It’s never been easier to produce high-quality web videos. Improved video technologies and the widespread adoption of broadband have enabled business to begin leveraging video as an increasingly powerful, high ROI tool for engaging visitors, driving traffic, and improving search engine visibility. Here are five tips (guiding principles, really) that we practice here at Rewatchable that can improve your corporate web videos today:
- Keep it short – When you have a great message, or a great speaker, or a great location, or a great event, it can be incredibly tempting to let your online videos go long. Avoid this temptation at all costs: attention spans on the Internet simply don’t support anything longer than 2-3 minutes, and even worse, long durations may prevent anyone from even starting to watch your video.
- Be funny – Humor is a powerful tool for engaging viewers. If you’ve got a dry 2-3 minute message, consider putting something funny (even amusing works) at the beginning and/or end of your video. Professional comedians know that if your first joke and last joke work, the audience will perceive your entire performance as a success. Always be on the lookout for ways to use humor to your advantage, and try to emulate comedians’ technique of using humor as ‘bookends.’
- Show off – If you do something visual, film it! Viewers want to see auto mechanics fixing cars, lawyers in a courtroom, doctors seeing patients, etc. Even if you’ve got a ‘talking head’ video, make every effort to get some good ‘b-roll’ footage of something relevant to your subject matter. You might be surprised by how many people are impressed by seeing you do things that you might consider ordinary or mundane.
- Send a clear message – The best corporate web videos present a single clear, powerful message. If you’re introducing your company, stick with the journalistic basics (who, what, when, where, and why). If you’re presenting material, isolate a single idea, and then step the viewer through that idea clearly and convincingly. If you have three terrific messages, create three terrific videos. Attempting to convey multiple messages in under two minutes is hard for professionals with highly cultivated storytelling skills. If you’re inexperienced, it’s next to impossible. A video of a CEO delivering an outline of 2010 strategic goals will always be better than a video of a CEO talking about ‘the future.’
- Keep it short – Seriously. We can’t stress this enough. You need to keep cutting until you’re removing good footage. Leave only great footage, and then make sure that great footage is as tight as humanly possible. In order to engage viewers, online video needs to be either funny, amazing, or incredibly dense/fast. Since corporate online video tends to be a little light on the funny and amazing, you really need to push it on the density/speed.