If you have opened any social media platform in the past five years, you’ll notice a general shift in focus from text and images to video content. There are plenty of reasons for this, from the amount of time a user spends on a given platform to the amount of engagement and interaction videos get compared to photos. So how do you create and utilize video content to help promote your brand?
Photo by Donald Tong from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-camera-recorder-66134/
Have Fun
There’s a saying in the writing world: if you’re bored while working, your audience will be bored while reading your work. Audience members can tell when the content they’re consuming was put in front of them by someone who didn’t even want to be producing it in the first place. And, while the Internet has provided unprecedented opportunities for selling, it has also created an acute awareness and dislike of being sold to. When brands mindlessly and mechanically replicate trends without any understanding of what made them funny, charming, or engaging to begin with, the effect is almost uncanny: a toneless recreation of something originally much more human.
Part of the point of pushing video content to begin with is to foster a more personable social media environment. So have fun. Humor, bloopers, editing styles, improvisation, and colorful graphics are all ways to put a creative spin on a video. You can cater to your niche, maintain an air of professionalism, and still add that human element to your marketing strategy.
Use Your Phone
The other great thing about videos being pushed on social media is that the sizes and lengths are usually the same across platforms. All you need is a smartphone, a 9:16 aspect ratio, and 1080p resolution. Professional software and equipment are helpful in terms of producing a higher-quality product, but ultimately not necessary. TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Pinterest, and Instagram Reels favor shorter-form content (though TikTok now allows videos up to ten minutes in length), while Facebook and YouTube allow for lengthier videos. LinkedIn videos can be between three seconds and fifteen minutes long.
You can find free (or inexpensive) video editing software optimized for the production of social media content, or you can use built in editors—TikTok and Instagram Reels, at least, allow users to edit within the app, so that anyone can produce good-quality, professional-looking videos.
Livestream Virtual Events
It’s difficult to talk about the emergence of live virtual events without discussing COVID-19. As the pandemic swallowed the world and the world, in turn, kept chugging right along, events that would have been held in person were instead held over conference calls or livestreams, which existed before but were nowhere near as widespread.
I held my book launch over a series of livestreams on release day, first on Instagram, then on TikTok, and as someone in the writing sphere of the Internet, I watched a lot of my peers do the same. Some held Google Meets, hosted podcasts, and ran Zoom calls. Others, like myself, kept it more simple: a live reading of a couple chapters, a link to buy the book, and a Q&A segment. This accomplished a few things. For one, it was near-universally accessible. Book tours and live author events are exciting, but not everyone can get to a specific bookstore at a specific time, and authors often limit their tours to a few countries at the most, even if they have fans all over the world. For another, it was easier to coordinate for indie authors like myself who didn’t have convenient means to organize multiple live appearances, not to mention the added costs of travel.
This still holds true. Instead of hosting a conference (a time, money, and labor-intensive process), set up a livestream on Facebook and host a Q&A session. If you do organize in-person events, use social media livestreams as a way for others to get involved, and build on your relationship with your audience.
References
Scott, D. M. (2022). The new rules of marketing and PR: How to Use Content Marketing, Podcasting, Social Media, AI, Live Video, and Newsjacking to Reach Buyers Directly. John Wiley & Sons.
Warren, J. (2021, July 21). Why you should be sharing video on social media right now – later blog. Later Social Media Marketing. https://later.com/blog/video-on-social-media/
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