David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

12 Tips on Making Better Vine Videos

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Are you familiar with Vine? It’s an iPhone and Android video app that makes 6-second videos. With Vine, you can watch videos, follow other Vine video makers, and easily share your videos on other social networks like Twitter (Twitter owns Vine).

And … Vine is one of a handful of new, popular, visual social tools. Others in this category would include Instagram and Snapchat.

Vine has the potential to be a really powerful and fun medium when used well! So – first, go watch a bunch of Vine videos to get a feel for what can be accomplished. Done? OK. Now, let’s talk about using it well.

Here are 12 tips (that’s like 2 tips a second in Vine mode!) for making better Vine Videos:

  1. Plan, practice, reshoot. I know – planning and practicing seems pretty silly, right? I mean, it’s only 6 seconds – what’s to plan? Quite a bit! You have six seconds to get your idea across, share a joke, or show something off. So planning it out and doing one practice run might be useful. Then reshoot it until you’re happy with the video. There is no edit button.
  2. Share one thing. You want to make sure your main idea is communicated in six seconds. So no introductions. Just do the one thing you want to communicate, and get to the point fast.
  3. Good lighting is important. As always in video, even six second video, lighting is important. Vine videos are created on your phone, so you don’t necessarily need to set up a lot of fancy professional lights for that six second video. Just shoot outside, by a lamp, or by a window.
  4. Audio is HUGE. Arguably, the most important thing in a video isn’t what you see. It’s what you hear. That means you need good audio! Try using your headphone mic (iPhones come with with a mic/earbud combo – do Android phones? Not sure). Or get one of those “made for iPhone” mics, like the i-Microphone.
  5. Think in scenes. Don’t make one big, boring, six second scene unless it’s a beautiful waterfall, or you have discovered a Sasquatch in the wilderness. Otherwise, make multiple quick scenes, multiple angles, etc. You can break up your sentences, too. Speak one phrase, then lift off your finger, shift position, and then say the next phrase.
  6. Use another lens. Have a clip-on lens? Use them. I have an Olloclip lens that gives my iPhone a fisheye, macro, and wide-angle lens. They work for Vine videos, too!
  7. Shoot through something else. You can get some pretty cheesy effects by shooting through semi-transparent things. Shoot through see-through cloth, water, a foggy window, your glasses, etc.
  8. Animation – try it out. Animation is fun, and really easy to do on Vine. Just quickly touch and let go, and you have one “frame” of an animation. Usually animation is about 10-24 frames per second, so … this will be a little time-consuming, even for six seconds. But you can quickly move something around on a table, touch your Vine screen a lot, and see what you get. Make sure to use Vine’s Ghost mode for stop-motion animation, and think about using your phone in Airplane mode. You don’t want to be interrupted mid-way through!
  9. Fun effects. Want music? Turn on the radio or have someone play beside you. Sound effects? Same thing – have someone do them off-camera. Visual gags and effects can be done easily by stopping the video, changing out a prop, and starting the video up again. Experiment and see what you can come up with.
  10. Talk to another video. One funny thing I’ve seen done is talking to a famous person via a Youtube video. The on-camera person might ask a question, then have someone else “answer” the question using something they said in a Youtube video.
  11. Hands-free mode. Apparently, you can swipe left to right at the bottom of the recording screen in Vine, and the video will record in hands-free mode. I haven’t gotten that to work. But you can also set up an assistive touch gesture on an iPhone.
  12. Use hashtags. This will help other Vine users find your video.

Useful Vine Video links:

Finally – follow me on Vine! I’m davidleeking on Vine.

One Difference between Twitter and Facebook

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Somebody recently asked me about Twitter for their library (which lead to my last post and this one). As I was answering her question about social media strategy, I said (a version of) this:

Facebook is a bit more conducive to “branded conversations.” Facebook can be highly visual, and the conversations are a bit more contained and threaded (i.e., comments and likes go underneath the actual post). If you’re not into one conversation, move to the next.

Twitter, on the other hand, is just the raw conversation as it happens. Sure, it can be visual and sorta-kinda threaded now, but it’s still (in my mind, anyway) pretty much real-time text-based conversation.

What’s that mean? For Facebook, you can insert some branded, “market-y” stuff, and not really bother anyone (as long as you have other content too!). It’s expected.

