The use of video on your website or social media platforms can add life to your business. It is a fantastic opportunity to get the ethos of your company across while entertaining your audience.
While the thought of standing in front of the camera for the first time can be daunting there are a few things you can consider before launching into your amateur film making career.
As part of our Boost My Business initiative Fiona Alston asked experienced media professional Pamela Finn for some pointers to getting the best out of your videos.
Pamela is owner of Galway and Dublin based PR Pam and co-owner of Social TV @Hashtag Media. She has a wealth of experience both in front of the camera and advising on content creation. These are her top tips to creating your own videos:
Know your target audience – before anyone does anything on social media, and often this is forgotten about, it's really important to know your target audience. Before you create any video know what you're creating and why you're creating it.
Make a plan - people often just shoot video with no plan in place. What happens is they might record a video one day and then wait maybe three or four weeks to record another video - you are better planning ahead and actually creating all your videos in one day because sometimes you'd be on a roll for videos and you're better off to keep some synergy in the style of videos that you're going to create.
Tell stories that people want to hear - you need to tell stories on your video that you think your audience would be interested in. It's not all about selling - it should be 10% selling in your video and 90% is storytelling about your business and what you do. It's really important to keep your voice authentic when you're telling a story, it should show your personality - are you weird, quirky, offbeat, colourful or artistic? Be yourself because it comes across if you're not being authentic in a video.
Match your content to your brand voice - Your content should be reflective of your brand voice - your logo style, who you are as a brand, who your audience is.
Feature your brand colours and logos - feature these as much as possible in the video. For example, with our videos, we use a lot of yellow, black, and green because that is a lot of our branding. If you are a cool funky brand you can introduce a lot of colour in the clothes that you wear or the backdrops that you're using.
Create videos yourself before investing in large productions - there’s lot of production companies out there, but you can easily create a video on an iPhone or an Android phone. What I recommend is that you always record your videos horizontally. Instagram and Facebook are square boxes so if you get the wide spectrum of the shot you can cut it if needs be.
Invest in a lapel mic – lapel mics can be low cost starting at around €30. Clip it on to your shirt and it goes to your phone and it just means the sound quality is a lot better.
Upload videos as a native video – what I mean by native video is you shouldn't have to click through anywhere in order to view the video. People don’t want to click through to view a video, they want to see it straightaway.
Share your brand video on you social media platforms - I would recommend that you upload it to YouTube, set up a YouTube channel for your company – a one minute video is considered the equivalent of about 1.8 million words, that just shows the impact of video.
Take free classes - there's lots of free classes online at the moment for filming and editing so you don't need to buy a top of the range camera you can just use your smart phone. They'll teach you proper angles for interviews - play around with that and find out what you're comfortable with.
Keep your stories short - definitely no more than three minutes, and I would try to reduce it down to a minute. Don’t be long winded with your story, keep it simple. You can download an autocue app for your phone to help keep you on script.
