Winning Social Media with Video at Scale

Okay, nice to see so many people. You never know when there are three tracks. I don't know who I'm competing with though. This is just the same, so let's jump into it. First of all, Emilia said a little bit about StoryKit. I'm just gonna tell you that we are the leading video automation platform helping you distribute content at scale in the format that the audience actually consume video, as you all know. We're gonna talk more about this. And who am I? I am the communications or marketing director at StoryKit. I was a journalist. I love telling stories. I actually started out wanting to be a singer, but that's another story. If you want to follow me on LinkedIn, you can use that QR code. Modern, huh? It's gonna come back in the end if you realize that I should follow this person on LinkedIn. So what's the challenge? I think we all know this, and I'm gonna kick in so many open doors, but let's repeat. This is something LinkedIn talks about, the attention crisis. I mean, we have a gazillion numbers telling us that we need to do something to grab people's attention today. We just can't sit around thinking they're gonna find us because of some divine intervention. And this is the number that they're focusing on. 81% of B2B ads fail to gain attention. This is LinkedIn's number that I've stolen from them. How do we solve this today on social media? There are two things that we can do. We can publish consistently, and we can use video. We can try every trick in the book to be viral, to be loved, to be funny, but these are the two things that will work. Our CEO used to say this, to any company looking to truly win in social, my single best advice is simple. Publish more. If there's one thing you can do, just publish more. But what about, publish more. But what about my, more. And why do we say that? Well, we see and we know that winning brands publish a lot. If you want to do something when you come home today, you take your favorite influencer or favorite company, and you count the amount of times they have published today or last week. Heidi, my friend and colleague here, who you can meet in the booth afterwards. She counted for a week. This is one week, one feed. And as you see, they publish a lot. So when your boss comes up to you and say, I don't want you to publish more than once a week because we're gonna tire out the audience, just say, that's not the way it's gonna happen, honey. Maybe not, honey. But they publish more posts they did in a day. In a day. And they still have like a couple of million followers. And why is this? Well, once again, there are so many numbers showing this, but we know that social platforms love quantity. Why? Because they earn money on it. When we publish a lot, they love us. When we don't publish, they forget about us. And the audience forgets about us. so, if there's any place in the world right now where you can say out of sight, out of mind, it's social platforms. Once again, think of your favorite influencer. If he or she hasn't published in a couple of days, maybe you don't even notice because you don't go around thinking about what they're gonna publish. But if they show up consistently, they're just gonna be there for you. But what about the quality thing? How can quantity beat quality? I mean, in this big AI flow of crap, how can quantity beat quality? We've been saying this for years, not just because of AI. We've been saying this for years because we know that quantity is the foundation for quality in social media because we don't know what quality is. I can spend thousands of krona and thousands of hours creating what I think will be the most perfect piece of content and put it into a social media and everyone hates it. Or I can do hundreds of very simple pieces and just throw them out and see what happens. And when something works, I do more of that and I try to figure out why and so forth and so forth. And when I figure out what works, the audience will have changed, the algorithm will have changed, so I'll have to change again. But no one has succeeded on social media by posting a little bit here. And a little bit there, regardless of how expensive that material was. And what about video? Well, I guess here, this is really just kicking in those doors because we all know why video is important, but it drives results, first of all. Once again, I could pick so many numbers. These are some of my favorites. We know that we share video more than anything else. We know that it outperforms stuff. We know that it gets more engagement. We know that people remember what they see in a video more than what they read in a text. And that last number is a new one from LinkedIn, too. They say that they see 5x more conversions when combining video ads with lead gen forms. Why? Because the social platforms also love video. Because it makes the visitors stay. So almost all platforms have moved towards the video-first reality. Why? Because they wanted to so badly? No. Because we wanted to watch video so badly. We could see this firsthand because we were working with text and video on social media 10 years ago when this happened, the big pivot towards video. And we could see that it wasn't the platforms. They tried to push video down in the algorithms. But the audience wanted it. So badly that eventually everything had to change. So video lets the audience stay on the platform. It's the best way to share something. And it's also perfect for storytelling. And as we all know, it's both the platforms and the marketer's favorite thing. So this should mean that everyone are using video, right? Right? You know the meme, right? Obviously not enough. This is a survey that we did where we asked