From the course: Social Media Video Strategy: Weekly Bites

Creating content - Premiere Pro Tutorial

From the course: Social Media Video Strategy: Weekly Bites

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Creating content

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- Earlier in this chapter, we talked about some content curating strategies. Now let's talk about some best practices for creating original content. I'll be talking pretty high level here because we're going to spend the majority of this series breaking down many of these points in detail. So first, and we talked about this earlier, but you need to have a clear idea of who you're making a video for. You've got to understand your viewers habits and their motivations. You should know what would make them engage with and share the video with their own networks. When you plan backwards, it can help you create videos to better fit with your audience, and all of this knowledge comes from researching your target audience and hanging out in their online communities, asking good questions, and of course, connecting with them and understanding them. Second, you should try to keep your message very simple. Create a thesis and then spend the video supporting your main points. If you take too many tangents, you'll likely end up with a very high drop off rate. Take a look at this graphic from Wistia which shows typical video engagement and drop off. As you can see, there is a big drop off after two minutes and then viewing rates pretty much plummet steadily from there. So keep your videos short. When you have multiple points to cover, it's usually a good idea to just make multiple videos and then target them separately and strategically. Third, appeal to your audience in fun and engaging ways. There are so many popular categories of videos that you may want to explore, including many from this list. We'll examine many of these later in the series, but needless to say, you have a wide variety of approaches that you can explore. And of course, you can mix and match many of these as you build your social media strategy. Fourth, tailor your videos for the social media platforms that you intend to use. Each platform has very different benefits and constraints and cultures, so be aware of those and use them to your advantage. When you can, look for crossover and overlap and find ways to make videos that will work in multiple spaces. And discover how you can edit, repurpose, and retarget your videos for each social media space to get the most bang for your buck. We'll dissect exactly how to do this later in the series. Fifth, optimize your videos for a silent play environment. Since the majority of videos are actually watched without sound. If you can believe it, 85% of Facebook videos are played silently. So it's essential to catch peoples attention as they scroll through their feeds. Be sure to begin the video with something very visually interesting, add clear, easy to read captions so people can still enjoy and understand the video during silent play. You may also want to include short snippets of text on screen that are not only eye catching, but also help drive the story forward. And speaking of text, it's also important to accompany your videos with catchy headlines, quotes, statistics, or other blurbs to give your audience a good idea of what your video is about so they'll stop and watch. Finally, just one more note for now. When you do create content, be sure to clearly brand your content so that people are aware of where it came from. Often, once content is shared across the internet, assets become orphans, which means that the content is separated from the creator, which you definitely want to avoid. We'll talk a lot more about branding later in this course, but for now, just keep in mind that you'll want to include branded elements like text, graphics, logos, bumper intros, and even things like trademarked style and structure. All right, so hopefully this high level discussion can serve as a springboard for us to dig deeper into many of these strategies throughout this series.

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