Is the End of Evergreen Content Here?

This video will self destruct in T minus 24 hours and counting. Okay. No, it won't, but it wouldn't be that weird if it did. Ephemeral content, which is content that disappears after 24 hours, is absolutely everywhere these days. So this begs the question, is the age of lasting content over for good?

I use social media honestly as a form of escapism, which is really interesting because we talk about TV and books if people still read. As a form of escapism, that for.

Me depends more on what channel I'm looking at. But I feel like I'm gaining slightly more inspiration or connection to people I know in real life. On something like Instagram, I don't post.

A ton of it, but I do watch a lot of it. Like Instagram stories, I'll just post, plop them on and they just scroll through and you can just spend hours just watching what your friends are doing.

I don't like stories. As somebody who does kind of regularly make content on a channel that's supposed to be very long lasting, like YouTube, for example, that to me is ultimately more satisfying.

I think that really it was Snapchat that started the whole ephemeral content thing, but Facebook was able to make it successful through Instagram.

Yeah. And I think what's interesting about brands getting on that is just the sense of urgency that it creates. From a brand perspective. I can see that being really valuable in driving sales just through that sense of urgency.

Ephemeral content is something that at least appears like it was created in the moment, whereas a wall post or something that appears in your Instagram feed is something that looks, it's allowed to look like. A little bit more planning and perhaps a little bit more staging went into it.

We are accessing all this stuff on our phones, putting it in a mobile format so they're viewing it when they're on the train commuting to work.

If you're scrolling through and you see a story, you automatically think of that brand and it's, it's your. If you're a brand that's able to produce a lot of short form stories, then you're going to stay relevant.

On social and fomo. It also like, adds that sense of fomo. When I was talking about how sometimes a lot of the content that I look at on Instagram is, is aspirational, like I want to hang out with that brand.

Meanwhile, while I was making those stories, I was sweatier than I've ever been in my life.

You know, when they first introduced polls, for example, and these interactive tools and stories, you know, and people could ask questions like, should I buy these shoes? Yes or y yass. You know, it's just kind of like it gave people this opportunity to know like, oh, someone's there, somebody's interacting with this. And you know, on the brand side, it can really give you a sense of maybe not yes or yass but it can give you an opportunity to figure out like what, what is driving your followers and your customers and your audience to respond to you when they introduce the ability for brands to add swipe up links. I think that that made ephemeral content and Instagram stories tremendously valuable to brands.

Like what you were talking about with swiping up on Instagram for me immediately. I'm sure every company was like, oh, finally we can prove our ROI for social media. We have some actual little metric.

Exactly. You can. Finally, finally there's attribution.

Yes.

A food brand might have spent a ton of money a couple years ago on a produced ad with maybe a celebrity came, whereas now they might make something on TikTok that just gets like a million views. And that's their strategy and that's how they're producing videos.

It's all stuff that we want to see and that we want to consume and they're just serving it up to us and we're like, yes, please, thank you, give me more of this and lots of that.