marketers if they were using video for ads. And as you can see, over 50% aren't even using it yet. Even though LinkedIn are telling us that you get 5x more conversions with video. So that's a little link to the report if you want to read more of it. And why? Because marketers are exhausted. We have more tasks. This is my colleague, Heidi, showing you how many hats she has on an ordinary workday. No, but you know, we're social media managers. We're video creators. We're writers. We're performance marketers. We're event people. We're you name it. We're doing it. We don't have time. We also need to publish on more channels. My dad was a marketing head of marketing. Marketing at a big company when I grew up. He didn't have this amount of channels that he had to publish to every day. He doesn't understand what I do at all. And more formats. You can't just do video. Even though you should do more of it. You can't just do text. You can't just do memes, unfortunately. So we're doing more. Do we get more money? Has anyone in the room, if you're in marketing or comms, gotten more budget this year? Anyone? Increased budget somewhere? I asked this in Sweden when I was talking there for 500 marketers. One woman just... And everyone was like, what did you say? No one does. Because we get less. And if it's not enough that we are doing more with less, we also have to meet all the assumptions of what video should be. And now I might be making someone mad. But first of all, we have the blockbuster mindset where companies hire experts and teams and creating films, not videos. They buy the fancy cameras. See a lot of them here. Or just they're giving up and handing the job to the agencies. Do something with a high production value. And that's good. It's fun. It's nice. It's amazing. It can do... It can change things for companies to do this. But in a social-first world, it's impossible to scale. If someone comes in and says, hey, I'd like a video done for these five recruitment ads. Or, hey, we're doing this report. Do you want a couple of videos on it? No, I don't think so. It's expensive. It's time-consuming. It will create bottlenecks. We did this in our company long before we had this amazing video tool. And we went to the video motion director and said, hey, can we do a video on this? And he said, yes, in three weeks. And then we have the new way. Which is also a very lovely way to create video. This is the way my 14-year-old daughter creates videos. She uses cheap and free software. She uses templates. She's recording with a phone and she's doing things influencer style. Using her brother as a prop. And this is lovely. This is something everyone should experiment with. And everyone should do. But if you have a company that cares about the brand, it's super hard. It's almost impossible. Impossible to have control over the brand when people start doing this. It's difficult to tell different kinds of stories. How do you do that influencer kind of style video on your report? Also, the results are varying at best. And it really doesn't suit everyone. Our customers are often, we meet loads of marketers who are 55-year -old ladies that don't want to be on camera. We also meet 25-year-old young guys who don't want to be on camera either. And let's talk about just this for a second because it annoys me. Because today it's so super trendy to go out there to have this kind of brand that these people have. And go out and say, this is what everyone should do. Just film yourself saying thought leading things and just put it on LinkedIn and it's going to fly. If you're good at filming yourself, saying thought leadership things, then you should. The problem is that most people hate it. I mean, you see me. I work at this cool digital sauce company. I obviously like to be on stage. Well, this is me trying to film myself. Yeah, works. The person laughing in the background is my colleague, Heidi. We never published anything from that. And then we have the idea of AI. So you're an AI video tool. So we can do unicorns or whatever? Yeah. So AI video is super cool. But it's still difficult to tell stories with AI in video. Because what AI today is good at is creating clips. If I need a flying unicorn, I can create that clip. It will not tell the story I'm trying to tell. Also, to be able to do these videos, you will need to be very good at AI. So when I say that we're an AI native tool, it means that we're using the language models to create the videos, not creating clips. So the risk here, when you're taking all this into consideration, is that you won't create any videos. And we see this happen all the time. We bought this new tool, or we're going to do some stuff in Canva, or we have this person who likes video. Then we look at their feed, and it's like nothing, nothing, nothing. Because we don't have the time. So we need to think differently. And as I've said to a lot of people out there today, it's not a matter of either or. It's a matter of both. Everything should be video. Not just the few hero campaigns that already are video, or the thought leadership that you already put out there. How do we do that? We need to do two things, once again. We need to use what we already have, and we need to automate. Because one thing that marketers don't know is that we're sitting on gold mines. We love to create new things. Okay, so we're going to have a video strategy. We're going to create new things. We're going to have a new type of way of talking. We're going to do new, we're going to talk about new things. What we don't remember, because it's a bit boring, is that we have a homepage with like a thousand of pages of amazing content that is just sitting there. And what do I mean with content? Well, you