Hey it’s Janet Johnson with Social Media Hangout Time. I’m here with Kimmy, our social media puppet as the salon owner.
Hi everybody. Hello!
And we have our guest today that is from our state, our hometown here in Minneapolis, Tim Lewis. So welcome Tim.
Hello, thank you for having me.
Yeah, well thank you very much for coming on. I want to first give a brief background where Tim comes from and share with the audience what we’re going to talk about today. Tim is, Tim Lewis is the owner of Master Communications Group and that’s a video and interactive web production studio in New Hope. So you’re little ways from me, I’m down in Farmington but I definitely still the “Minneapolis market”. Tim and his team of visual story tellers that create compelling videos and interactive media for agencies, marketers, trainers, publishers, corporate communications and business owners. They create marketing videos, explainer videos, promotioanl videos, meeting and event videos, training videos and interactive modules. Pretty much videos for anything. So what do you think we’re going to talk about today? Obviously, video! So welcome Tim. Tell me, let’s start by backing up how did you get into this world of video?
Oh well I actually I was a navy journalist and when I was going to go and thinking of going into the navy they give you a big test that’s like the SAT only it’s more vocational. And they said you’ve got this journalist thing and not many people get that and I was sort of 19 year old. So what they do, they said we’ll get you to run around video cameras. That looks really fun. That’s what I want to do – I want to run around with video camera and tell stories. So I’ve been doing it ever since.
Wow and it must have been a lot different. You probably seen a major change in how video has come around and how much simpler it is to create video, we can even talk about that a little bit.
We could, absolutely. And you know back then you have to carry around a big backpack with a big giant heavy machine that had your tapes that were this big that recorded the media. And then your camera was the separate thing and was connected by a 6-ft cord and everything was just a big hassle. And now everyone carries around a better camera in their pocket and that camera, the quality of the pictures is better on your phone than it was back then. That’s just one, of course all the editing has changed, too. It’s all non-linear, was linear editing, too. So yeah it’s a lot of changes but it’s great because now video is become a very important tool for marketing your business.
I agree, I completely agree. Well before we get started with our main topic I would like to have Kimmy ask you a question. She always has to ask a fun little question at the beginning.
Okay.
I love to ask this one, well Tim, have you ever been interviewed by a puppet?
I can’t say as I have. No, this is the first.
I love everybody’s face when I ask that question, but it’s fun and we’re so glad to have you on here. And I’m going to ask you the first question specially as it relates to social media because this is one of the shows, we want to know how could somebody really stand out in a noisy crowd on social media and I think video is one thing that’s really starting to explode. Can you talk a little bit about how important it is to have video on social media?
Absolutely, absolutely! Well it seems to me like I’ve been doing videos since before the internet, of course, and with social media is like rocket fuel for getting views of videos. Because as you know, you both are social media experts and social media like-minded people are hanging out like we are right now in the same group and sharing, we’re sharing ideas right now. In social media, like-minded people are sharing content or sharing articles, they’re sharing videos. So when a video hits that, it’s such a, videos are so niche. They’re all very using very specific audience like for business, it’s pretty difficult to get a viral video unless you got tons of money you can have babies break dancing or something. It’s very difficult to have a viral video, that’s okay though. You don’t really need tons of views by random people. You really just want certain people to view your video. And so it is a very niche media and social media allows you to get into those exact niches that you wanted to be in and get more views. That’s why I think social media is basically rocket fuel for video views.
So can we go into more on how would you do that? Let’s talk, get in deeper on how exactly about the content strategy, that kind of piece of things?
