How to Make Social Media Videos That Engage

Hi everyone and thanks for joining the video marketing webinar and actually the inaugural one so it's the first one of this kind. I have so long wanted to to bring together some of the most brilliant marketers in one room or at least sharing their insights to how they do marketing, how they do video marketing and to kind of to share the actionable tricks, advice, hacks so that other people can be inspired and throughout the years we've done that in all different kinds of ways and through seminars, through video marketing expert series, through video marketing automation week and also the last addition to the family is video marketing meetup which is very much more community driven and of course as also announced and also as you're a part of today is basically the last addition to the family that I'm super excited about. We've been long wanting to bridge the gap to make it even more hands-on, a bit more fast-paced and also that you're able to come back with some things that you can actually start doing the very same day or the next day so that's why we're launching this video marketing webinar series and this webinar is supposed to be a very useful for you guys and also to for you guys to to ask the questions that you might have. It's not for us that we're sitting here, it's for you and so for that I'd love for you to use the chat function. You can find it on the right side of your page. It's a chat and it's questions. Chat is open to everyone and questions is basically just to me and to Andy. So use the chat function so that we can actually get something useful out of this and also get to know who you are and what you do and what you're wondering about. So first and foremost, I'm Madeline. I'm from 23 and I'm the head of evangelism here and I've been working a long time to actually bring on all this content so that you can get your hands dirty with your video marketing and for that I'd love to get to know you. So use the chat function. You can actually add your name without last name if you'd like and please just state short what function do you have in your company? Are you a CMO, social media manager, a growth hacker? Just write that in the chat and then we'll see that people are coming in little by little. So we'll wait a bit along with that. I'd also like to love to know a little bit about how you guys are also using video these days and if you're using a little or a lot. So we see here. Okay. So Mary says she's a CMO, senior motion designer. VP of marketing. Cool. A good collection of different people from different places in the marketing team. Great. Just keep it coming. And I'll be asking you another question. So from zero to 10. And how much video are you using today? Where zero is zero is nothing. And 10 is on a daily basis. So zero. Zero, if nothing and 10 if you're doing every day. I know that it's difficult to get used to using the chat function. Here, we also see that it's the digital marketing manager here. Great. And. Hi, Kyle. Ten. You're using video every day. Three. Okay. So using Mary. Is using. about yeah some video but not a lot and there's also a business developer here nothing really okay so all over the marketing team and also uh someone who's not using as much and someone who's using a lot okay just keep on posting here and then uh then in some way me and andy will be able to to see who's here yeah president founder digital marketing social okay great then at least we know who's with us and and where we're going to place our ourselves within the video marketing space great so let's let's get kicking so i'm super excited about this uh right now we have in in the latest video marketing report we saw that 82 percent of marketers uh plan to produce more video in 2018 i mean we're soon in 2019 so we'll see how much we're going to be producing then as we're moving into a time when everyone is going to be doing video but how do you actually just go about doing it as everyone is saying these days and for that we are so lucky to have uh the co-founder and cmo uh of orbit media studios as our first guest i first saw him as a speaker at content marketing world i think he was like 2015 or 16. it was extraordinary extremely inspired also by his hands-on and extremely actionable things i have never seen as many phones lined up to take uh take photos of uh of his slides uh so it was very clear that when we're going to do a webinar that was very actionable and hands-on that i wanted uh andy to be here and share lots of his insights and hacks and tricks of how he does scroll stopping social media videos so uh welcome andy thank you for having me i'm glad to be here this is the very first one yay the inaugural episode what an honor thank you thank you so much for being here with us and i know that you already have uh prepared some slides and some that are based on some of the insights that you've recently done also with a lot of the testing and hacking that you've done with video yourself and i'd love for you to just dive into them and then just go ahead and share some of your insights. so if you guys keep the chat function also possible for you to uh to ask questions there we might pick up some there on the way uh if not we're gonna gather some of them also towards the end. perfect this is all about you guys any question at any point that we're here for you so this can be as much of a q a as you'd like but it is helpful to start with some context and to answer this big question why video or try to help uh explain why this is such a