Transcript for: Get Visual – Adding Videos to Edgar to Increase Your Engagement
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[00:02] Today, we’re going to cover some of the why behind why rich media like videos do so well on social networks and how to add these videos into your Edgar account. As a reminder, we do have my lovely colleague, Zachary, here to answer any questions that you have, so feel free to go ahead and pop those into the chat bar over on the right. All right, let’s jump right on into things here.
[00:24] We’re going to start today with some background on why video is so important for social media. For one thing, these statistics here on the slide speak for themselves. If you’re not putting video out on your social networks, you’re missing out on some really big numbers and followers. As you can see, video content is also some of the most shared on social media, so within these statistics is the idea that the demographics of today, who your brand is really trying to reach is tied strongly through visual content. This is the type of content they really react to and does well on social media.
[00:55] Another thing that comes from this idea is that the visual content and the social video that you’re putting out on your networks is really grasping some of the most really influential buyers, that 18 to 33-year-old age range demographic, and thinking about this. Millennials are spending less time in front of their TVs and more time in front of their videos on their computer. their mobile devices, their laptops, and what this really means is that the videos you share on social media are more powerful than ever and are really increasing and kind of taking place of other types of rich content that might have been previously consumed on TV or elsewhere is now really coming into the social media sphere more than anywhere else.
[01:38] Another important thing to remember is that 65% of your audience, 65% of the population in general are really visual learners, so this means one of the most powerful methods you can use for video marketing is to educate your audience through visuals, and this can be with how-to videos and demos about your product, or why you stand out from your competitors, and how your product can really be a solution for your followers’ pain points.
[02:07] The next thing about video we’re going to cover is how video is one of the most authentic mediums out there. There isn’t really no way to fake it. For example, the easiest way to think about this is think about the founder of your brand or your company. They have to actually be in front of the camera to address your followers when you’re producing this content through video. When you’re in writing or anything else, this can really be done by a copyright or someone else. Of course, you’re going to always have it follow your brand voice but this in front of the camera aspect gives that human connection that people are craving so much on social media and can really help set you apart from your competitors.
[02:44] When you’re trying to create an authentic human connection, we really wanted you to keep in mind that your audience is looking for something that’s going to be a person talking about the business, not just facts about your business. When people go to social media, they wanted a laugh, they want to feel enlightened, and they want to be pulled out of their boring nine-to-five jobs that they might be in at that current time, so we’re really going to encourage you to try to center your videos around emotions and that concept that we think when you’re watching something on social media, you’re taking a break from maybe some stress, from something else going on in your life. When your videos are really tied to emotion, especially happy emotions, people are going to leave this with a really positive feeling about your brand, which can lead to some really strong brand awareness in the future. Another reason that users follow brands on social media is the solution of transparency that it creates. I’m sure you’ve heard us talk a lot here at Edgar about this concept of know, like, and trust on social media being so important. This concept really centers around the idea that your chances of creating a strong brand and loyal follower base is going to increase if you can really get people to feel these three things: that they know you, that they like you, and that they trust you. People believe that they’re going to really have a strong connection if they know what your brand stands for, and video can really help with that third trust aspect more than any other medium out there on social media.
[04:11] Because of this, videos that take users behind the scenes can be really, really powerful brand building tools. All these other ways that you can kind of think to show the more fun side or the more hidden side of your company are really strong ways again to build this know, like, and trust. It might seem boring to you, or it might seem mundane to you to introduce people to the inner workings of your business, but thinking about the fact that they don’t do it every day, and they don’t really know that inner working and the way you do, it’s really again going to create that bond and create that emotional appeal that goes beyond just that sort of writing that other posts on social might be doing.
[04:48] You know, the good news is you don’t have to be a big enterprise with a professional video team to take advantage of all of these great things that video has to offer on social media. Even if you’re a small business with an iPhone, it’s super easy to walk around your office and introduce some of the more important players on your team, to really do like a product unwrap. All of these great things can be accomplished with the tools that you already have.
[05:12] Again, if your goal is to really increase brand awareness on social media, you’ll want to introduce your brand as a solution to your pain points of your customers and create that emotional bond at the same time. This doesn’t mean every video on social you do has to be centered around an inspirational or a funny topic. You can think how you can incorporate emotions into these other types of videos here. What’s the purpose of the video? Do you want to introduce your product? These unveilings are doing so well on social media and on YouTube channels when people are taking products out of boxes, stuff like that. It gets people really excited.
[05:49] Service videos, anything you can do to show how much your company cares and how much your customer service can set you apart from your competitors goes a really long way when it’s coming straight from the voice of your customer service team rather than just typing out sort of service agreements. Culture videos, these really go beyond just what your company does and goes beyond that why your company does what it does. People are buying more and more of these days and really being loyal to these brands that show that why quite a bit. Video is just the prime way to do this.
