Greetings, newsletter readers. Can we all just take a moment to agree that inflation sucks? Our modest handbasket of groceries rang up to $100.43 at Safeway the other day. It got us thinking. Uber costs more than cabs in 2023. AirBNBs are more than hotels. Streaming video services are more expensive than cable. How did we let this happen? The new economy is a scam.
Local Viking isn’t part of that scam. Our pricing is still foolishly reasonable (take a look at what competitors charge for reference). We’ll be raising those prices in about a month though. Nothing drastic– probably around $10 per tier. Existing users will keep their current rates in perpetuity, so there’s no need to fret if you already have an account. Anybody without one should go ahead and sign up– you may as well lock our current prices in while you can, you know?
We have another Local Viking / Local Brand Manager announcement while we’re at it. Nate will be hosting his fifth AMA session with anyone and everyone smart enough to register for it on Wednesday, February 15. Nate will regale all participants with an explanation and demonstration of our GeoBooster plugin for WordPress sites (the kind of websites almost all of you have, whether you realize it or not). Find another career if that sounds dull to you. This talk is gonna be off the chain. Everyone will be welcome to ask questions about anything after the core subject matter is covered.
Oh yeah– Local Viking has video functionality now. We would have liked to add this years ago, but Google only made video uploading possible through their API fairly recently. Here’s how you do it. After selecting one of your locations, you’ll want to click the Media link on the left side of the screen. Next, click the blue Add Media in the middle of the page. Finally, you’ll see a select video option in the center of the screen. You can watch the screen recording above this paragraph to see what we mean.
You can read Google’s video guidelines on this help page. They’re pretty straightforward. All videos need to be 30 seconds or less, 75 MB or smaller, and at least 720p in quality. So long as your videos meet those requirements, you’ll see them post to your locations.
Videos don’t post instantly. We’ve done a lot of testing over the past few weeks. One of our videos took twenty minutes to appear on our GBP listing. It showed up the fastest. The longest wait time we had was ten hours. We found an SEO blogger who said it can take up to 48 hours. Your mileage will vary.
You’ll notice that we included the word beta next to our video uploading. We still have a lot of functionality to build out. For now, though, you can upload videos to your GBP locations. Right now, this feature is only available on Local Viking. Local Brand Manager users will be able to start uploading videos on Monday.
We’ve been so busy updating Local Viking that we haven’t had a lot of time to check in on industry news. We came across a novel ChatGPT project that we’d like to share though. There’s a streaming Twitch channel that shows an AI-generated Seinfeld knockoff 24/7. It’s called Watch Me Forever and you can click that link at any time to jump in and view it. It’s always on. The script and the animations are constantly being updated. Watch Me Forever is both fascinating and bizarre.
The Super Bowl will be played on Sunday, February 12. It is the pinnacle of both American Football and marketing. TikTok released a guide for how brands of all sizes can ride the Super Bowl’s coattails and generate some buzz. They have suggestions for content that can be released before, during, and after the game. You can check it out here.
The last thing we’ve got for you this week is Artifact. It’s a new app that was designed by Instagram’s two co-founders. They describe it as “TikTok for text.” It could be a hit (these guys have a pretty good track record, after all). Maybe it’ll flop. Either way, it’s not popular yet, so everyone reading this should go snap up a good username before they’re all taken. Better safe than sorry.
That’s going to do it for this week. We will have more Local Viking features to tell you about next Friday. A lot of things we’ve been working on are all coming out of the pipeline now. Have a great weekend.