The viral carousel playbook

Transcript

What's good, what's good, y'all? Welcome back. You wanted more social media videos. Here we are. One of my personal focuses on my profile since the start of this year has been adding more carousels. I've been making a point to do two plus a week, and I am working with brands on them constantly as well. And so in this video, I'm going to break down the carousel playbook, both the types of carousels that I do and what works and hasn't, and the types of carousels that brands can do. Because this is a super important time if you are trying to grow on social media or thinking about launching on social media or have a brand to understand multiple formats. But why is that? So first, one thing I talk to brands about all the time is that if you have a good idea or a good concept or a product or a project, you can usually dice it up three ways. And I will use my own content as an example. So for instance, this Stussy Art Direction video, a lot of y'all would have seen it. It was a YouTube. We used to live in this world months and months ago, years now, where everyone said, oh, you can just chop a short from your YouTube videos and turn that into 10 TikToks and turn that into blank, blank, blank, and you're going to blow up. That's not how this works anymore. But what does work is you take a good idea and you put it into the formats that work. So I had a Stussy Art Direction YouTube. I took the four top points of that. I made it into a Stussy Art Direction short form video. If you want to learn more, you go to the YouTube. I could take the 10 examples I used in that YouTube. I could probably make a good Stussy Art Direction carousel. And if I want to break down a playbook in a really short fashion, I could turn it into what's called a one shot, which will deserve its own video at one point. But a good example is this is a one shot. This is a video of mine that's 80, 90,000 views, nothing crazy, but it is literally breaking down a couple of strategies in a single video shot. And so that's what we're going to dive into here today is carousels are one format that any good video idea you have could be done in a carousel. Any product you're launching, anything happening as a brand can be a carousel. I'm going to talk about different types of carousels, what makes carousels good and work on social media, show you tools I use to make carousels, how I actually do it inside of Photoshop, this tool Visual Electric, I use to generate images for carousels, get to the root of hooks and calls to actions. You have a playbook you can take to work on your brand or your own personal brand for social media without having to worry about video. I'm super excited for this one because I mentioned it has been a focus on my personal social and I've built out a pretty big playbook for this with the brands I work with. We're going to walk through it all here today. Let's lock in. So first off, why carousels? Why are we talking about them? So both TikTok and Instagram weight carousels just as highly, if not sometimes more, than they weight videos in their algorithms with some pretty particular things around there. This is my explore page here. You'll see there's a mixture of reels and carousels. I'm pulling up literally a random one that I've selected before this video. And this is great because a lot of people don't want to make video and they're afraid of it and to which I say, especially for creatives, you should be making carousels. Document the work you're doing, show the behind the scenes, try out new creative looks and feels, curate things you love, share things you think other people would enjoy. And then if you do make video and it's already in your toolkit, then you should do what I'm doing as a creator and say, hey, I want to add another thing because not everyone's going to watch a minute or two minute video of you talking or vlogs, but almost everyone will scroll through carousels. When we talk about how they're using the algorithm, TikTok will share carousels just like it shares TikToks. You're just as likely to see them. Instagram has multiple placements. So you get the explore page, like I just saw here, you get the actual feed, and then you have the reels feed. This is important for a note here. TikTok, you can have carousels that are nine by 16. They can be other sizes. Instagram, your TikTok, your carousel should be four by five, long ways. And if they are four by five with multiple images and with music, then they can also be shown in the reels feed, which means you not only get the main feed, you not only get explore, but you also get reels, which is a super helpful thing to think about the potential reach of your carousel. Now, while I encourage everyone to optimize for the different social networks, and we'll talk about that in this video, if you do make a four by five carousel for each, you have the most reach across both social networks, doing the least amount of changes to your content. But first, we're going to talk about the anatomy of a good carousel, and I'm going to get into types of them. So what do I mean by anatomy? Let's click another completely random carousel. This is the hook of your carousel. You've heard about hooks for videos. The first couple seconds of your video, the combination of image, text on screen, and what people hear. Those three things together form the hook of a video. The hook of a carousel is the same exact principle. Slide one is 90% of the battle. If slide one stops people scrolling the feed and then gets them to begin to scroll sideways so they engage in it, you've already won. Your job is to get there. Once you get there, optimizing the rest is easy, but you need to get people into your content as a brand or as a person. And so this, the hotter