Sure. Well, as you know, too, when social media first came around everybody’s like “oh you’ve got to be on social media, you have to be on Facebook” and people were just sort of randomly throwing out content, right? And that was like the first 2 or 3 years of social media. It’s just random stuff here, random stuff there. Well, as you experts know eventually you got to have a strategy. And just like all marketing you have to have a strategy and a plan if you expected to succeed. So the whole reason for having a video content strategy is it what it is just a master plan for organizing your content so that it sort of times correctly with other marketing that you’re doing. And basically it helps you advance your marketing objectives. It applies logic to the order of the videos as they are released and published. And it also makes the production of them more efficient because when you’re shooting video, if you’re going to shoot more video at one time, you’re creating an efficiency there and saving money. It’s also important, like I said, to have a strategy behind it because that way you’re able to coordinate with your other marketing efforts like if you have an event, for example, you’re going to sponsor or even attend. You could promote it beforehand and then you could also recap it after. So that sort of my reason of why it’s important to have a video content strategy.
Could you break down how to Kimmy as a salon owner, break down what sample social media video marketing strategy would be with her salon?
Sure. Well the first place, the first step in a video content strategy is to access if you have any existing assets. Like you might have white paper, you might have blog, you might have video that you shot or that you were in or something like that. That’s the first step, kind of see what you, what already exists. Because a lot of times what we’re doing in video is we might be creating a video from a PowerPoint that already exists. Or we might be creating, recreating a video that was kind of done in-house they want to bring up the production value or something. So that first step is just what do you have currently that is telling your story. The second step is to define your audience and what they need to know about your business. And also barriers to why they might not work with you. Like those, that sort of defining your audience and remember I was talking about the niches before, what is that niche? Who is that person? I like to call it sort of customer profiles. Like profile your customer – this is the picture of exactly who our number one prospect is and then maybe here’s some secondary customer profiles. So that’s the second step. Third is to develop objectives and tactics for a particular series that would speak to those audience members. So you want to look at your overall marketing plan and see if there’s tactics that can be achieved with video that wouldn’t be as effective with other like blog or even a webpage. Video is better at visually demonstrating things. It’s also better at emotional, telling an emotional story. Those are the two ways of video really is better than a blog or white paper pdf, whatever you got.
Well it adds that human touch, you know. People really like to see people nod their heads, say hello and see what they’re wearing for glasses and specially in my industry, they love my pink hair.
Well that’s right.
You can actually see the person.
That’s exactly right. And when you see a person in video speak, you’re looking at their eyes you can tell whether they are authentic or genuine, telling the truth. Because there are so many visual cues that we give off when we speak and videos are able to convey some of that. So the whole trust thing and likability of small business owners need to be aware of when they’re marketing themselves to prospects. That’s where video can help.
Yes.
The fourth step of a content strategy, developing one, is to do research and you find the top experts. Now the small business is usually one person, right, so they are the expert. So what you want to think about as a small business owner is what are those aha moments where a customers, you interface with customer. What’s that question, those common questions that the customer has for you? Can you answer those questions before they even have to ask them? And what other problem will a new customer encounter, not just doing business with you but in the industry that you’re serving. A salon, is that hair that we’re talking about?
Yeah, hair coloring and hair cut.
Okay.
So could you make one long video and then use little snippets for multiple videos? So if I have an FAQ on what to wash my hair with to make it soft and without frizz, and then I have another one one kind of color would look best for me.
Exactly. So the way you’re writing those titles to the videos is exactly right because you want to write your title to your video in exactly the way the customer would have asked the question. What kind of hair coloring, what brand of hair coloring should I use if I try to do it myself? How-to, that kind of thing. How do i do this? Keep in mind that YouTube is a search engine. That’s what people are going to type in there – how do I take a slapshot, or whatever you’re question is, that’s how they’re going to ask it. And the chances of your video coming up in that search are pretty great if it’s exactly what your title of your video is, right?
That’s true, very true.
Yes. And how often would you say to do videos on YouTube or put out these videos with a strategy?
Well it depends on your budget, your plan and everything and how it integrates. Obviously there’s other content – pieces that you would want as part of your social media plan. If it can support that then that’s how often, I would think that. We put up videos all the time, but that’s what we do. But I would think you can start off quarterly and go to monthly if you can and you have enough content. But the whole idea is to produce as many in one shot so then you can just release them over the course of several months.
So you batch it, so basically batching – doing it all at once and then you break it out and have it, kind of almost like we did these shows where we record more at once and then we spread it out through the weeks. Is that correct?
