Did you know that Team Edgar hosts daily Facebook Lives? Join us daily as we chat about social media, marketing, business, and entrepreneurship. Here’s a recent Edgar Live on how to become an expert at social media video.
We often hear from our community that video is some of the hardest content to think of and create. Well today, we’re going to share 6 tips for better social media videos.
How to Tell A Story on Video: Draw Them In
Now Facebook has said they are prioritizing videos that are 3 minutes or longer. Content that is not long enough to craft a narrative that’s going to hold a viewer’s attention until the end will not be prioritized. As a content creator, what does this tell you? You need to tell a story with every video and that starts right at the start. Your videos need to pull someone in really quickly with a hook. We talk about how to have a great hook in a lot of different ways. One of my favorites comes from the YouTuber Sunny Lenarduzzi, and she calls it the HOT script.
HOT:
- H=Hook
- O=outcome
- T=Testimonial
Let’s break that down. H stands for the hook. You have to have something to hook people i in that first three seconds so that they stop their scroll watch your video. O means outcome. You have to tell a story of transformation. You have to show that you can get your audience an outcome that they want in this video. People should know within the first couple of minutes of your video that the outcome they’re going to get if they put in the time and effort to watch the whole video all the way through.
And T stands for testimonial and that means social proof. Your audience wants to know that you’ve been able to provide results to other people, that other people have consumed your content in the past and seen results from it.
These 3 things should be present within the first few minutes of any video you create.
How to Tell a Story on Video: Use Your Own Story
Often entrepreneurs create products and services to solve their own problems. So their audience members are past versions of themselves. In fact, this is part of MeetEdgar’s origin story. Laura created the Edgar software because she needed it for herself.
So what is it about your story that you could weave into why you created your service, course, product, podcast —whatever it is? If you talk about your own personal story, it’s easier to connect this narrative with your viewers. Your viewers are often that past version of yourself, looking to get over a specific pain point and improve their lives and reach their goals. So if you’re afraid to jump on the video bandwagon, remind yourself that it’s just talking to a past version of yourself and that’s going to produce videos that connect.
Everyone says you should be “authentic” and “vulnerable” on social media with your audience. That doesn’t mean you have to share every single secret of your life. Vulnerability on social media doesn’t mean showing all of your scars. You can pick and choose the lessons that you actually want to teach in your social media videos.
Think about the lessons that you learned over the years and how you can be a mentor to help make sure you’re saving people time so they don’t have to go through the struggle and the failures that you went through, but you can set them up for success, sharing your story and how you improved.
How to Tell a Story on Video: Use Your Analytics
If you’re able to have a great hook, offer an outcome, give testimonials, and share your own story, then you have the ingredients of an engaging video. But your job isn’t over. It always takes some trial and error to figure out what your audience likes and what keeps them watching your video. You can figure out what that is by paying attention to your social media analytics. Your analytics will tell you when people drop off and your retention rate. If you regularly share videos and then review your analytics, you can start to see where it is that people are going to drop off and what language you use or what concept you’re covering when they do drop off, and this gives you the ability then to know what is holding your viewer’s attention and what’s losing it. From there, you can use that information to keep improving your social media videos.
Structure Your Videos to Increase Views
Every piece of content that you’re putting out on social media should lead to something else. Tell your audience what you want them to do next. For example, if I put out a video about how to blog properly, what question will my viewers ask next after they watch that? Well, if I teach them how to blog really well, their next question might be, “Well, how do I get readers on my blog?” Then my next video could be about how to drive traffic to that blog. Creating sequential videos that lead into the next is how you get to hook your viewers in and make sure they really look forward to your video.
Creating a content calendar and planning out your videos makes it much easier to structure them so they lead to the next step. Here at MeetEdgar, we choose a content theme for each quarter. Then we brainstorm all possible topics that relate to that theme and we map out each piece of content we’re going to create so they are in a sequence that keeps solving problems for our audience.
Planning Your Videos
You want to train people to keep watching your videos and get in the habit of expecting your videos. Share your videos on a consistent basis, whether it’s a daily or weekly practice. If you only post videos or go live once a week, make sure it’s on the same day every week. If you post videos every day, make sure it’s at the same time every day. Let people know when you go live or are on video and invite them to watch you.
It’s much easier to stay consistent sharing social media videos if you know what you’re going to be talking about on these videos. If you need ideas for video content, download this worksheet to brainstorm ideas for your content. We believe in identifying content categories or content pillars to help you come up with content ideas. This will help you create a long list of ideas for social media videos.
One easy way to come up with video content ideas is to think about the commonly asked questions you get from clients or prospective clients. What if you got on and answered those questions on a video? This is great because you know if one person in your ideal audience has asked this question, it’s likely that 10 more people have probably had that same question and they’re just not reaching out to you. If you’re answering it over social media, you can get ahead of any objections or questions and you’re going to be serving your community in a proactive way.
Also, think about ways that you can bring other people into your video marketing with interviews. If you go to MeetEdgar’s YouTube channel, you’ll notice that we do community spotlight interviews about how our users engage with our software. We do this not only to gather some testimonials but also to inspire our community with different workflows that they might not have thought of by themselves.
We also do interviews with business owners who are building their own businesses. We do this to spread some goodwill to small businesses right now but we also do this to have a collaboration and increase our reach. If we do a video with you, it’s likely you will share this out on your own social media feeds as well and that gets our brand a little more awareness from your followers. It also gets you some awareness with our followers. Collaboration is what it’s all about, and we can all gain from that. So bring other people in. You would be surprised at how many people are truly excited to have an interview opportunity with you.
Upcycle Your Videos
Finally, once you do have some social media videos recorded, get the most out of those videos by upcycling them. You can take one long-form video and cut that up into different 15-20-second intervals. Editing a video is really easy to do in any video editing software and you can use these shorter clips for Instagram stories, Facebook stories or TikToks. You’ll get more mileage out of your videos which will save you time and effort!
So if you have never done a social media video before, it’s time to hop on the bandwagon! It’s a really fun medium to connect with your viewers. It lets your get to know your brand voice and it builds their trust with you faster.
