In his bestselling book, The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly, who is a co-founder and senior maverick of Wired Magazine, makes a compelling point about ‘flipping the audience pyramid’. A few decades ago, making videos and taking photographs was in the realm of a few ‘experts’ while the majority of people were consumers of content.
Now, thanks to the strides made in technology, all of us can be creators rather than consumers. By 2016, Reddit had 170 million unique visitors per month and 10,000 daily active communities. YouTube had approximately 1 billion monthly users – a workforce creating videos to compete with traditional TV. By June 2018, 1 billion active users had posted on Instagram.
In 2020, Facebook is the most significant global community on earth, with 2.5 billion monthly active users. While the 2008-2016 social media was mostly text-based, we are moving rapidly to using audio-visuals for our social media engagement and interactions. The number of videos being created and viewed by audiences has multiplied over just the last five years.
Creating great videos for your social media has never been more important. As video creation becomes increasingly ubiquitous, taking care of the finer details of your story arc, ensuring the highest production quality at optimum cost and effort, and using the right tools, have all become necessities for quality video creation.
The ‘why’ of creating great videos on social media is quite obvious. In this short article, we try to help you understand the ‘how’ of excellent video creation. We will help you understand the vital creation tips to follow so that you are able to easily learn the secrets of a quality social media video.
Tell a Good Story
Whatever medium you are using to create, effective storytelling is arguably the totem for all your content. Constructing a compelling story is often assumed to be an art. However, in reality, the science of good storytelling cannot be underestimated.
Articles published in Psychology Today and Harvard Business Review and initiatives at Stanford University, such as The Stanford Storytelling Project, all have emphasized the importance of a good story.
No matter what video you are creating, the need to make your story compelling is paramount. Having a good ‘hook,’ defining an appropriate dramatic arc, and ensuring a cathartic conclusion are all basic elements of good storytelling, which has almost become a basic requirement for a great video.
Tell the Story Precisely
In the age of Tik-Tok, Snapchat, and Instagram, precision is king. There is now a large body of research which suggests that attention spans of consumers have decreased over the decades. As we become used to fast engagement and a plethora of choices, being able to precisely convey your message in your social media video is a golden skill to have.
Good storytelling structures play a vital role here. Furthermore, it’s important for you to empathize with your audience. If they become hooked to what you are trying to say in the video and connect it to their personal or observed experiences, you can very effectively get your message across. But it needs to be short! Remember, the almost omnipresent low attention spans!
Customize for Your Platform and Audience
Every social media network has certain common patterns about its audience. Yes, there is some overlap between users of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc., but even these overlapping users have different expectations from different platforms.
YouTube is exclusively about creating and sharing videos of all lengths and types, Twitter will likely provide you the opportunity to share more complex content, Facebook’s algorithms seem to favor live videos more, Snapchat wants you to keep it short and snappy, TikTok even shorter, Instagram is associated with more vivid video content.
In a nutshell, research on the patterns of the platform, understand how your audience perceives that particular platform, and customize your video content accordingly.
Select the Optimum Video Editing Tool
30-40 years ago, professional video creators had a crew to help them carry out specialized tasks such as editing the video, overlaying content such as subtitles, and much more. Proper editing can often make the difference between a video becoming viral or falling flat with its target audience.
In a world where there are millions of video creators, we cannot all go out and hire a video editor. Fortunately, there are many video-editing tools such as InVideo which assist you in getting some unbelievably well-edited videos without the need for human support and expertise.
If you visit the websites of such video editing tools, you will find a kaleidoscope of video-editing options such as an online video editor no watermark, and even a free intro maker no watermark. And that is only the tip of the iceberg.
Video editing tools of the 21st century allow you trim, join, adjust segments, change background brightness, rotate, crop, transition, and even do things that a video-editing professional may not have heard about.
Don’t Ignore the Lights, Camera, Action (and Sound!)
Your audience is human, and in a day, several video contents across multiple channels are competing for their attention. Therefore, ensuring you get the basics right becomes vital. If you are shooting on a smartphone camera, darkness, or the wrong angle can lead to poor video quality.
Try to keep the ambient noise to a minimum to ensure a good audio experience for your viewer, and finally beware of unflattering camera angles.
Great Videos are a Function of Getting the Basics Right
You may have created a compelling story, and you may have used the best video-editing tools to make your video precise, but the old-school qualities of good lighting, quality camerawork, and apposite sound remain crucial for creating a great video on social media.
Conclusion
As a creator, you should reflect on how you make the decisions to watch or skip a video. In the social media age, creating videos and reaching a wide audience may have become very easy, but the competition has increased manifolds as well.
We hope that the tips shared in this article can give you that little delta for creating the best quality videos for your social media.