powerful. format for content. the um one way to think about it is that there are the way that the human brain works there are sort of uh rules that determine how visually prominent anything is that were that is in our field of vision uh and this could be true uh on a web page this is true in social media streams this is just true offline uh generally speaking there's a visual hierarchy and big things are more prominent than small things. and in digital. things that are high up. are more prominent the things that are farther down. like on a web page. uh contrast of course is a part an aspect of visual hierarchy and things that are contrasting colors and very. uh from the things around them. uh in their tone or color of course great. prominence but the format movement this is the most important part movement is more prominent than images and images are more prominent than text. i'm a writer i love writing i write words every day but i totally understand that that words. format. are important. i think the video allows the visitor to read and video allows the visitor to just view it's just more it captures attention better it holds attention better just because of the way that the human eye the biology the brain it all comes together in the in this. super important law of visual hierarchy. that movement is more powerful more visually prominent than images and images are more visually prominent than text. so we this is why video is. so important why social media websites are pushing. it to the top of social streams why it is uh so convincing and effective at building trust and there's really i can break it down now i'd say there's probably three main types of videos. that we use in marketing uh one of those videos that we use before people are even visitors we use them in social media and we're going to go into the details about how to create a. really powerful social media video based on our research and our best practices and that's for people that aren't even maybe don't even know about you yet uh they're just exploring right. there's also videos that can catch people's attention and teach them something because they have an information need and those are videos that work well in search google youtube and videos that can go well into your website in the blog in the resource section the teaching stuff the helpful useful stuff. uh the things that. make that that create brand awareness uh by and build a loyal audience then there's the conversion videos the videos that tell your story that build trust video testimonials videos that go into your origin or your passion or explain. how you do that thing you do so well and that's the conversion videos we're going to talk about each of those examples of each of those. but i would say that if there is a of a kind of a formula that always works if this is a formula that always works it is to turn your top x into y. digital marketers knew this forever i could argue this is the main value of analytics is to show you what your top access so you can turn it into something else. and uh so as an example like whatever your top facebook. post has been or social media post. use that as the subject line of your next newsletter and i can almost guarantee your results. because it worked because it's vetted because it has been demonstrated as effective at leveraging human psychology and capturing that that person's attention if it worked in a busy social stream it's likely to work in a crowded inbox. another one is just turn your top articles into a guide madeline knows this she's got a whole family of content that she builds right this is the smartest. type of content marketing right is to not just do a thing to. a series of things combine little things in the big things. madeline you love this tactic i know yeah i love it. yeah it's this is repurposing the art of repurposing turn your top blog post in an infographic i'm doing this right now for a thing that i'm working on that goes that i'll be publishing soon. upgrade the format again in you know images are more powerful than text. text it worked as text it will work even better as an image or more importantly it worked as text it will work great as a video. right whatever your top thing is make it a moving thing. you've shown a voice and body language. with actual video like we're doing now and this is a quote from larry kim which i love i mean he's he says that everything we publish is either a donkey or a unicorn. and that your job is to find the unicorns and make baby unicorns. so when that's true are in that analytics has told us that that that thing is good and that our audience like that and they were engaged with that i had good engagement metrics good time on page good good you know low bounce rate or high social engagement whatever that was wherever it was. and if you just look at your analytics this is always true just look at your analytics and i filtered by. all pages report to just see blog posts. the time the the visibility of some of these blog posts is far greater than others right there are no straight lines is always this exponential curve. this is these are the things that should be repurposed in this more compelling alternate format of video. so i'm going to talk now about social media videos my social streams are filled with video why. because the social networks want to keep me engaged. on their social website and their social media website and they know that by pushing videos to the top of my social stream that i'm more likely to stay engaged to spend more time to to. you know sit there