from what we've seen, when you switch it to, when you go from vertical to horizontal, they just do better, right? And then now, like for the first time on X, I'm seeing that I don't have anything to verify it on LinkedIn, but all I can do is look at my account. I'm like, yeah, big difference. Yeah, on my LinkedIn, I've gotten more views on the vertical than I have horizontal.

Nope. The other way around. No, I'm saying vertical, I've gotten more views. No, you haven't. Yes, I have. I looked at your videos the other day. Yeah, but that's just one.

If you just look at it in totality. We're not the individual, dude. That's cheating. We're talking about individual. But then I could say, oh, that topic was more of a hit, and it's 10 minutes longer, so the engagement.

No, no. I'm telling you, dude, this is the bunch of biggest baloney ever if a vertical or horizontal. That doesn't logically make sense. If you look at X, they publish their algorithm.

I do not see one being horizontal versus vertical, and it creates more engagement. Here, let me ask my thing while we talk. Go check this out. Go look at what the average length is for a horizontal versus a vertical video.

I bet you almost always... Majority of the time, a horizontal video is longer. That impacts engagement. Then vertical videos, looking at the X algorithm in GitHub repo.

Okay, so we'll come back to that. I just don't see it because you've also had vertical images, videos that get millions of views. Not on X. Not on X or LinkedIn.

Have you tried placing those videos on X and LinkedIn recently? Yeah. What do you mean placing? The vertical, the ones that got millions of views, like recently going.

Yeah, we have. We have recently, like now, like today or last month, not like last year. Last month. Yeah. Which one? They don't work. Which one that got millions of views on YouTube?

We tried the ones that I don't remember, but we tried the ones I'm like, hey, let's just try it on all of them. It doesn't work. Pull it out. Which one?

It doesn't work. We got right here. It doesn't work. All right. I'm going to go through. While you're doing this right now, Neil, I'm looking at yours, okay?

So I'm looking at Neil's vertical views right now. So 100 likes on this one, okay? Another vertical one, 146. You got to go look at the views. Another one, 16.

I can't look at your views. Only you can see your views. Oh, yeah. Okay. So then your next one. By the way. On your X, by the way, I'm scrolling down to May 14th.

I don't see any verticals. You're only posting horizontal. Because we switched. When did you switch? Recently. You can ask my team. But, okay, I'm looking at, okay, your horizontal one on LinkedIn, and I don't want to lose the audience here, but you got 270 likes on this one and 81 comments.

How much longer was the video? This one was 15 minutes. The other one was, your other ones are like one minute or so. Yes. And by the way, I'm not disagreeing with you on, yes, the views, the retention matters because they want watch time.

Which they've actually published as part of their algorithm. That's why I believe horizontal. I'm looking at LinkedIn, by the way. So I don't know about LinkedIn, but X.

Almost all social platforms look at video engagement. Yeah, they want more watch time. I don't disagree with you there. I will say, though, like, okay, you publish another one here.

556 likes on it. It's a 15-minute one. So, yeah. And you could make the argument, Neil, that a horizontal video has its longer form. So by default, it's going to get more engagement, right?

Yeah, but you typically people spend more time creating a horizontal video than a vertical. Yeah. But like I'm looking, I'm already at April 19th. I don't see any vertical videos on your profile.

On X? Uh-huh. I'm continually scrolling. Why is my Hermes not responding to me? Uh-oh. Okay, there we go. I'm going back even more and more and more. Let's see.

I'm on April 13th. You have a lot of X content. All right, I'm still going. I'm on April 5th. I see a GIF. That one's cool. Old school Transformers. Uh-oh, uh-oh.

Anyway, so I'm already in March. I still don't see any vertical videos on your profile on X. Yeah, beats me. But point is, we've tried it. So we can move on.

While my Hermes pulls up the algorithm over here. Quick plug. If you want to win at AI SEO, then you got to check out ClickFlow at clickflow.com. It creates content that actually sounds like you, not AI slop.

And there's a free 14-day free trial. Okay, back to it. So I'm going to move on topics. Let's move on to... Google's Guide to Optimizing Your Website for AI.

Okay? Okay. So this is the part that everyone missed about Google's Guide to Optimizing Your Website for AI. So you've seen what they wrote about how to optimize your site for AI?

I have not seen the article, but I did see someone post on LinkedIn how anytime they tell you what not to do, when people do it, they do better. What is that? When it comes to SEO and AI and GEO, because they have some guidelines that are published. So this is, I'm talking about the guidelines.

Internet sucks, but there you go. So this guy wrote this. Okay. So to Neil's point, Google released something called optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google search.

Okay. So here's what he says. Basically it's like, oh, is SEO still relevant for generative engine search? So this is what we should talk about first.

Okay. So Google said in short, yes, best SEO practices continue to be relevant, which is interesting because when people reach out to your company or my company, when they start saying, oh yeah, we just want AEO. We just want GEO. We don't want SEO.

