This video is great – it’s 4 minutes long which is a relatively long time to command a user’s attention but as the information and ideas are condensed and presented in an engaging way, it conveys information more quickly than, say reading about the topic for the same amount of time.
Video is also good for ’humanising’ communication and forms a solid component of the social media wave that we’re riding – topics my colleagues Sara and Lena have written about respectively - it’s also an alternative platform for interacting with an audience, so we’ve been looking at how video is used and asking questions about the format that type that works best so here are some of the considerations we came up with
- Length – watching a video requires a commitment from the user, so they need to be persuaded that this is going to be a good investment of their time. Again consistency in quality is a factor here, as is setting expectation by offering a summary of the content and perhaps providing some kind of predictable format – such as a certain type of video on a particular day of the week for example or perhaps by publishing schedules.
- Identifiable types of videos for different topics e.g. commentary, interviews, reviews, so users can look out for the types of video they prefer.
- Clear benefits - why should the user watch the video? The advantage of watching the video over doing the alternative should be clear e.g. it may be more convenient to watch a product review rather than read a long article to find out what the expert thinks
- Advertising – where are the opportunites for sponsorship? On the same page as the video, a ticker tape in the video and an ad in the actual video before and after it takes place? Advertising in the video itself has lots of opportunites for additional exposure because a lot of videos are now begin made available to be embedded in other content. Chris Brogan mentioned a video on the LA times website that allowed him to embed it in his own blog.
- Traffic - how is the video going to drive traffic to the site? Which urls are promoted, verbally and/or visually and if so, where and when, should they be clickable? Should the video be used as well as or instead of an article? The Sun embeds video into their articles as a supplement to the story.
- Comments – how can users can respond to the video? Gary Vaynerchuk has a nice commenting tool on his videos, where the audience can comment but along with the ticker tape ads, they can make the site a bit too busy, but there’s the option to turn the comments off if you want to.
Measuring clickthroughs and adapting according to the results will fine tune the video offering and with the online video audience looking set to increase over the next few years, levels of video activity are likely to increase in line with this.
Tags: communication, video
Excellent post Verity. Really like you summary.
Yeah video should be on the up in the next few years. Sites that should benefit from video are probably news sites (such as sky news and bbc that already integrate a lot of video where possible) and publisher sites such as Fool.co.uk or lovemoney.com where a lot of emphasis is placed on article writer by use of by lines and personal blogs.