on linkedin or facebook or whatever i'm not actually a facebook user but linkedin so here's how i make social media videos to leverage that to benefit my marketing. this is a screen you can see i'm in this room right now this is a photo i took of my office my desk this is the chair i'm sitting in now. i have a window right there natural light i have a tripod and a camera right there actually using a different camera now and simpler one i have a microphone using a different microphone now and i have camtasia which is important you'll see in a second. and i'm sitting in a chair okay this is my video studio the nice. my friend amy landino says the best camera to use for video is the camera that's closest to you. you don't need a fancy camera you don't need a big setup just you know for social media videos and i'm going to show you a couple of things that i've done. i've done a lot of social media videos it can be this camera right here. okay so here's how they break down i smile start with a smile first impressions right. i sometimes sit and stare at the camera with my normal grumpy face until i think of something that makes me smile and then i start. and then i introduce myself. i tell the visitor what i'm doing here the viewer what i'm doing here then i summarize the article and making a one minute commercial for that piece of content i'm going to drastically improve the click through rate from social media to my website. i'm making a much more. complete. compelling call to action to visit this is not a tweet that would just. ten words this is not a linkedin post that you know it has a couple of. sentences this is a video commercial and i'm going to spend about half an hour on it which sounds crazy but you'll see in a second it makes sense. and then i have my call to action right this is why they should click this is why i would help them and i thank them for watching. the next step so i want to stop that recording it goes into camtasia which was the tool i used to capture it screen flow camtasia there's several of these. basically it's any tool that will. let you add captions if you do it directly native from your phone to write onto the social site there are apps i think that will add captions. there's probably other tools so here i am i just go to modify captions add captions and then what camtasia does is it makes little segments in here so that i can just. listen to myself talk and then type while i'm listening so that the captions go in for each of these little segments this is going to add you know ten ten minutes to the job of course. then i'm going to make. a post but the post doesn't just have a link back to the article i'm going to add campaign tracking code. so that i'm going to know the source of the traffic and would be able to attribute those visitors. to this social media post so the campaign sources linkedin the medium of course is social. campaign name something specific to that video name and then it depends to the end of the link to your article those three little attributes those parameters source medium and name every campaign. you're probably using this already if you're not you should notice all. over the place when you click on stuff the url and the address bar always has these three things at the end there. attribution and then i'm going to make a minor masterpiece of a social media post with the headline and secondary headline and numbers and hashtags and line breaks make it bigger and. mentions and i'm going to add the video with the caption and then the link with the campaign tracking code and here's what it looks like and here's what it sounds like and feels like this is really this is an example of the post. if you can hear that. call. 27. web design. tips based on. research. it goes on. get the idea i'm pausing that you don't need to watch the whole thing, but this is a social media post that i'm literally spending like 20 minutes or a half hour on. that sounds crazy right who spends half an hour creating one social media post well I do and you'll see why I do. And again every trick in the book i'm mentioning the people who I included in the article and i'm a big fan of collaborative content I almost never publish an article without including a contributor in it. Why would I. When you include people in the article and makes the article better. Quality goes up. makes the article more likely to get social traction because they may share it in ally and creating content is an ally and promoting content so. And it's fun good for your network and it's good to make friends like madeline I are collaborating right now. And also look for other reasons to mention people with you making this post a few days after the thing went live and someone commented on it, you can thank the commenters as you share it here again and trying to pull people into the content. And then one more trick to. Maximize. The visibility of this super hardworking social media post. These three dots up in the corner. This is run any site. Will give you a little menu and one of them is to get the link to this specific post each social media post has its own url actually. And then I'm going to share that with. My marketing manager the person next to me a couple of friends are company group chat. And I'm going to ask them to quickly go in and interact with the post either by just liking it or leaving a comment. And those early interactions will trigger the social network to make it much more visible and show it to many more people. Looking for evidence that it's engaging. This sounds weird I know