Post more Carousels! Some Good, Some Bad from Google and more AI Hype Skepticism

With the rise of AI, chatbots and predictive text on smartphones, I want to get back to writing, without the assistance of these tools. My weekly LinkedIn article talks about marketing, the world of work and anything else that I think may be relevant to this platform.

Confirmation that Carousels Get More Reach

We got the word last week in a post from the head of Instagram himself: Carousels get more reach.

If you are a marketer, you’ve probably noticed how well they’ve been performing. Now we have direct confirmation straight from the someone who gets to see all of the data with a bird’s eye view.?

In his post, he also encouraged users to include music when sharing carousels as it can help bring them into the Reels feed, thereby expanding reach.

I’m a big fan of carousels because they’re an easy way to repackage existing content and information to round out your monthly content calendar.

Additionally, I think that a large part of their success is that there’s just something about having to swipe to reveal hidden information that is irresistible to people, which of course, contributes to better metrics. It’s a micro-dose of FOMO delivered into the feed of your followers.

We talked in this space a few weeks ago about how Instagram recently increased their carousel limit to 20 slides. The app is definitely signaling that it wants us to use this feature more often.

So if the head of Instagram is telling you that carousels get more reach, it’s probably a good idea to make them a part of your marketing strategy.

And this goes for LinkedIn and TikTok as well. Carousels (which you have to upload as multi-page PDFs) perform well on LinkedIn. Meanwhile, on TikTok, I’m seeing more posts that forego video entirely and are just a slideshow of photos.

Google Translate has added Canadian French

In case you missed it, you can now translate text into Canadian French using Google Translate.?

This is big if you’re a marketer who has to prepare bilingual materials for a Canada/Quebec-based audience.

I have preferred to use DeepL to Google Translate, but the output that DeepL provides is very European. It's nice that Google is now providing us with this option. I’ve already added the new language option to the app on my smartphone.

Quick Tech Reminder: Firefox Web Browser Still Supports Ad Blockers

Google had been signaling this was coming for a long time and the moment has finally arrived. The web giant has begun purging ad blockers from their web browser.?

If you are unaware, Chrome is the engine that powers most of the web’s browsers, including Edge.

Firefox doesn’t run on the same engine, it has its own version that is separate and distinct from Google. uBlock Origin should continue running on Firefox for the foreseeable future.?

A certain wave of nostalgia hits me when I think about how clean and snappy Chrome was when it first arrived. I can recall using it at my first office job back in 2009, marveling at how good it was. But for several years now,? it has been bogged down with all kinds of bloat and is is now attempting to?force-feed us ads. What a sad decline.

MIT Economist Downplays AI Hype

Interesting video that came across my YouTube Recommendations. An MIT Economics professor is not buying the AI hype and thinks that?only a small percentage of jobs will be completely claimed by AI.

For now, I remain firmly in the “AI is a tool” camp when it comes to marketing jobs. I don’t see ChatGPT or Gemini replacing or making us obsolete any time soon. I wrote about this in detailed fashion in a previous article.

I thought I’d share this video in an effort to combat a lot of the existential dread and doomerism that has accompanied the topic of AI.? Ultimately nobody knows where the AI experiment will take us, but it is nice to come across a more level-headed prediction from time to time.