For the past 3 years, short-form content has been center stage for the strategy of brands and creators. I remember spending hours advising my clients and partners that “15 seconds is long enough.”

Then Reesa Teesa happened last month and cemented that audiences don’t necessarily have short attention spans when the content is good.

The 'Who TF Did I Marry? ' story, posted on TikTok, was 50 parts long with most of the videos being 10 minutes long, bringing the total watch time to well over 7 hours.

Seven. Hours.

Just this week, Instagram started testing 3-minute Reels.

Long-form is going nowhere and it's only natural to see TikTok and Instagram encourage longer videos.

The challenge will lie in incorporating long-form content without completely abandoning trends.

Shout out to the folks at the American Marketing Association for helping bring today’s list of best practices.

The AMA is putting together a 6-week online training for a small cohort in April which you should check out.

Master the art of crafting a social strategy. This small group and conversational training from the American Marketing Association equips you with the knowledge to create highly effective content plans and audience engagement strategies. Define your purpose and measure your impact.

Boost Your Engagement; Register Now!

POV: You watch a video of an influencer applying a face mask while they talk about everything but the face mask.

Jump to the comment section and you’ll likely see comments asking for the face mask brand.

This is good old product placement taking a whole new form.

While not entirely new, it is a way to highlight a product while leaving the audience quite intrigued.

Here’s influencer Clara Peirce doing a TikTok trend while doing her skincare routine:

Jump to her comment section and you’ll see comments asking about her face mask, which she has linked in her bio.

Combine this with affiliate marketing programs and ki-ching.

Not to sound like a broken record, but using Reesa Teesa’s example above to highlight this best practice too.

Instagram and TikTok are taking a more casual, off-the-cuff storytelling style which will continue to bring growth to brands and creators.

The appeal? It hooks and helps form deeper connections.

Creators who are seeing significant growth are making their followers feel like they’re catching up with a friend on a FaceTime/Whatsapp call.

Why? Because audiences want to see a face on the other end.

It’s raw, entertaining, and counter-intuitive (but is it?) in today’s world.

This is new old news—nearly half of Gen Z uses TikTok and Instagram as search engines (and Google is very afraid).

Users are looking for a more exploratory experience with niche curated takes and personal experiences (think TikTok storytelling and honest reviews on Reddit).

Keywords and SEO research have become cool again and any marketer worth their salt should ditch legacy tactics (like hashtag stuffing), and focus on letting the algo help users discover content.

If you haven’t created a list of keywords you’d like your brand to rank for, do it now.

With TikTok's rise, brands revamped their approach to paid social, often using organic social teams for paid media content.

Traditional ad formats like highly polished, extended cuts and boring image carousels are losing effectiveness. Users have become very savvy at recognizing (and ignoring) ads.

“Ugly ads” have become a norm. Ads that look like a friend’s story, organic content, or something that was shot without much thought are still breaking records in performance and driving sales.

It will be interesting to see if the organic side of social teams (and those of us who do this daily) will be easier to train on performance metrics and media buying, or if it will be the other way around.

A mishap with MAC Cosmetics leaves us cringing.

The brand sent creator Olivia Markus a PR package consisting of a ginormous lipstick-shaped package.

Let’s just say Markus was not delighted.

Instead of posting what the makeup brand may have hoped would be a fun unboxing video, Marcus posted about how “wasteful and gluttonous” unprompted influencer gifting can be, along with the annoyances of “glitter bombing.”

This has sparked a discussion on influencer gifting practices.

Below is the iconic video *cries in marketing*

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