it's actually exactly how it all works now in the old days we just had to make an ad. That promoted our business and then it evolved where we had to make content of course we're all doing content to promote the business. And then I just suggested making an ad in social media to promote the content that promotes the business. And then weird enough yes very meta. I'm promoting. The social ad that promotes the content that promotes the business by getting early interactions on that through mentions and through sharing the link directly with. Fellow content promoters and friends and coworkers. The outcome of tracking the outcome. The first time I did this I got three hundred ninety eight visitors I got a subscriber and this social post lasted for like a week it kept getting traffic for a week that's unheard of in social media right. Is that these things last for like four minutes or something now this is going to last for days. I'm promoting. Because social media networks are trying to show it to more people right these this like golden era for linkedin video especially the next option the next example two hundred and seventy visits and three subscribers over two weeks that is. You know if a typical social media post gets you know a couple of clicks or maybe a dozen or two this is ten times that. You know I think an average social media post might get three or five this is a hundred times. You know ten times the results. Ten times the effort. Half an hour for creating a post but a hundred times the results hundreds of visits. Look at this one by third example twelve hundred visits thirteen subscribers totally attributable to that link right here's my conversions my newsletter subscribers over a two week lifespan. Bottom line it's not the best content that wins it's the best promoted content that wins we need to work harder at our content. Actually most people are not working very hard at this kind of content but. This is a classic example. And by the way. If you say well and you get those results in linking as you've been linked in network we can all have linked in networks and here's a kind of a separate social tip. Be a bit permissive with who you connect with on linked in because it's a content platform. You wouldn't decline a follower in any other network why would you decline one in linked in. Right so my rule is to connect with anybody in my industry anywhere in the world. Or to connect with anybody in my city in any industry at all. And if you happen to be in Chicago and in marketing. You get a message. Back to you saying thanks for connecting. And of course if you're a student in Sydney Australia or chemical engineer in Pakistan there's no reason for me to connect with you I just ignore those. But this does growing your linked in network can be really helpful in increasing the reach of these videos. Size of your reaches this is a function of the size of your network. So. Madeline that's an example of a breakdown of a social media video we can certainly talk about the other types of videos well the kind of marketing in the conversion videos but. I hope that that. Kind of. Give people a few things to think about. I'm going to come out of screen sharing now and we can answer some questions and continue the conversation. This is this is definitely amazing I so good that you can actually share things that are very hands on because it's so easy to just jump into the very. Big picture and also be afraid of sharing the hacks that one oneself have found. And I'm very happy that you did and we've gotten so many questions along the way so let's just jump into them and then we'll see if we have we dive into to other other things as well but. Great. One question that is very much related to this is you basically would just in a linked in post where you shared a video of yourself and how. How that was also linking things into into your article so. And one question here from from start here and have you noticed any difference in terms of performance if your video content on LinkedIn and LinkedIn is scrappy or better produced. It's a really great question how important is. The production quality. To what extent does production quality correlate with success. I think it's people one of the reasons people don't do more videos because I think they have to go to a really high level of quality and I think that's a mistake. It's not necessary when but what does correlate with success in social media is those captions. That's worth the extra time because the captions give it stopping power. The visitor is scrolling their fingers on a piece of glass right or or a mouse wheel or a trackpad. So how do you stop. Them as they scroll past the video will play by default they don't click to play in social media but if if you don't have captions they they don't know what you're talking they can't hear you. So. I don't think that we need to worry about making I think scrappy is good but caption and fine but captions are the main differentiator between good and great social media videos. So that leads me to another question of you have examples of brands that. That repurpose. Social content really well. Oh well. It's the best content marketing programs are normally the ones that have. Plans to build families of content that span across multiple formats. So as an example I was talking to a friend Ian and Clary from razor social he and I were talking yesterday and he said he's going to be doing this thing and he's been making articles about it. And a guide that you can download for it which will help them gather. You