Spread out, the publishing of it. Exactly.
Publishing. Okay.
The other thing I would stress when you’re thinking about your content strategy is to do research. Look what people are searching, if you can, in your area of expertise. You can never do enough research on to what questions people are asking and the answers they need. Don’t be afraid of telling them everything – how do you come up with your cost? How do you, maybe there’s some things you want to keep secret, but in general most businesses you put more information out then they’re the more likely to be seen as expert in the field. And the research is going to help you prioritize and also to your previous question, how many and how often, it’s also going to help drive some decisions along there because what you want to do is create what’s called the content filler. So filler would be by the needs of the audience and it could be a filler that’s around thought leadership. So that may not be necessary for a salon owner, thought leadership on maybe there’s a certain kind of technique you’re using that you can sort of crow to your prospects that is what you are good at and that’s the whole point of marketing is to prove or sell what you’re good at, right?
Absolutely!
And so make that a front, the head of the sphere of your marketing efforts. The tactics could come out of these fillers and it might not be a video, it might be some white paper or whatever the case may be.
And Tim, is YouTube really the only place that you should promote your videos? Or, I mean, I see sometimes there’s YouTube on the website but yet I don’t want to click on there and leave the website, are there other alternatives?
There is. I guess what I would say about YouTube is if you’re looking for people to find your video then you want it to be on YouTube because it is owned by Google, the biggest search engine. A lot of our clients have videos they do not want to put on YouTube because this is public and YouTube will tell you that they own the content as soon as you upload it, so technically they own it. You know you paid money to create it. A lot of people don’t like that. So no, there’s plenty of other platforms, of video platforms. They’re kind of niches, as well if you look at them, but there are a lot of very robust video streaming services that allow you to measure the video’s effectiveness, the number of views that almost down to the person that watched it and how long they watched it and where they click through. So there is, of course you have to pay for that, that’s not free. YouTube is absolutely free.
Do you have some tools that you can name that you can give us even if it cost? We love tools here.
Absolutley! Brightcove is probably the catalogue.
What’s it called?
It’s called Brightcove.
Okay, okay.
And it’s like basically a private YouTube streaming service. It’s very high-end, very expensive like big corporations use it. And then they can embed their videos and in that way they are not as. as you imagine they are not clicking off to YouTube and then God knows where from there. Wistia is the one I’m favoring right now. It’s a lot cheaper than Brightcove. There”s different plans. And also whether you want to monetize or not, that is sell the video, which in our case when we’re talking about content marketing we never, we can’t sell it. It’s got to be free and available, right, because we are trying to attract customers. But some clients are creating product that the video is the product and they are able to monetize it through some of these video streaming services, professional streaming services.
Nice. Nice. And then what about tools to, do you know any separate tools to measure that can give you report, that kind of thing? I mean obviously the Google Analytic, that kind of thing, can do some stuff but are there other ones you use?
Right, yeah. Usually if you sign up for one of these services they will have the analytics built-in like Wistia has pretty neat heat maps that shows exactly where they click on and off like everyone stopped watching right here at minute to 15 seconds. So you can adjust your content like if you know that okay that’s where we started doing this, let’s not do that anymore, whatever the case might be. It sort of help you make decisions on the actual content, too. But you should probably, if you’re going to work with one of those platforms, look into the analytics to see that it’s going to give you what you need in terms of metrics and measuring. In general if you’re a small business owner they probably aren’t that level of analyzing and doing metrics on their videos. They just more of like just get something out there. That’s going to work and isn’t going to harm your brand. Make sure the quality is good enough to that’s not going to do more harm than good.
That’s important.
Hey Tim, you know, let me ask because I like to do video in our salon. Do you have a recommendation for the types of cameras that we would want to use? Do we need a special camera? Is there pros and cons to the social media videos?