What do you say? If they just want SEO and not GEO. No, if they just want GEO, AEO, they're like, oh, we don't really need traditional SEO. We just need GEO, AEO.

What do you say to that? Well, we'll try to tell them what we believe they need is and why. And if they only choose that they want one thing or to start off with one thing, we'll work with them. And then we try to showcase how it's great, how it also benefits SEO, and how we can do a few other things and even kickstart the SEO even more.

But we will be upfront and tell them, hey, there is overlap in both GEO and SEO. Yep. So what Google, and I'm not going to add anything to that. It's the same thing for our side.

But Google also said, what do you want to do? You want to create valuable non-commodity content for your audience. Easier said than done. Okay. Yes. You should think about what does that mean exactly?

That means thought leadership content, right? It could be a really helpful PDF backed with data. Okay. What else could it mean? It could mean what? My bad.

I'm still scrolling on your X profile. I'm already in January 18th. I still haven't found a vertical video. What are you talking about? I'm certain. You want to see the last vertical video I saw?

Can you just... Here. Okay, here. I'm scrolling, dude. Here. I'm going to scroll... I'm going to scroll to the ones... Now, because you're trying to make a point, I'm going to show you right here.

So... I'm going to go all the way back. 12,000 views. Here you go. I'm going to go back all the way. 12,000 views. So since Neil wants to double down, I'm going to shove it in your face now.

No, no, no, no. You're not letting it go. I think you're talking out of your butt. No, no, no. Just being honest. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's obvious that these algorithms look at engagement.

Vertical has less view time. I didn't disagree with you, though. I know, but that's why vertical would get less. I didn't disagree with you. You created vertical?

That sucks. 10 minutes but you asked me a question you said did we publish any verticals that performed well on these other channels here and i'm gonna pull one up for you right now okay so yes i want to see it because i don't see any verticals it's gonna ruin this we're spending so much time on this right now we're gonna it's not good for the audience i don't mind because i had to go all the way to january i'm already beyond january okay so so let's see keep going but you're talking about roughly six months ago I'm talking about we have published these things, and it's not like the algorithm just magically shifted into something new.

Okay, fair enough. Yeah. But where is it? Months and months ago. It is months and months. I'm looking at it right now. I'm looking at it. Look, I'm looking at a bunch right now.

You see this? 118 views, 188 views. When was this? This is December. December. Yeah. But I also think it's the topic because some of your horizontals have like Jensen Long in there.

My point is, my point is these same ones we've published on Instagram and they've gotten way more views. Not a hundred views. You know, it's not a hundred views, right? I don't know what is on your Instagram, but I got over here.

I got eight. Remember the ones when I said, if you hate billionaires, you have low IQ. Yes. That one crushed it. Look at this. 245 views. Wow. Yeah, that's right.

It could just be X is a different audience for that. And there are a lot of rich people on there. If you hate billionaires, what is it? If you hate billionaires.

If you hate billionaires, you have low IQ. Have low IQ? Yeah. Eric SIU. Hating billionaires means you're focused on Instagram. All right. Let's see if I can pull up the reel.

It did better on Instagram than X, but I just don't believe if it's – I don't think vertical – if I had to break it down, what I'm getting at is the format of vertical versus horizontal makes no difference on view count. I don't think that's part of the algorithm. I think it's everything to do the content, content lane, et cetera, but not actually the format if it's vertical versus horizontal. Remember, I just gave you an example, right?

So when I had a video that got 124,000 views and it was only 42 seconds, that was horizontal recently, right? And you can look at the other ones. I'm trying to pull some up from recently, but it just nothing else has gotten close to that before. Now, I want to caveat that by saying the caption I had was pretty good, too.

What was the caption? I think the caption carried it. So it was my bet. Here's the caption, Neil. So it says, my bet is everyone is going to have something River-like at their company.

So talking about the Shopify thing. And that was trending at the time. Yes. So that helped it. Yeah. But I think it's all or what I'm getting at specifically is.

Yes, we understand engagement matters. We understand hooks matter. I don't think the video format of vertical versus horizontal actually makes the difference in views. If anyone actually has real data on this and they took the same clip, same caption, same hook, et cetera, and one format vertical, one horizontal, curious to see if you have data.

Please share it with us and then we can go from there. Yeah. So, and by the way, both these things can be true, right? Like I didn't disagree with you earlier.

I said, look, if there's greater watch time, it's going to perform better. Yeah. But I'm just saying, I don't think formatting matters. You know what, actually, I should just text my friend at LinkedIn.

No, why don't you? I will after this. What do you do right now? Because it goes on camera. Oh, OK. All right. Yeah, good call. OK, so let's continue on this.

So we'll see what happens. And if you guys work at any of these companies. Oh, actually, I have someone I can hit up, too. But we'll hit up our friends.

We'll see what happens and we'll settle the debate that way. Now, going back to talking about Google optimizing your site with with AI over here. OK, so a couple of things and we can we can react to this over here. Right.