[06:21] Again, a tour of your office, anything that’s going to be backstage at like an event that you’re going to, interviews with any of your sort of really loyal followers can be a strong way that increase that social awareness as well. How to’s are really great. Responding to tweets, a lot of people are reaching out for customer service on Twitter these days. Think what a better experience it is on describing your answer in 280 characters to actually film a short video describing how you’re going to answer their question. Again, just goes up and beyond that extra touch that helps create that personal bond with your followers or hosting live Q&A sessions on something like this, YouTube live platform or like Facebook live, can again just be really powerful to go beyond that initial interaction that typical marketing does to really get that human connection beyond your business.
[07:15] You can brainstorm ideas and do some research on social media. For example, if there’s a relevant trending topic or a hashtag that you notice pop up on your own Twitter feed a lot, add a video about this topic, about this news event or about this hashtag, and it can really help to increase the views and engagement on your posts. One of the main goals on social media is always to make sure that you’re delivering really relevant content to your followers, but beyond that relevant content, you want to put your own spin on it. There is so much chatter out there that the more authentic you can be and really get this sort of concept into your own niche and have your own voice and opinion on it, the more likely it’s going to generate some sort of talk amongst your followers in the community.
[07:59] How to videos, these are a great opportunity to promote your product without being too heavy-handed. Social media is really, really about that brand awareness more than just selling, so how to videos can kind of be a workaround to that to show like the benefit of your product without actually just asking for that sale.
[08:20] Cool. Before you actually start making these videos, I always recommend that it’s a really great idea to answer the question, why is someone going to share this video? This is a really important question to answer because the goal of any posts you’re putting out on social media should be to get your followers to want to share it out to their own networks. Think of how many really great things this opens up for you, new followers seeing your content from someone that they actually trust and know can be such a really great way to bring in not only followers who are going to be curious about you but who already has that social proof that your product or your concept has worked for someone they know.
[08:59] This is also such a powerful question because it helps that interaction of your post get more reach to. The more people are sharing it, commenting on it, liking it, the more likely the algorithms in Facebook and Twitter are really going to start to pick up on the fact that this is quality content. If you’re putting quality content out there, they want to keep people within their own apps. Facebook has a really strong way of making sure that you’re serving up content to you that you want to see in order to keep you within Facebook. The more shares, the more likes your content is going to receive, the more likely it is Facebook will surface that for more of your followers. Really, again, answering that question, why are people going to share this video, can not only help get your video quality up, but also get that video out to more of your followers.
[09:46] Having these questions guide your video creation will help produce quality content, and keep in mind, the most powerful, and shareable stories are the ones where the customer actually sees themselves reflected back into the story. This kind of goes along with this concept of like the hero’s journey that you see everywhere. People are more likely to share content that they’re relating to personally, so you’re not going to be the hero of that person’s story. You need to think when you’re creating this video how does it fit that person into your product to really start to get that connection and really start to show some strong proof of why they need your product.
[10:22] Last but not least, your headline is such an important part of your video. What you’re going to name your video, how you’re going to introduce it in your status update can be just about as powerful as the content within the video, not only to inform people and kind of prime them on what they’re about to watch, but much of the time, people are going to share content, blog posts and videos alike based on what they read in that first little section, that first headline section, and this is going to really help them decide, does this video say something that I want to really relate to, and to share it out to their own networks.
[10:57] Take some time to brainstorm different headlines. Make a list of a few of them, and really start to kind of get a little bit of an idea of what your followers like to see from your headlines by testing and experimenting with them, and not being afraid to A/B test. Hey, if I put this video out with this introduction, how many shares does it get versus if I put this video out with this headline, how many shares does it get? Really start to pay attention to these things to help inform your next video.
[11:26] Cool. When you’re making the video, there’s some trusted strategies that marketers find really useful as well. For example, we want you to make sure you’re featuring movement and really snappy things within the first few frames of the video especially if you have features like auto play on Facebook. When people are scrolling through their newsfeed or on Twitter, which especially has such a fast scrolling and a fast-paced social network, it’s really important those first few frames in those first few seconds have a lot of movement and a lot of action. That’s going to stop someone from continuing to scroll because they want to see what happens next. It’s the kind of based on that statistic that you really need to capture a viewer’s interest within the first 10 seconds or less or they’re probably going to stop watching your video and move on to something else.
[12:12] This also really helps force you keep things nice and concise. The more that you can really pack things in a really concise, punchy way, the more likely it is that people will keep watching that video because they really find benefit right from the beginning there. Adding subtitles to your video, this is such an important thing as well, and it really lets users watch them on their mobile devices when they’re out and about like in a waiting room or on a plane or something like that where they don’t have their sound on. It also comes from the statistic that only about 85% of video is ever watched on mute, so this means that if you’re not having subtitles on your video, a lot of it is going to waste, a lot of that really great content that you’re creating isn’t actually being heard or seen, so we really encourage you to place a lot of subtitles on your video to get a clearer view to your viewers of what they’re watching.