and richer guide, is a good example. They are calling out, this is a playbook for which you should get hotter and richer, two things that people want. Much like the ultimate unfiltered guide to take social media seriously. Another one, a guide. Everyone's algorithm is different, but as you can see, a more meme focused one, manipulator starter pack, getting ready for a meme drop. We'll do a meme video later on. So yeah, Pokemon is fonts. Favorite Pokemon is fonts. I'm in. Your job with the hook is to get people into the actual meat of the carousel. Then once they're into it, you want to keep people scrolling. So a really easy format is if you do something like this, is to just keep it going with more interesting content. Or if you're telling a narrative to leave a cliffhanger going on to the next one. But people, once they've already started scrolling, if they like the concept and it's good, will keep scrolling. And you get to use both videos and text to actually achieve your goals with your carousels. And TikTok, it is only text on Instagram. Favorite Pokemon is fonts. I'm in. Your job with the hook is to get people into the actual meat of the carousel. Then once they're into it, you want to keep people scrolling. So a really easy format is if you do something like this, is to just keep it going with more interesting content. Or if you're telling a narrative to leave a cliffhanger going on to the next one. But people, once they've already started scrolling, if they like the concept and it's good, will keep scrolling. And you get to use both videos and text to actually achieve your goals with your carousels. And TikTok, it is only text on Instagram you get video as well. Same concept here. Gold Mercedes-Benz. Got it. I'm in. Second slides of video. Same format. Awesome. Sliding through, I get some still images. Doesn't have to do that much, right? But we'll talk about carousels that build value and don't later. But then one of the best benefits of this is you get calls to action at the end of your carousels. What do I mean by that? This is one of my marketing carousels. I go to the end. People swipe through to the end. I can ask them to do something. Something that's a little bit harder to do inside video, obviously, et cetera. But you can get the general idea that you can get them to go achieve a goal and ask for something if they reach it to the end as an art in itself. Those are the three things to think about. The hook, the core, the story of the carousel, the middle part, and the CTA, the end. 80% of the emphasis should be on that intro, on that first hook. Because if it is not good, it's not going to work. And this carousel, for instance, of mine is, I don't like this, but personally, doesn't meet my standards of my aesthetics, isn't where I want to be portraying myself, but it works. It catches people. It stops the feed. It has bang and reach for me for a carousel. I'm a niche creator, right? And I am here at like 124,000 people, reached a ton of my existing followers. I'll take, if I can get 78,000 people for a carousel that I made in Adobe in 30 minutes, with 1,800 saves, I am winning. But the general idea is this pops out in the feed. It gets people interested enough, the best marketing in history to see the absolute bottle, to see the Duolingo owl they're in. That is a hook shot. So this leads us to the goal of a carousel, whether you are a brand or a person, the number one and two goals of your carousel are for people to share it and save it. We are not talking about likes. We're not talking about view time. We're not talking about comments. Saves and shares, just like video. This is equally as important if you don't want to get lost in the numbers and virality game, because those metrics show intention. It shows people taking an action or wanting to save it for later to take an action on your content. But there are also big signs to the algorithms. And so you want to design every piece of content. If your brand is saying, here's our new thing, that's not saveable and shareable. If it's, here's how you style our new thing to achieve X result, that is a more saveable carousel. If you present a scenario or a product in a funnier, more entertaining way, then maybe it might get shared. But those are the goals you're going to set out when you go to make a carousel. We're going to walk through a ton of different ways to achieve that here in a minute. The first is curation. So this is one of my most popular carousels from last month. Picture of me, some books. We are off brain rot, instead consuming from the taste economy reading list. So a curation is literally, you take a selection of things that you like and love and put them in one place for a niche. So for instance, if I was just like marketing book carousels probably wouldn't do as good. But having a hook like the taste economy, having it be something interesting, a little bit different, a little bit of a different look and feel, there's not a lot like that, that becomes a little bit more applicable for people. So I am basically purely just putting in a selection of the books that I like is that simple. I'm doing a curation. And the second type of content, a lot of the examples I show when I just randomly pull out my explore piece, what we call a playbook, how to do something, my friend Zach crushes it on these. So he'll do how to design a life you're obsessed with. He is giving you a playbook. These are all pictures from his life. He's saying, here's your steps. Define your categories. For each category, create an identity. Here, do this thing, do this thing, do this thing. A bunch of ideas where he's giving so much value. Where it's, oh, even if you like one slide, time block your day. You're going to save that because you're thinking, I want