know. Grow a list to promote webinars around it. And the webinars will later be repurposed as video. You can see right away this is this is how the great minds think is they don't make a thing. They make a series of things in multiple formats over a span of time to capture and keep the attention of that of that audience. So. Any the the big publishing brands of course are some of the best at this. Any brand that has a webinar series where we're in we're within one now. That's working can be on the And then for me is just a big proud. From. On a. B2C level, but I also think that a very recent example of Drift is actually using this in a very good way in the sense of being very personal, where the CMO himself, I think it's the CMO, Dave, who has been in some way almost creating a series himself, where he's basically doing, like chatting directly to his camera, walking on the street and directing people to the landing page to the actual piece that he's written or the big long version of video that he has done. And of course, Jason Miller, who recently left LinkedIn, but he's also done some amazing things when it comes to figuring out how to do formats that in some way we, have looked at in some way looked at tv series like looked at inspiration from from entertainment as we see is becoming more and more trend these days uh seeing that jason miller also had uh i think it was called marketing dinners or dinner with marketers or something yeah yeah that was really good and bringing together four people around the table for some really useful meaty marketing discussions was a really interesting format and and where he also basically linked that very much into the services that linkedin provides so it made it very it was content that was useful it was fun and but it also linked very much to what linkedin was selling in some way it's a good example so i really liked what he was doing there yeah linkedin is so good at this yeah they do everything in every format they're gonna make they publish a magazine like a print magazine yeah it's crazy and i'm just going to pick up one more question for you uh there any um so uh does the length of the video differ according to what channel you posted to this is um yeah a question from mary um not that i know of these aren't necessarily i mean what i think about when i think about the social videos is um does the psychology of the social follower or of the video viewer vary vary from linkedin to facebook to instagram or other channels i don't really think it does i think that the psychology of your audience is mostly the same in that context it's what they see as they scroll it's what what captures their attention um the length may be determined partly by how much you want to say to promote that article that you're publishing or that you're promoting but it doesn't really seem likely that you would publish drastically different lengths of videos in different channels um when you could go through the whole thing and you could go through the content marketing type videos i think the length there can vary a lot these are like short commercials social media but the content marketing videos the length can vary a lot this weekend i'll be recording a how to set up google analytics video that thing might be 20 minutes long if i was doing a how to make social media video for linkedin probably three four minutes we just did it in no time so the length should be determined by the by the purpose and the topic and a content media video it's likely about a minute no matter where you put it so do you have any kind of answer for like and based on the videos that you've been creating over time uh what works best in different channels on youtube facebook twitter uh would you say that one place it's possible to have longer than other places well where you host the video would depend on the purpose of the video so youtube videos are usually something that's marketing teaching type video you host it in youtube and you put it also on your website and it's similar to the question of how long should my articles be and the ultimate answer to best practices around length are it should be exactly as long as it needs to be to answer every one of the related questions and not one second longer so i don't have best practices for how long a content marketing video should be the length should be driven by the the the topic is it going to be a shorter video there are statistics i think like the average um uh pop like viral video on youtube is like two minutes and 55 seconds or there's some number but if you follow that best practice i think that uh you may not be produced it may be pushing you in a direction that isn't ideal for your audience make it as long as it needs to be to to explain that thing you know to be the best video on the topic in content marketing our job is to make the best thing on the topic is the best thing might be you know three minutes it might be 30 minutes um i've made videos like how to rank higher in google in five minutes it's a very specific tactic step by step um you can do it in five minutes these are the things that i've made that you know it's uh i did it uh two weeks ago i did an eight hour uh content marketing master class for marketing for marketing props in san francisco wow it was it was hard to fit it into eight hours it's the content marketing master class it was very it was very very dense um so it just depends on the topic and you could see that people were staying on for eight hours of straight video content there it was not it was live but it