But with Twitter, if an organization starts sounding market-y – if they are mainly using Twitter as a broadcast tool to push out their programs and services – those tweets will stick out like a sore thumb.

That’s a great way to be ignored – fast – on Twitter.

Megaphone pic by Gene Han

 

One Library’s Twitter Strategy

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My library has been doing a few different things with our Twitter account the last couple of years, and have finally settled on a Twitter strategy to try for the next 6 months or so.

Who’s connecting with us? Our Twitter followers tend more towards marketers, advertisers, start-up business types, the “activist/we get stuff done” types in town, the 20-40 year old business up-and-comers, and a lot of media types (broadcast, newspaper, and some radio journalists). And a bunch of young geeks.

We are focusing on this type of content:

  • What’s interesting (to the library) right now and why?
  • Library “breaking news”
  • No big sell – share what the library finds interesting
  • Be yourself, be casual, but at the same time remember you represent the library
  • Friend our customers and local businesses
  • In general, try for friendly and helpful, but not pushy.

Posting schedule: We post multiple times a day, every day. We have seven staff members assigned, one on each day. I’m the floater/substitute for when people are sick, on vacation, etc. And I monitor activity, answer the harder questions, and make sure we’re on-target.

How will we know if we succeed? I will measure growth and engagement via the new-fangled Twitter analytics!

That’s our plan. What’s your organization’s Twitter strategy?

Pic by Jeff Turner

Twitter has Analytics!

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Timeline Activity - Twitter AdsWay back in 2011, Twitter announced they were starting to offer Analytics for some Twitter accounts. Finally – almost two years later, they are offering analytics to everyone!

Here’s how you access those analytics:

  • Get into your Twitter account (the web version)
  • Click the Settings icon (looks like a gear)
  • Click Twitter Ads (and sign in again. If you haven’t signed up for Twitter Ads, you’ll need to do that first. No cost associated with signing up, so do it for the analytics)
  • Once you’re logged into Twitter Ads, click Analytics (in the black bar at the top of the page)
  • You’re in!

What types of analytics do you get? 

Right now, there are two choices – Timeline Activity and Followers:

Timeline Activity

The Timeline Activity view provides most of the analytics. At the top of the page is a handy graph showing Mentions, Follows, and Unfollows for the last month. Hover over the graph, and you can see a per-day breakdown of those numbers.

Below the graph are Recent Tweets. This shows individual tweets, going back all the way to your first tweet (I think – I scrolled back about a year)!

For each tweet, you can see these analytics:

  • # of Faves
  • # of Retweets
  • # of Replies
  • If there’s a link included in the tweet, you can see how many clicks that tweet received.

For example, I now know my tweet about Twitter analytics (as of last night) was favorited 7 times, retweeted 3 times, and the link included with the tweet was clicked 45 times.

You can also choose which tweets you want to see – All, Best, or Good.

  • Best shows the top 15% of tweets with some level of engagement, going back to August 27 (so, about 10 months).
  • Good shows the top two-thirds of tweets with some level of engagement, in that same timeframe.
  • All shows all tweets in that same timeframe.

This page also includes a CSV download, which provides a list of all tweets with numbers for Faves, Retweets, and Replies.

Followers:

Followers is the second option, and includes some pretty cool stats about your followers. At the top of the page, there’s a graph showing your per-day follower count from day one of your Twitter account. Below that, you are given some interesting topical, location, and gender info, including:

Interests:

Most unique interests – shows the top five most unique interests of your followers. I’m assuming this comes from some data-mining of follower’s Twitter accounts. For my Twitter account, my followers most unique interests are:

  • 39% Biographies and memoirs
  • 11% job search
  • 9% Education news and general info
  • 7% freelance writing
  • 2% geneology (yes, that’s how they spelled it. Oops)

Top Interests:

The top ten interests of my followers, which include:

  • 72% politics and current events
  • 58% book news and general info
  • 56% business and news
  • Etc. Hover over any of the numbers in this section, and you can see a total number for that percentage.

Location:

This shows the top countries and states of my followers (USA, Kansas, New York, Illinois, Ohio, and Massachussets). Also a lot of people from Australia and Canada.

Top Cities:

In my case, they include: Topeka, Wichita, Sydney AU, Melbourne AU, and Perth AU. Alright – you Australians are awesome!

Gender:

45% male, 55% female.