to go back to this later whenever I want to time block my day. Whenever I want to go down and actually do this, you're giving a super saveable playbook. And then the nice part, the shareable part about content like this is if you're talking to somebody else, if you have your friend group, your group chat, whatever it is, and you're into these kind of things, you will share this with other people like, yo, check this out. We should do this. Pop this LaCroix. All right, back to it. And the next type of carousel is called a showcase. A good example from a boys' super line, something like this, where it's, hey, here's this thing that happened. Here's a bunch of examples of it. You're just taking an idea, whether it's your product or someone else's, that Mercedes we saw earlier, you're saying it's a showcase. Hook title and a bunch of examples of it. That is a showcase carousel. So we have curation. We have playbook. We have showcase. And with that framework, I'm going to show a bunch of different carousels of different types that you should think about for your brand. But those are the three best types I would focus on for almost all content. There's things like photo dumps and more lifestyle stuff. If you want to drive value for people, focus on those three. Get some examples for brand and personal brand, that kind of thing. So personal brand, my boy Alex, this is a great format where he is basically saying, here's a bunch of misconceived notions. He's crossing them out and giving you a plan for how to replace them. So instead of, hey, let's hire an intern for social, this needs to be a dedicated team, blah, blah, blah. He's giving people a set of resources and reasons. But I like this idea, because it's more inherently more interesting to cross something out, a misconception, than say something else versus just saying the answer. It's a more interesting format. This is another one from Grace Beverly showing off her podcast, or she's asking experts about particular things. And she's giving a combination of the videos from her podcast, quotes, things from Twitter and pulling it together into one showcase of the various things that are going on with her podcast around a single idea. Replace them. So instead of, hey, let's hire an intern for social, this needs to be a dedicated team. He's giving people a set of resources and reasons. But I like this idea because it's more inherently interesting to cross something out, a misconception, than say something else versus just saying the answer. It's a more interesting format. This is another one from Grace Beverly showing off her podcast, or she's asking experts about particular things. And she's giving a combination of the videos from her podcast, quotes, things from Twitter and pulling it together into one showcase of the various things that are going on with her podcast around a single idea. And on the curation note, there's a lot of marketing accounts, accounts in a niche. This could be car culture, marketing, women's fashion, cosmetics, wellness, whatever it is, or people that just curate the news. They're saying, here's your campaigns that launched this week. This is a useful curation. I always want to see the campaigns that are happening this week. This is where I want to call out having personality and not having personality. So this account, you never see the person that runs it. It's just an account of these curations, which means that there just isn't a bunch of affinity. Versus I want to call out someone else who does this, Tatum, who is in my Cut30 program. This is this week in fitness, branding and marketing, very similar to the campaigns that dropped this week done by this other channel. But the difference is, while you don't see her besides her outro card here, when you go to the rest of her content, she is talking in all the content. She's establishing a personal brand and then using that curation to add to the personal brand. For someone that never establishes themselves, there's just a lot less resonance around that. Unless you just have the utmost highest level of taste, which it doesn't matter if you're shown or not. Like Outlander would be a great example of that. If you're not familiar with Outlander, where they are establishing a brand by the power and amazingness of their curation, which I will say for 99% of people who think that they're that good, you're not. There's an enigma to get to the level that he is at. But you do that not just by curating, but by having a perspective in how you curate. And that's a separate video in itself. One of my favorite examples for brands, brands are always saying, how do we participate in carousels? What do we do? How do we tell a story? Because all good content, carousels are the same as videos. If you watch any of my YouTubes about making good video content, you either make value content or entertainment content, or you fail. Those are your two types of content. Value content is something someone will save or want to actually learn something from. Entertainment content is something that is competing with TV. It is funny, it is super interesting to watch. If you are not creating either of those two, then your content is probably flopping. But for a brand, and they're saying, hey, well, we're doing stuff. How do we show that off? This carousel from Juice Tint, I think is a great example. So they're basically going through their latest photo shoot. Behind the scenes look at the Juice Tint. And again, not the most engaged, biggest carousel ever, but a good story tell. Here's the product that we're shooting the photo on with some notes. Here's the muse for the photo shoot. Here's the outfits we use in the photo shoot. Here's the looks. They're answering a bunch of questions, the props, and showing people the