was recorded and um uh it was i think the feedback i got was that it was really engaging because you have if you teach something in that format for that long you have to always you know take breaks and use examples and make it interactive and ask questions and do live things it can't just be like an eight hour powerpoint um there's special things that there's special tactics that you use when you use very long formats it's like a book you know if you've ever written a book or read a book it's got you got to break it up into chapters you need to keep them scanning through by using uh short paragraphs sometimes uh visuals of course will keep people engaged um so whatever it is that you're doing if you go into a very long format you need to make sure that you break it up right jokes images um you know uh other people's voices contributor quotes right um this is people don't dislike long content people dislike boring content so the key is to make it non-boring so we should have actually squeezed in a bit more of um jokes here andy this is a pretty short one but um i've got a joke for you what format for content do pirates love most webinars oh yeah that is a horrible joke but it was perfect for right now because we're on a webinar true that's true and that can be done so many ways as well amazing just one last question before we start rounding up a bit uh or i'll actually have two because i'm one for me as well uh so adrian here is uh is asking uh if you're i'm not sure exactly it says reproducing for producing for a purpose of repurposing so do you do that sure yeah i i don't just make one thing i make that thing with the plan to make other things so for example we just did our blogger our blogger survey which takes us like 150 hours and we do it once a year we get a thousand bloggers to answer 15 questions that becomes a giant article that goes into all the detail with all of the slides and all of the graphics and diagrams and charts and then that immediately gets turned into an infographic we make social video to promote that article we plan in advance and give prepared to do interviews around it we write guest posts for it specifically for separate websites giving them the scoop we repackage the data and give it to some of the bigger sites so that they can find their own insights from it marketing process an example they'll be publishing a their their version of it as well so lots of outreach lots of different formats lots of pr basically we don't just don't just make a thing and then start promotion make that thing designed in many ways and that will drive you to repurpose it into different formats with that plan in advance so whatever that article you know you saw you several charts in this in this that i just made those are repurposed charts from presentations and from articles so when i make a chart i know that i'm not just going to use it in one article that chart is going to immediately go into some presentations it's going to go into some videos i'm going to use it when i pitch some guest posts for some related things or some of you you're all welcome to ask for the slides yes take the slides use them however you want use those images however you want we want this content to reach farther so um yes the repurposing is part of the original plan that's amazing god it's so much meaty stuff here and i think that we need to have another webinar where we can actually move down the funnel as well because now we've kind of been touching on the social media videos and the awareness side so i we need to get going with an extra webinar one day andy sure so let's dive into one last question before we round up so if you would uh give uh one one piece of advice uh to the marketers watching now based on on all the good stuff that you've been sharing today what would that be hit the record button it is uh most of your competitors are probably not doing it uh if you are early to it you will see a lot of people who are not doing it and they're going to be a greater advantage sooner um whatever the the reason why people don't do video is not that video is hard it's that video is scary so i don't need you don't have to go to therapy but think for a minute why you're not doing why you don't do things what are your own biases know thyself this is going to be good for your marketing what are your biases what are your inhibitions what are those three things all of you may be thinking these right i don't do it because My so very Because or see themselves, I don't want to watch these again later. I don't need to see it more than once as I edit it. But get past the emotion, the emotional inhibition that prevents you from creating more and creating better and going deeper and bigger. And that's going to give you a very good outcome in 2019. Amazing. Thank you so much, Andy, for taking time to share and also that you actually share the tricks that you have down the sleeve. And thank you guys for joining and also to be using the chat function. It's sometimes a bit scary too, not only to do video, but also to join in chats. So I hope that you found this webinar useful. And as Andy just said, he will be gladly sharing his slides, like a lot of you have been asking for. So they will be shared. And then basically give us feedback. Let us know how you want the next webinar to be. And if you have... If you have wishes for other contributors to the webinar. And then I guess it's just about saying bye and thank you, guys. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. My pleasure, Madeline. Anytime. Great. Bye.