Imagine Your Reality

For the final post in this series, I want to focus on video. I’ve admittedly used this medium the least in my own efforts, though I’ve been slowly increasing my use of it, in order to show as well as tell people about my perspective on social media. Video is going to become more prevalent as the tech demands become easier to manage. The proliferation of sites such as Youtube, Vimeo, Blip.tv, show that video is becoming more and more part of social media. Additionally mobile phones are integrating video components into their tech, which will make it easier for anyone to upload video.

When creating video, it is, again, important to think about your audience. Because video sites are used by a wide variety of people for a wide variety of purposes, businesses don’t have the advantage of using video in a niched site that reaches to a specific audience. This means that businesses have to be very specific in the first minute of the video to weed out people who aren’t part of their audience, but also hook the audience they want so they’ll watch the rest of the video. Some of this can be done with the description of the video, as well as search tags, but some of it ultimately comes down to the actual video content that is used.

Video content should introduce people to what the video is about within ten seconds, if not earlier. If it takes longer than ten seconds, then the person will probably move on. A person should get a sense of what they will learn from the video, so they can determine if its something they want to watch.

One other thing to  consider with audience is what type of video service to use to present your video on other sites. While youtube is the most popular video site, blip.tv looks like it could be more useful because it doesn’t include a logo or other videos which are made by other people on the same topic. Your audience isn’t just on video sites, but also can be found looking at your website or blog, so it can be very useful to use a video service that doesn’t blatantly advertise other videos to draw your audience away from your website.