world that they are building. And this is a good example of a more middle, bottom funnel carousel that's really educating their customer base, answering their questions, getting them more affinity versus being designed to go wide with an amazing format. I'm trying something like this out for my brand in a minute. Another example from the same brand where they're hosting an event and they basically have a slide for the space, a slide for the guests that they invited, a slide for the spread. They are, again, they're showcasing the things that they're doing and making it a visual, more entertaining way to show it. And then using the carousel format to show a bunch of video clips versus just making a standard video. But a great example for a brand is just actual storytelling in the text format. This is a good one. Where we took our getting robbed to New York Fashion Week. And they're literally telling a story in one line with a photo or a video of exactly what's happening for their brand. Now, this is a cool story. It's relatively engaged. But there's a hundred stories like that. The story of why you started your brand. The story of the biggest challenge that you face as a brand. The story of why you picked your color story for this season. Or what went terribly wrong in your photo shoot that cost you eleven thousand dollars. Or the inspiration that you spent forty-one hours on when you determined how you were going to approach your logo. Those are all stories for a carousel. And it doesn't have to be crazy complicated. Look at this. This is literally there's like ten words maybe on each of these slides. Same thing with a product showcase. Just like you debut your product in a video, you could also debut in carousel. And I usually recommend for brands to consider doing both inside their campaigns. I'll do a whole campaign strategy YouTube. It's it. At some point, this is just a good example of if you're going to debut a product, this carousel format gives you a lot of stuff. But things you already have. You already built all this out for your product detail page. Put it in a carousel. Run it organic and test it as an ad. Product combos is another one. It's just an aesthetic fun thing that people will scroll through basically for entertainment to see combinations of products, things people like, various displays. There is something to visual beauty and aesthetic curation that is entertainment in its own right. And this is one you can do with stuff you're packing into luggage or looks or things coming out of a purse, beverages in your fridge, whatever. There's a lot of ways to approach a curation like that. Sharing your reviews. This is another cool one I thought where they're basically combining a cool photo with the reviews of the product. And then there's storytelling of things that happened like this let's go on a trip carousel. Where obviously she's in the private jet, so there's a bit of leverage, but I love this format in general. I'm going to South by Southwest here tomorrow. Recording this video won't come out for a week or two, but that's where I'm headed. If I was saying, hey, let's go South by Southwest. I'm maybe I don't have the PJ shot, but I need to find that right hook shot. But I can do the same thing. What's in my bag and bring in my Osmo and bring in this and that. I pack these new shoes I got. Here's where we're staying. I'm staying at a cool hotel. Here's some of the people I met. Here's the events we go to. Again, I will probably not get the likes that she has because this is a banging carousel of really cool stuff, but I will certainly get solid engagement for what I do. And that's what I'll be thinking about for you as well. Same thing with a brand. Hey, we're going to this expo. Hey, we're launching our first retailer. Hey, the team went to blank and blank. Just look at that storytelling and say, what do we need to make that work? We need a hook shot and we need enough narrative and enough idea to keep people scrolling through it. And then we have these edits. I look at this as entertainment content. Aesthetic content is entertainment content, but people love aesthetic content. So this guy got popping off doing these edits that combined his hands and his feet and his fits. You as a creative, if you are a designer or videographer, whatever it is, should find an interesting format for you that you can experiment with. Another version, this is a design guide, how to be alone, where she's literally just providing some advice, a value driven content in her own creative way. Same thing. It's more a creative carousel. Become that girl in 14 days. We need a hook shot and we need enough narrative and enough idea to keep people scrolling through it. And then we have these edits. I look at this as entertainment content to aesthetic content is entertainment content, but people love aesthetic content. So this guy got popping off doing these edits that combined his hands and his feet and his fits. You as a creative, if you are a designer or videographer, whatever it is, should find an interesting format for you that you can experiment with. Another version, this is like a design guide, how to be alone, where she's literally just providing some advice, like value-driven content in her own creative way. Same thing. It's more like a creative carousel. Become that girl in 14 days. She's giving you a playbook, very much similar to what Zach was doing above, but in her own creative style. And I share this to show you that it can be any kind of visuals for this. There's a wide range of that. Another type of value carousel is a transformation carousel. These are short carousels. This is my boy JT showing off his 12 types of income and he's breaking them down in this extended thing. And this is designed to be