Well I don’t know, there’s a lot of, I’ve got this camera that was less than a $1000 that I use to shoot with my kids’ hockey games and stuff. It’s very high quality. If I wanted to plug a professional microphone into it that might be a little difficult. But usually people have the most trouble with sound. Because if they can’t hear your video, like hear what you’re saying, that’s probably a big problem. So that’s the thing, you can get cameras that actually account for the lighting in the room when and they aren’t, you know. That lighting is not a big of a deal with this, the sensitivity of the camera is very high now and the other’s microphone built-in the camera but usually it’s so far from the person that it sounds echo-y in the room and it just doesn’t sound good at all.
I have a tangled cord that I plug into my phone that I can put on my lapel, it’s really long but it really makes a big difference.
Yup, and that’s what I would recommend if you’re going to do a talking-head video. You can go to RadioShack and get a $25 little clip on lapel mic and of course test it before you have it but that’s, that would greatly improve your sound quality, for sure.
Great!
Because with microphones it’s all about how close the sound is, the sound source is to the microphone. And if it’s across the room it’s probably not going to be very easy to understand.
And then I suppose it would pick up all the paper shuffling if somebody was sitting in front of it.
That’s right, that’s exactly.
Yeah, yeah and people are turned off because of the sound, I completely agree with that. Sound is a tough piece. Let’s go into social media and finish up by talking about you have this video, you have this strategy, now you’re putting the videos out there. You have it on YouTube. Now how are we pushing it on social media and how often? Because is once enough, do you do multiple times, do you do direct YouTube? There’s just a lot of pieces with pushing it out to social media.
Yep. And there’s a lot of ways to do it right and wrong, too. I’ll back up a little bit and say what I would recommend is to have a YouTube channel and embellish it. As you know, YouTube is just another social media channel.
Yes.
And then you can do all kinds of things with graphics and you can have like a homepage video. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make with video, embedding or setting it up on YouTube is they don’t put description. They just put like the name of the file or nothing in the description. So the description of your YouTube, the title of the YouTube videos are critical. That’s the first thing someone’s going to see. And then the description is critical because the search engine does not know what you’re video’s about. So you have to describe the video in the description. Actually the first thing in the description should be your website if you’re trying to get people to your website, if that’s part of your strategy, that’s the first thing that should be in your YouTube video description. There’s also a lot that you can do with YouTube now with captions. Captions are also search engine optimized terms in search terms. It will do an automatic one but I think it does a really lousy job. It’s like automated kind of thing. You can do official captions that you can embed in there. So there’s captions, there’s annotations. You can put clickable hot links right in the video like at a certain time. The main thing that I would say is just to really, it’s really important to get the title right. A lot of times what we’ll do is we actually put the business name, the city they’re in and their phone number right in the title. So that’s all in the title of the video. It’s in the description, too. And all the keywords are in description. Now YouTube says that they don’t like when you keyword stuff the description but we see people doing it and nothing happens to them.
Yes.
Not that you need the keyword stuff but it makes an accurate description that is going to be relevant for the search engine and the humans that are reading it.
Uh-huh. And then what about putting it on to Facebook? We can talk a little bit about the new changes that just happened last week with the difference between, obviously we want to get, if we’re using YouTube channel, we really want to get our views to our YouTube channel. So it’s kind of a bummer with Facebook post now but of course they did because it’s Facebook and Google. So can you talk about what the difference that this change and the difference between putting your YouTube on Facebook vs. uploading direct?
Yep and you know it used to be that I would always recommend people to have it on your YouTube channel and then embed it in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter from your YouTube channel. But it seems to me like Facebook is really trying to get, is trying to improve their video embed quite a bit and I think you might actually know more about this than I do, they change it to where you have to embed it through Facebook now.
It just it’s giving it more, it’s going to show up more often and get some more reach if it’s directly uploaded to Facebook. So they’re kind of basically, they didn’t say the word, but they’re kind of basically saying.
They’re preferring it.
Exactly.
