Characteristics of video content - Premiere Rush Tutorial

- [Instructor] The wide world of social media video spans a multitude of different varieties, and when used strategically, each serves a different objective. Now, before we talk about how we're able to repurpose video to fit these different objectives, I'd like to start by talking about some basic characteristics of video. Here are some of the characteristics and technical specs of online video that I'd briefly like to explore. It is through large and small modifications based on many of these qualities that we'll be able to alter our video to strategically fit our needs. Let's begin with video type and content, which are interconnected. Type refers to basic categories of video that various content falls into, each of which serves a specific purpose within a social media strategy. And of course, content is simply what the video is about. Here are some of those basic categories that are quite popular in social media, particularly in the world of business and marketing. You've likely seen each of these before in a multitude of different ways used strategically within a social media plan. For example, some of these videos are used to create awareness, hook attention. Some are used to further inform and generate interest. Some are used to entertain. Some are used to provoke thought, spark conversation, and some are simply used to sell products and ideas. Bottom line, each of these types of videos have very targeted purposes, and often you can use the very same assets to create very different videos. So, the same video interview can be cut as an engaging Q and A, or it might find its way into an educational video, or as narrative under a more packaged promo. There are a multitude of possibilities. Now, speaking of assets, this deserves a mention. The assets a video is comprised of are its building blocks. There are so many. First of all, video, which is an incredibly large category that includes countless different subtypes. There are images and photos, graphics, animations, audio, which includes dialog, narrative, sound effects and more. There's music, there's visual and audio effects. Any type of text or titles, stack assets, and more. Obviously, there are countless decisions that go into constructing a video from these various assets, but in terms of repurposing video, we have the ability to rearrange these building blocks even when we're the same type of content. So, maybe we begin by editing a promo with five basic elements, titles, video B-roll, interviews, narration, and music. Really, the foundation of this structure, the thing that is driving the story forward, is the interview and the narration. So, if we switch out the music and provide new imagery and change the titles, we're effectively keeping the foundation intact but we've refreshed this for a new audience, we've given it a new tone, and we've provided a new purpose. With a little creative planning and the ability to look at the larger picture, this type of adjustment is fairly easy to accomplish no matter how you switch out the assets. And this is certainly something we'll take a look at much more closely later in the course. Next up, we have audience. The intended target audience that will view your content is one of the most important things when discussing online video. In the world of social media, each social media platform has different audience demographics, and generally, it's a good strategy to try to match the type of video you create with the audience that's going to consume it. The social media management software company Spredfast has done some interesting analysis in terms of each platform's target age, gender, income, time spent on the platform, devices used, and more. Now, what I'm about to show you is a lot to consume and my point isn't necessarily for you to study each of these details, but I'm simply showing you this so that you can see at a high level that there certainly are differences in audience demographics across the various social media platforms. Knowing this type of information about each platform is very useful in making sure that your video is tailored as specifically as possible to the people who will watch it, because again, you're able to repurpose your video slightly or dramatically depending on some of this very important audience demographic information. Now, the next thing I'd like to discuss is length. Some online videos last only a few seconds, some last hours. In general, it's usually good to try to make your videos as short as possible since your audience's attention is often going to be spread very thin. As you can see in this chart from Wistia, videos under two minutes receive maximum engagement, and then after that, especially between two and six minutes, there's a big drop-off. That's not the whole story, though. Depending on where you post your video and for whom, you should generally tailor your length accordingly because each social media platform has different expectations for video length. HubSpot, a marketing software developer, offers a high-level look at some general recommendations. At the shortest end of the spectrum is Instagram, where the optimal length is 30 seconds. Twitter videos have an optimal length of 45 seconds. Facebook videos, one minute, and YouTube sees the most engagement with videos that are two minutes. Now, these are the average lengths of videos on each platform that receive the most active engagement. So, not only the most views, but also the most likes, the most comments, shares, and other important social metrics. So, again, depending on where you're going to post, you'll often want to repurpose the video by producing multiple versions, each at a different length.