[13:02] Focus on one message per video. One message or one story for your video helps keep things really simple, again, keeping it concise. A brief video that performs really well on social media can bring in a lot of new followers, so there should be one point to every video. Keeping it brief is hard too you sometimes. What we’ve learned here at Edgar from Facebook and Twitter videos is that things under a minute really tend to do well. Our founder, Laura, here at Edgar is awesome at videos because she really is authentic about why she created the product and why it means so much to her, and this can be accomplished in such a short time. That emotion that comes across can really, again, help create that bond that goes a really long way.
[13:45] Last, don’t forget about that call to action. This is really right within that short kind of concise video idea. This call to action should go along with the one message per video, and you can type that call to action in with these subtitles. Having it at the end of your video is a really great way to say like, “Hey, learn more at our website here.” This can really motivate people to take that next step and not just kind of be left at the end of your video, so that learn more at your website here line can be used in most videos but also take some time to get a little bit creative about your call to action. Would you rather have people share the video? Would you rather have people talk about creating engagement and talk in the comment section of your video? Really think about the goal of the video, and then typing that call to action at the end so people know what to do at the wrap up.
[14:36] Cool. Remember, as we were saying before, everything you do on social media is really like an experiment. You want to go in and look at your results to really inform your next steps there. Facebook Insights is awesome for this. It’s a really powerful tool that helps answer questions like, “Hey, when are people dropping off while watching this video?” Some cool insights that you can go on is thinking about, hey, we posted this video on Tuesday during the work day but look, when we posted on the weekend, it did especially better.
[15:06] You can kind of see it right here in this graph the type of drop-off you have. Again, it’s always going to go down the longer it gets because people are, their attention is being pulled elsewhere, but if you see patterns like this with weekday versus weekend, some things to think about is like yeah, maybe people do have more time to actually watch the video on the evening hours when they’re not at work, or on the weekends when they’re not at work. Everyone’s audience is different. We do find that weekend hours typically work well for your longer form videos, but again, we can’t inform your own strategy, so this Facebook Insight part is going to be really fantastic for kind of getting that next step going on.
[15:46] Now that we know why you should add video to Edgar, we’ll go over quickly here how you actually do that. When you click to add new video in Edgar, you’re going to just click as if you’re adding any old posts to this composer screen here. It’s a super simple process. As you can see with this little video camera icon right under the text box, if you hover your mouse over it, Edgar automatically pulls up this tool tip that’ll give you all the requirements of the file types and the size types that each network does allow. Edgar supports video on Twitter and Facebook. Again, just thinking about how these networks move so quickly, we do recommend keeping the videos pretty small, but you can go ahead and upload as many videos here as you’d like by clicking this little camera icon here.
[16:31] You’ll select the file from your computer, and it’ll go ahead and start uploading to the post. You’ll go ahead and know that the video has been uploaded as this little thumbnail icon with a picture of the video will show right there. When the upload is complete, you can go ahead and introduce the video, you can add captions, anything like that in the post text box right above there, and go ahead and save the video to your library.
[16:56] Again, if you do find that you’re wanting to make longer videos to introduce a product or anything else like that, another awesome option is to add YouTube links to Edgar. You can do this right in the editor screen. Go ahead and copy and paste any YouTube link from your channel in there. Again, maybe introducing it, putting some commentary, your opinions on it in there is a really great way to set yourself apart from your competitors if you do you have a similar product. Go ahead and introduce it. Put that YouTube link right in your editor section.
[17:26] A great thing to do is also to pop over to this preview tab here. You’ll notice if you do share a YouTube or like a Vimeo link right into Edgar that the preview tab will show you it actually sends to Facebook and it sends to Twitter as this playable preview, so it’s a really great visual content, and it also adds the benefit of cross-promoting on social networks. If you guys do have a really awesome YouTube channel or if you’re trying to build a following on YouTube, having links go to Facebook and Twitter with your YouTube videos in them is a great way then to shift people from Facebook onto your YouTube channel, just letting them know it exists. These links are really awesome as well to put things like subscribe to your YouTube channel, stuff like that, again, explicitly telling people the behaviors to take, and that call to action section can be really great for increasing follows and really creating that connection.
[18:18] Awesome, so we’ll stick around for a couple of minutes here. If you do have any other questions, go ahead and pop them into the chat bar over on the right, and we’ll get those answered. We really appreciate you coming in and learning about the types of content that work well. We’re also really interested in hearing about what you guys want to learn, so if you ever have an idea on a webinar or something that you would like us to cover here at Edgar, go ahead and email [email protected], and we’d love to hear from you at any time. Thanks so much guys, and hope you have a really great rest of your Tuesday.