So maybe you do both. Maybe you do put it on, maybe you do upload it, it’s the same mp4 file. They all require the kind of the same standards as far as mp4, the highest quality mp4. If it’s not mp4 it’s probably going to transcode it on the way up and might look, it might affect the quality negatively. But yeah, I always recommend you have it on YouTube and with YouTube, of course you’ve got the embed code. When you click the share button on YouTube, you can either link, there a link that highlights or you can embed which is a bunch of garbled code. Those of us in social media and what not know that that’s an embed code. And then you can embed it in another page or in your social media. Usually you can just do a link like on Facebook, I’ll just do the link that’s enough. But if you want to actually embed it in a website then you need that embed code and it’s freely available to anybody on just about any YouTube for as long as it’s public you can embed some of this video. The other thing I see people do a lot with video on social media is you can actually turn off all those other videos that come up at the end that might have content that is not appropriate for your business or maybe even your competitor.
Not relevant.
Not relevant. You can actually turn that off. So it’s in there, there’s a little radial button somewhere in there and a lot of people, when I see that come up I’m like why would you want that to come up on your website. The other thing that I see people do is they don’t use the right aspect ratio and they embed it so you’ll have like a black part like at the top and the bottom because it wasn’t, the setting, the aspect ratio wasn’t set correctly. Do the YouTube, maybe do the Facebook for Facebook but you’re going to want it on YouTube anyway if you want people to discover it and use or pull inbound marketing tactics to come to your, eventually come to your website.
One of the things we always do is we always pin all our videos to Pinterest, too. So I don’t know if that’s another avenue that you’ve used, too, but I just know that the boards are one specific board and that board, it’s so organized. It’s great. And every single video you just hit the Pin It button and boom, it’s over on Pinterest, too. So you get the SEO power for that also.
Yep.
Yup and I would say whatever channels you’re involved in, I’ve been really favoring Twitter myself lately because it’s so much easier to scan the headlines and it just seems like in Facebook, specially on your phone, it takes up the whole, one person’s post would take up your whole screen. Whereas for Twitter, there’s always 6 or 7 you can just keep scrolling through it until you see something.
That might be changing, too, know with the whole now they’re allowing pictures and they’re having Twitter cards so that’s going to hog more space on your phone. It might look like Facebook soon.
Yeah that could be true.
Hey Tim, Tim let’s talk about small business. Sometimes they just don’t have a lot of time to do a lot of video. So how can they reach you to get a jump start so you could help them create videos and stories for their business and maybe even have a couple of them? Where can the contact you?
The best place to be a start would just be our website. We’ve got all our contact info and they can see samples and what not and that’s on the screen below here, right there.
Yes, that’s right.
And we’re always willing to, we don’t charge for consultation on just talking about a project. We don’t charge for any of that. So, always willing to talk to people about video and what they want to do with it. In fact just a couple of weeks ago I helped a company set up so they can do videos themselves. It didn’t make sense for us to get involved and helping them produce their videos but I can at least help them increase their quality of the ones that they’re doing.
That’s excellent.
That I just said when you’re ready to do a real video just let me know.
That’s very helpful because personally I’ve seen your videos like event videos. We had a big business expo. You’re telling the story and professional videos look wonderful and I think it really is important to have that at some point in your business. So I just want to thank you so much, there’s tons of notes that I took here, lots of value and I really encourage business owners, myself included, to do lot more videos.
I agree, I agree. Yeah, great information. Let’s finish up with one question. I just want you to give one action step to our audience also. We always like to end with what is something they can do in the next 24 hours that could possibly push that video social media campaign?
If I was a small business owner I want to stick my toe in to video and social media, I would take my phone and interview my best client, just very quickly. A little testimonial. That’s the quickest, easiest way to do it. Just try to be in a quiet area and try to just get them talking about your business.
Perfect, very simple. Yeah.
That’s what I would say is the quickest, easiest to way to get your video in.
Cool. That’s very simple, so that’s the action step to take in the next 24 hours. Grab your phone. Remember the sound, we did discuss the sound so remember if you can have an outside mic, that would be beneficial, too. So I appreciate Tim you gave us tons of information today on YouTube and videos and all that kind of stuff. So we really appreciate your time Tim and thanks for coming on.
Thank you, it’s been fun.
Bye.