First off, I want to make it clear: Great social video takes work. It takes a lot of time and effort. But not many of us have the time to be great. It sounds terrible to say, but it’s just a fact. And unfortunately, video is getting to more feeds than anything else, so it’s hard to ignore it when you really don’t have the time for it.
So what do you do?
You figure out ways to get effective video out there. It might not be the most beautifully shot video. It may not win awards. But it’s telling your story and getting it into more feeds than you otherwise would. If that’s your goal, let’s go.
Turn Your Blog Posts into Social Video
We constantly say to take what you already have and repackage it. But are you really doing that? Most people I know would say no. Just kidding. They’d lie and say they are, when they’re probably not or not doing it enough.
An easy way to do it? Take blog posts or informational pages on your website and turn them into video.
Does that not sound so easy to you? There is a program called Lumen5 that does this with a click of a button. After the video is generated, you can clean it up to make it look more on-brand or to add in any information that might be missing. Overall, I have found it to do a decent job, and I can have a good informational video done in about an hour. However, it will be a bit corporate in nature and with minimal faces.
User-Generated Social Video
But nothing does quite as well as someone who looks like your fans talking to them. And the best way to do that? Find videos of your fans to use.
This requires deep dives of hashtags, particularly on TikTok and Instagram. I want to tell you that people will tag you in their videos, but the fact is that you will probably find the best videos are using non-branded hashtags. Definitely still promote those branded hashtags. Just don’t count on finding everything there.
The downside of this is that you really can’t control the story being told and are just stuck with whatever they are posting. The plus side is that it will give you a relationship with someone who can be a great ambassador for your organization.
Create an Ambassador Group
If you do want to have a bit more control over the story, you can always create a group of people who know how to do social video well. You can give them themes you might be looking for and give them resources to aid in their creation process.
However… if you don’t compensate them in some way, anyone belonging to this group will get bored and move on. It’s a fact of life. So if you don’t want to compensate them, make sure you have a large community of people who are good at social video so you can continually pull from them. You will simply be constantly replacing people and asking multiple times for the same videos, which will frankly end up being more costly than just paying them in the first place.
Like I said, this is the key to good social video, not great. If you want great, you will have to figure out how to have loads of time to create an idea, execute it, edit it and then support it. We don’t all have that luxury, so it’s absolutely fine to decide good is good enough.