And finally, a Your Followers also Follow list. My followers, unsurprisingly, also follow these Twitter accounts:

So that’s that! Twitter – thanks for the analytics! There’s some really good stuff here!

Five Tips to Reshape your Social Media Plan in 2013

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[This is an article I wrote for my book, Face2Face – I thought it would make a great post here, too – enjoy! DLK]

Social media has been around for over ten years. My guess is that by now, your organization is probably involved in some way with social media. Maybe you have created a Twitter or Facebook account. Maybe you even have some friends and fans on those accounts, and you share things with them when you have time.

Let’s rework this in 2013. Social media is now mainstream, and your customers are using it to connect. They connect easily to each other, and since the tool is the same, they’ll find it easy to connect to your organization, too… if you make a few easy-to-do adjustments in your approach to business-facing social media.

Here are five simple adjustments you can make to kick-start your organization’s social media efforts in 2013:

1. Focus on Conversations

First off, let’s focus on conversations. Many organizations and businesses have been using social media status updates as a broadcasting tool. They send out notices of events, sales, or coupons. Possibly, they have used social media as an easy outlet to send out press releases and important corporate announcements.

My new book - Face2Face: Using Facebook, Twitter, and Other Social Media Tools to Create Great Customer ConnectionsGuess what? If your organization focuses primarily on sending out corporate communications, your customers will tune out your organization and unfriend you in a heartbeat. In 2013, instead of using social media as a one-way broadcast tool, work on starting and continuing conversations with your customers.

This will require your organization to do three important things: 1. Listen before you speak. Set up some listening tools (Google alerts and Twitter search alerts are good places to start) to see what your customers are saying about you; 2. Respond, using colloquial, conversational language. This will feel weird if you’re used to more formal marketing-speak. Make it feel like you’re talking to a work colleague at the water cooler – do this, and people will start talking to you. And 3 – figure out what types of conversations YOU want to start. Do some brainstorming on the conversations your organization needs to hear in 2013, and start those conversations.

2. Focus on the Visual

For the most part, many businesses and organizations have been posting text-heavy status updates in their social media accounts. That makes sense in text-based Twitter, but not so much in Facebook. In fact, Facebook best practices show that when you do one simple thing – add a photo or a video to your post – engagement increases by 100% or more.

So get those cameras out of your pockets (yes, that iPhone or Android smartphone makes a great point-and-shoot camera), and start taking photos around the office, the warehouse, or the store. Maybe think about the three most important things that your customers should know about your organization, take photos of that, then share those photos with customers.

3. Focus on Video

That smartphone I just mentioned in #2 is also HD quality video recorder, and we can put it to good use! There’s a reason YouTube is so popular right now – people love watching short videos. Studies show that people engage more with video posts than with text-only posts.

Here’s my guess – most likely, you haven’t made many videos for your organization. If you have created some videos, it probably resembled a TV commercial. That’s not what your customers want to watch. Instead, get to the point immediately – YouTube suggests that the first 15 seconds are critical to connect with viewers. So don’t waste those seconds with titles, fade-ins, and credits.

Just start sharing your main points. Then post that video to two places – YouTube and Facebook. Use YouTube to share in most places, and use the Facebook upload to share with your Facebook page fans. Facebook’s algorithm favors videos uploaded to Facebook, so those will get seen more than a shared YouTube video.

4. Focus on Next Steps

Many times organizations post information to their social media accounts, but don’t include anything for customers to do. They don’t include a next step. Let’s change that in 2013. Make sure that everything you do includes some type of “ask.” That ask can be as simple as asking customers to “friend or fan” a Facebook Page, or the ask might be to click a link that takes them to a new product or a buy-it-now page.

More people will click if you actually ask them to click. Because of this, make sure to provide customers with some next steps, and actually invite them to take that next step. Do that, and your organization will be one step closer to continued engagement with customers.

5. Focus on your Customers!

Finally, most businesses and organizations, believe it or not, don’t actually focus on their customers! Instead, they focus on their stuff, on their showroom floor, or on their sales staff. In 2013, let’s focus on our customers. Engage them in conversation. Ask them if they like what they’re seeing. Ask them to take next steps, and invite them into your organization.

Follow these five simple reshaping steps, and you will be well on your way to having a great 2013 with social media, and with some really engaged customers, too.

pic by Tintin44