saveable. People would be like, I want to make 12 streams of income. Hell, I want to make three streams. Let me save this to think of all the streams I could have as a creator. Another transformation one on TikTok, Saeed, this guy, he was in Cut30. This is a transformation where he basically describes a state he was in at one point, and then how much better it got in like six years with this brand. And he has social proof. It's a three-slide carousel. I love these two or three-slide formats. Maggie here has another one. Everything you do on a long flight to get your life together. Hook shot. Great shot of her dressed up with luggage. Great example of something a lot of people could do, right? Not in front of a private jet, but she picked a good outfit. It works. And she's literally just getting a plan. If you have no Wi-Fi, here's what to do. If you have Wi-Fi, here's what to do. It's super saveable carousel. But that's the toolkit. You curate, you make a playbook, you showcase, or you entertain. You can do it in a couple slides and show a transformation or a quick guide. You can do it in an extended narrative or an extended curation. You focus on your hook. I want to take a quick interlude and talk about Visual Electric. I use Visual Electric to generate graphics for carousels and for mock-ups all the time. I want to show it as a tool in this. I'll talk about how I use Photoshop later to make some of my carousels. Visual Electric is a tool very similar to Midjourney, but it is made for designers. Look at this interface we have here. I have sketch tools. I have hand tools. I have text. And I have imagery. But most importantly, I have real workflow. So for instance, these images are all variants of each other. I took this image. I told it to change the color of the packaging and change it to white. That's something it's capable of doing here. I want to basically see this art director function inside Visual Electric. Any image I take into a board, I can use this edit function. And I can go change the color of the packaging to black. Lo and behold, I have some dark versions of this. I can go select it and say, hey, I'm going to remove the background. Boom. Now I have the PNG version of this. I can go pull up retouch. Say, hey, I don't like this edge. I can apply retouch to it. I basically get full workflow similar to how you actually design inside of a generative tool. For another example, what I was able to do there, I took this image. I put it in a concrete studio environment. I said that, hey, now I want it in an art studio. You begin to understand the power of something like this. You can go, cool, I can move images through environments. And so again, if I want to do the background of a carousel or generate something, I can begin to get good, interesting stuff that fits in that and looks realistic in this tool. I actually get it to where I want it to go. So I will roll through. They have this inspo section here inside. You can go bring stuff. I can go take this into my canvas. I can say, great, I'm going to go edit, make the bag longer. I'm just going to make the bag taller and make it white. There we go. You will see I have a slightly taller bag that is white. I can go in here and I can clean this up. It's now just slightly less wrinkly, but now you never need to have a mock-up that's the same as everyone else's mock-up ever again. And you can kind of change and work around images in a pretty straightforward workflow and even do things like on this, I changed this billboard image from day to night. I want to tweak something for a campaign mock-up. Shift a nail color or an image. You can do all this in an interface. You can do it as a group with artboards and collaborate on it. You can resize and make variations. This is the kind of tool that actually works how designers work. And again, if you are looking to say, hey, I need to fill in a bunch of images for carousels, and I want to be able to edit them and have a design eye on them, this is the ideal software that is set up for it. You can find out more about them in the link below. Visual Electric. I want to give them a big thank you for sponsoring this video. Let's get back to it. So tactically, it's breaking a little bit of this. How do we actually do it? So I'm going to pull open my Photoshop, and you will see in Photoshop, this is an artboard Photoshop. You can do this in Express as well. Most design software. Literally, you'll see I have an artboard. And all I am doing on these is I've made multiple carousels in this artboard. I am dropping a new photo in behind it or a new image, and I'm adjusting the text. And I have a very consistent font each time. It's usually Helvetica Neue and Mersault or Caslon or one of these options for a sans serif. And it's not even the most glamorous thing with the template I'm comfortable enough with. I have the images blurred out and I make decent carousels. It's not the most amazing ones in the world, but I have a fan base that likes it. But literally, it's just an artboard. It is the same layout on each of these. I'm just duplicating it. And the only core difference is the call to action one has like a logo. I am dropping a new photo in behind it or a new image, and I'm adjusting text. I use the same fonts each time. It's usually Helvetica New and Mersault or Caslon or one of these options for a sans serif. It's not even the most glamorous thing with the template I'm comfortable enough with. I have the images blurred out and I make decent carousels. It's not the most amazing ones in the world, but I have a fan base that likes it. It's just an artboard. It is the same layout on each of these. I'm just duplicating it. The only core difference is the call to action—one has a logo or it will have a YouTube up there. And