know, all that content that never gets any light, that is buried on the page and forgotten forever. You publish once and you forget about it. The blog posts, the presentations, the reports, the white papers, the press releases, the customer testimonials, get it. The recruitment ads. Are they good content? Yes, they are. They're really good content. Are the press releases really good content? Yes, they are. They are good stories, and they are also the thing that you should be communicating. The dancing on TikTok? Fun. The press release? Important. And why is this pure communication gold? Because it's sitting there, waiting to be distributed. Please. Everything is already written, paid for. Someone has put blood, sweat, and tears into doing this. It's 100% on brand. And if there's anything that is difficult in the world of video, it's to stay on brand. What stories are we telling? Can I tell this story on LinkedIn? Well, did you find it on our homepage? Then it's okay. And these aren't just assets. As I said, these are the core of your company's communication that no one sees. Isn't that a waste? So instead, you can take every piece of content and turn it into videos with an S. Because a blog post, a press release, and so forth, is worth more than just one distribution post. It's worth 10, 15, 20. If you have a report, you can just fill the year's content calendar. I could bet you almost that I could fill all your distribution calendars just for a year, just from things that you already have. Come on and talk to me afterwards. How do we do it? Because this is what we do. Me and Heidi, we are the marketing team. So we swear by the 90-10 rule. 90% of the content that we distribute is made from content that we already have. I've just mentioned all of them. You get the point. The remaining 10% come from other divine inspiration, namely Heidi's divine inspiration. And then she does something fun. The other post can also be fun. Something different. And this makes it possible for us, while being a really, really small marketing team, to publish daily on several platforms. We've experimented with publishing 100 posts in a month. We've experimented with so many different things because we can. And the way we do this is we automate. And when I say automate, I mean automate. Our best example right now are press releases. So you can push your press release into Session, for example, and get an email from us saying, here are the five videos that we made from your press release. If they're good enough, post them. If you want to change anything, edit them. That's how far we want to push the automation. We don't want you to do anything. We want you to get these videos for your blog posts and your press releases without even lifting a finger. And one example of how you can just use one asset and turn it into a lot of assets, I thought it would be suitable to mention webinars. So we are always using our webinars as much as we can because, hey, webinars are great. We used them before I hosted a webinar with LinkedIn. The untapped secret to ROI. Wonder what that is? Video and LinkedIn. Yeah. And we used it to create videos to get people to come there. This is a way of communicating. And this is not just about getting people to sign up for the event. It's also brand building. Look at us. We're talking to LinkedIn. Look at us. We're hosting webinars. Look at us. We're fun. Of course, we use the during. We use the clips from the webinars a lot afterwards to show that we are a thought-leading, cool brand that are hooking up with LinkedIn now and then. And we use the after. And when I mean after, the first thing we did was write an article totally based on the webinar. We transcribed it using you-know-what, and then we just fixed it up. And after that, Haiti could easily just push a few buttons and get a bunch of videos out of it. So with this very, very simple way of producing videos, we had content for a month. We could probably have had content for two months. We're still publishing these videos. Either we create new ones or we publish the same. So the question here, because yes, I know creativity. Yes, I know what people talk about as production value and stuff like that. But the point here is not to stop doing what you're doing. The point is to add to what you're already doing without getting exhausted and getting more time to spend on those tasks where you definitely need to be present. And as we all know, because we're living in an age of AI, this is happening. Your competitors are looking into stuff like this. How can we create? How can we double our amount of video creation without adding to the team or without adding to the budget? So the question is, or should be, how much automation do you want? Because different tools, because there are other tools out there, gives you different options. Do you want to go straight from text to video? Do you want to help transcribing video clips or audio recordings? Finding good visual material, background images, stock images? Calculate time codes? Find suitable animation and visual illustrations? Apply brand guidelines? Help with scripts? Ready-made templates? Customized animation, storytelling, what not? To be brand safe? In StoryKit, you get all of this. And that was it for me today. So if you want to connect, this is where you find me. You see, I try to mix a little bit of I don't know what with the thought leading thing. So please follow me on my efforts to become a thought leader on LinkedIn. Someday it's going to happen. And if you want to talk to us, me and Heidi are standing outside, happy to show you the tool, or just happy to talk to you and hear what you're doing. So please, thank you very much. Thank you so much.