Last month I had the opportunity to spend an evening with the Social Media Club of Southwest Florida.  My friend Hope from Guerilla Media was speaking about “Using video to strengthen your brand” so I was there to support her & as well as to meet some new people who are interested in online marketing & who could help me learn more.  Reliability Web was kind enough to host & their space is perfect for interactive presentations.  I also have to report that everyone I met was super nice & easy to talk to.  Always a relief when doing networking type stuff!

According  to Dr. James McQuivey at Forrester Research (Jan 2009): “One minute of video is worth 1.8 million words.”  Um, wow!

When Hope checks her web stats she often finds that her site GuerillaMedia.tv has a 0% bounce rate.  Why might that be?  Well, her site is chuck full of engaging video!  People like video!  Several times she has attended a networking event & introduced herself someone to new who insisted they had met her before.  By the end of the event they often remember that they had visited Hope’s website and had felt like they met her via her video.

“Video gets your perfect message every time. It never gets sick or takes a day off.  It works 24/7.”  With the magic of video you can almost be in 2 places at one time.  Have you ever wanted to photocopy yourself?  Video can do that for you!

 

“Video conveys your passion in a very personal way and that’s the key to engagement.  Social Media is all about being an “open book” and engaging in a meaningful way.  Video allows you to craft your story to hit all the right notes to resonate with your audience.”  Let people “meet” you!

Some tips from Hope for creating video, whether you film yourself on your iPhone or hire a professional firm like Guerilla Media:

Sometimes you’ll want a longer video depending on how you will use it. However, since we all have short attention spans, try to keep it to 2 minutes tops typically.

Use video to help make it simple for clients & to continue to educate them.  Whatever “it” is:  what you do, teach, provide, create & why they should care.

Show, don’t tell.  Less talking, more action or more of whatever you want the client to care about.  Hope’s example was a video they made for local chocolatier Norman Love.  Instead of having the owner talk the whole time, they showed several scenes of chocolate in the making.  Mmmmmm, chocolate…  Where was I? Oh, right.

Do record in HD for more details & crispness since you can absolutely upload to even YouTube in HD.

So now you’re made a video.  What do you do with it?

Talk about it, share it email it.

Where to share: Facebook, Linked In, Google+, Vimeo, your blog (You do have one don’t you?  We’ve talked about this.), your website, Twitter, Vevo, Livestream, U Stream, Itunes, Blip TV, embed in email*, put link in your email signature.

*Pssssst: Video in email marketing has increased click through rate over 96% (Implix, 2000)