the front slide has more design. I hit this with a remove background, which you can just go into select subject. Then you'll be able to select inverse and it'll select anything that's not you and easily cut it out. I put layers behind me because that effect that you've seen a lot of people do where something is slightly behind but still readable is an effect that gets people to stop and scroll for whatever reason. Do not overthink it. Begin to get a format and some fonts for your hook slides. Get a format for what you want to do for the rest of this. It does not have to be this complicated. Once you have a template, I have two or three variants of this and I use it for all carousels. All the brand stuff that I have is just variants of that. Doing it on express on your phone allows you to not make it hard for yourself. This is your homework from watching this video. I want you to go curate something. Make a hook of something you think is worth sharing. Books, styling advice, recipes, places to go in the area you live. Five best coffee shops in rural Arkansas or South Africa, wherever you are. Things you need to do when you visit. Whatever it is. Get a hook image that catches. Do what I just did. Get a picture of yourself. Cut yourself out. Some text. A little bit behind you. Nice, big and bold. Big title that gets people a catchy hook. Get a little edgy if you can. The most hated places on the west side of Austin. Have fun with it. Put images together in that size and post. Do a curation. Do a story. Whatever it is. My only other pro tip is that I don't post those carousels on TikTok. I don't take the time to do it. I have a different TikTok strategy. I would be using TikTok's default captions. I would literally export my images here. I would go into TikTok and use this style. White text, black outline. Running the same text and titles and all that. Using that style without any of the fancy design. You can use the same images and everything. But I would literally be doing it in the default TikTok style. And Instagram using the more designed ones. Just use the same text formats. Everyone uses the same stuff. I'd be using that instead of doing a fancy design thing. I've just found they don't work as hard on TikTok. And everyone goes, "Oh, it's another thing I do." It's not that hard. It'll take you 10, 15 minutes. Just stop scrolling and do the work. That is your homework: make and release one of these carousels. Trust me, you can do it. If you're thinking, "Oh, I want to make videos," okay, fine. You should probably still make videos. You can definitely make carousels. You can grow your entire business, your personal brand, et cetera, off carousels just as well. I will put the examples of these in my Hyper Newsletter next week. I'll put a bunch of carousels linked in there. The link to that is hyperstudios.us and it is below if you want to sign up. I'll make sure you can access all these links so you can get them easily. That is it. No excuses. Let's make some carousels. You or your brand. I appreciate y'all watching. People would be like, I want to make 12 streams of income. Hell, I want to make three streams. Let me save this to think of all the streams I could have as a creator. Another transformation one on TikTok, Saeed, this guy, he was in Cut30. This is a transformation where he basically describing a state he was in at one point, and then how much better it got in like six years with this brand. And he has social proof. It's a three slide carousel. I love these two or three slide formats. Maggie here has another one. Everything you do on a long flight to get your life together. Hook shot. Great shot of her dressed up with like the luggage. Great example of something like a lot of people could do, right? Not in front of a private jet, but she picked a good outfit. It works. And she's literally just getting a plan. If you have no Wi-Fi, here's what to do. If you have Wi-Fi, here's what to do. It's super saveable carousel. But that's the toolkit. You curate, you make a playbook, you showcase, or you entertain. You can do it in a couple slides and show a transformation or a quick guide. You can do it in an extended narrative or an extended curation. You focus on your hook. I want to take a quick interlude and talk about Visual Electric. I use Visual Electric to generate graphics for carousels and for mock-ups all the time. I want to show it as a tool in this. I'll talk about how I use Photoshop later to make some of my carousels. Visual Electric is a tool very similar to like a mid-journey, but it is made for designers. Look at this interface we have here. I have sketch tools. I have hand tools. I have text. And I have imagery. But most importantly, I have real workflow. So for instance, these images are all variants of each other. I took this image. I told it to change the color of the packaging and change it to white. That's something it's capable of doing here. I want to, so I basically see this art director function inside Visual Electric. Any image I take into a board, I can use this edit function. And I can go change the color of the packaging to black. Lo and behold, I have some dark versions of this. I can go select it and say, hey, I'm going to remove the background. Boom. Now I have the PNG version of this. I can go pull up retouch. Say, hey, I don't like this edge. I can apply retouch to it. I basically get full workflow similar to how you actually design inside of a generative tool. For another example, what I was able to do there, I took this image. I put it in a concrete studio environment. I said that, hey, now I want it in an art studio. You begin to understand the power of something like this. You can go, cool, I can move images through environments. And so again, if I want to do the