So so first of all, Google, again, said SEO is still relevant for generative AI search. So for those of you that come to us when you say we just want GEO, AEO, come on, this stuff still grounds on SEO, traditional SEO. The other piece is create valuable non-commodity content for your audience, which we talked about. The other part is build and maintain a clear technical structure for AI SEO.

Guess what? That still goes back to traditional SEO. Like a lot of the technical structure that we're talking about right now, schema markups, having an FAQ section, having a summary at the top with the bullet points. And

All these things that are basically traditional SEOs and technical SEOs look at still matters, right? And then it says what you don't need to do, okay? You don't need LLMs.txt. You don't need to chunk your content.

You don't need to rewrite your content just for AI systems. You don't need to seek inauthentic mentions and you don't need to overly focus. Interestingly enough, you don't need to overly focus on structured data. What do you think, Neil?

My bad. I got this one as a real emergency, but it's not. Neil's distraction machine today, man. My wife's like, I got a spider in my car. What do I do?

Seriously? Seriously. Seriously. I'm like, hit it. Take care. Okay, anyway, so here's what Google said to focus on for AI SEO. Okay, we apologize, guys, for today.

So as you continue working on your website, remember that there are plenty of content thrives in Google search without any overt SEO at all. And you don't need to accomplish everything in this guide in order to succeed on Google search. To recap, here are the key takeaways from this guide. Apply SEO best practices to generative AI search.

So continue prioritizing foundational SEO best practices, such as building clear technical structure, creating unique, valuable content, and then Create non-commodity content that's helpful, reliable on people first. And then third, prioritize effective SEO strategies over GEO and AEO hacks. And you can ignore chunking content, creating unnecessary LLMs.txt.

And then finally, exploring agentic experiences. So stay informed about emerging technologies that allow AI agents to interact with your site, such as browser agents and new protocols. I think this is all great. By the way, SEOs like to invent work.

Yeah, you know, I've been chunking my content in these LLMs.txt. That's how they get you to pay their consulting prices dude so many seos say oh if you if you don't do this thing you're not going to get any llm traffic um uh what's that cloudflare cloudflare ended up releasing something for llms uh where it ends up reducing the file size it makes it easier so they can just get to the text of the or the meat of your content the md maker No.

What did you call it? The .md maker, like the markdown maker. There's a markdown creation. Is it markdown? Yeah. Because agents like reading markdown and to an extent, even HTML.

Yeah. Markdown for agents. Yeah. Right. So they introduced this a while ago. Don't get me wrong. Like, it's cool. But whether you do it or not doesn't necessarily mean your traffic is going to go to zero or it's going to double up.

And we ran tests with this specifically using Clouds for a solution with a few clients. And guess what the difference in LLM traffic was? Like almost nil? Pretty much, exactly.

Now, I'm going to caveat this in which we don't have an exact way to know if you're getting more citations and people are seeing your brand mentioned more and it wasn't causing traffic. But from a traffic perspective, we didn't really see any meaningful results. And the reason I throw out that... we're not 100% sure is, you could say, oh, Neil, why aren't you using visibility tools?

Well, with AI visibility tools, you put in a prompt and then it tracks it for you. You don't know exactly what a user types in. There could be a sentence that Eric and I are searching for on Google's algorithm or some stats, but if we type it in with a few different words in that sentence, we can get different results. Heck, if you use the same prompt over and over again, you still can get different results.

So the AI visibility tracking is not perfect. Eventually you need Google and OpenAI and ChatGPT to replace something like a search console. We should do a, here's a fun episode. You would get views on this one.

So Neil's building a home in Beverly Hills right now. I'm just curious, when you're building a new home in Beverly Hills to figure out the right materials for your home, how was the marketing that convinced you? Like how did that work to convince you to buy the right thing? Was it referral or what else went into it?

Like the tub, for example, that you're talking about. What marketing got to you to convince you that that tub was the right tub to pick? It's called, I didn't pick anything and I will show up to the house and whatever it looks like, it looks like. So the marketing is the marketing happened to your wife.

I have no idea. It's called designer wife or whoever picks stuff, picks it. And then I just go in and whatever is there. I think it's beautiful. Because if I say it's not beautiful, it'll cost me more to change it.

Nothing in trouble. It'll just cost me to change it, which I don't want to do. Okay. So that's a practical business side of it, right? But I'm just talking about like not enough people talk about the marketing that goes into building a home, right?

There's actually one channel and it appeals to women. It's Pinterest, right? Because they have more of a woman audience than a male audience. Well, a lot of people do.

I kid you not. When they're doing interior design stuff, they go look on Pinterest and they go look to see what's popular and has a lot of engagement and likes. And they're like, oh, I like some of this stuff. It's really popular.

Other people like it. We should do something similar to this. This is what we call vibe marketing. There you go. Yeah. And we will end the episode on that.

Goodbye.