background of a carousel or generate something, I can begin to get good, interesting stuff that fits in that and looks realistic in this tool. I actually get it to where I want it to go. So I will roll through. They have this inspo section here inside. You can go bring stuff. I can go take this into my canvas. I can say, great, I'm going to go edit, make the bag longer. I'm just going to make the bag taller and make it white. There we go. You will see I have a slightly taller bag that is white. I can go in here and I can clean this up. It's now just slightly less wrinkly, but now you never need to have a mock-up that's the same as everyone else's mock-up ever again. And you can kind of change and work around images in a pretty straightforward workflow and even do things like on this, I changed this billboard image from day to night. I want to tweak something for a campaign mock-up. Shift a nail color or an image. You can do all this in an interface. You can do it as a group with artboards and collaborate on it. You can resize and make variations. This is the kind of tool that actually works how designers work. And again, if you are looking to say, hey, I need to fill in a bunch of images for carousels, and I want to be able to kind of edit them and have a design eye on them, this is the ideal software that is set up for it. You can find out more about them in the link below. Visual Electric. I want to give them a big thank you for sponsoring this video. Let's get back to it. So tactically, it's breaking a little bit of this. How do we actually do it? So I'm going to pull open my Photoshop, and you will see in Photoshop, this is an artboard Photoshop. You can do this in Extobie Express as well. Most design software. Literally, you'll see I have an artboard. And all I am doing on these is I've made multiple carousels in this artboard. I am dropping a new photo in behind it or a new image, and I'm adjusting a text. And I have a very, I use the same fonts each time. It's usually Helvetica New and Mersault or Caslon or one of these options for a sans serif. And it's not even the most glamorous thing with the template I'm comfortable enough with. I have the images blurred out and I make decent carousels. It's not the most amazing ones in the world, but I have a fan base that likes it. But literally, it's just an artboard. It is the same layout on each of these. I'm just duplicating it. And the only core difference is the call to action one has like a logo or it will have a YouTube up there. And the front slide has more design. I hit this with a remove background, which you can just go into select subject. And then you'll be able to select inverse and it'll select anything that's not you and easily cut it out. And I put layers behind me because that effect that you've seen a lot of people do where something is slightly behind but still readable is an effect that gets people to stop and scroll for whatever reason. You do not have to overthink it. Begin to get a format and some fonts for your hook slides. Get a format for what you want to do for the rest of this. It does not even have to be this complicated. Once you have a template, I have like two or three variants of this and I use it for all carousels. And then all the brand stuff that I have is just variants of that. And doing it on express on your phone allows you to like not make it hard for yourself. But this is your homework from watching this video. I want you to go curate something. Make a hook of something you think is worth sharing. Books, styling advice, recipes, places to go in the area you live. Five best coffee shops in rural Arkansas or South Africa, wherever you are. Things you need to do when you visit. Whatever it is. Get a hook image that catches. Do what I just did. Get a picture of yourself. Cut yourself out. Some text. A little bit behind you. Nice, big and bold. Big title that gets people a little catchy. Get a little edgy if you can. The most hated places on the west side of Austin. You know, like have fun with it. Put images together in that size and post. Do a curation. Do a story. Whatever it is. My only other pro tip that I will give you is that if you... I don't post those carousels on TikTok. If I was to do TikTok, I don't take the time to do it. I have a little bit of a different TikTok strategy. But I would be using TikTok's default captions. I would literally export my images and stuff here. And I would go into TikTok. And I would be using this style. White text, black outline. And running the same text and titles and all that. Using that style without any of the fancy design. You can use the same images and everything. But I would literally be doing it in the default TikTok style. And Instagram using the more designed ones. Okay, just use... just copy these text formats. So everyone uses the same stuff. I'd be using that instead of doing a fancy design thing. I've just found they don't work as hard on TikTok. And everyone goes, Oh, it's another thing I do. It's not that hard. It'll take you like 10, 15 minutes. Just stop scrolling and do the work. That is your homework is to make and release one of these carousels. Trust me, you can do it. If you're like, Oh, I want to make videos. Okay, fine. You should probably still make videos. You can definitely make carousels. You can grow your entire business, your personal brand, et cetera, off carousels just as well. I will put the examples of these in my Hyper Newsletter next week. I'll put a bunch of carousels linked all in there. The link to that is hyperstudios.us and it is below if you want to sign up. And I'll make sure you can send out all these links so you can get them easily. That is it. No excuses. Let's make some carousels. You or your brand. I appreciate y'all watching. name