Engaging your Audience with Video
Video has become one the major successes of the web. Youtube is the second biggest search engine after Google. The statistics are staggering. Just looking at Youtube alone, more than 92 billion page views and more than 325,000 years are spent on the Youtube site per month. The growth of video on the web has been astounding.
Video has a History of Engaging
If you have a presence on the web as a blogger, a business or as an online ecommerce store, video can truly bring your online presence to life. Video keeps people on websites and it strongly engages audiences. When considering the history of the moving image, film has captured our imaginations for many generations. Film has been a formula for success because it is emotionally engaging. It truly takes us into another world. Video engages us much more strongly compared to other ways that we interact with the web, primarily with text and images.
Video for Blogging
Video can truly enhance a blog. It conveys a message through many avenues of communication. If you feature in your videos, it allows your audience to get to know you through your voice, mannerisms and other visual cues. Adding video to your blog is also relatively easy to do. There is no need to go out and purchase a complex editing program. All you need isWindows Movie Maker,which is natively installed in Windows and iMovie if you use a Mac. These programs are very easy to learn and use. Today’s standard digital cameras (and many phones) can take great quality video. Efforts should be made to ensure that sound and lighting are at a reasonable quality, since these are vital elements of video.
The following are some important tips. Firstly, keep it interesting. Engage your audience by being entertaining and stimulating. Secondly, make your videos relatively short. Users generally like videos to get the point and don’t like long videos. Youtube videos are mostly under 15 minutes for a good reason. Thirdly, share your videos across social media channels, including Twitter and Facebook. This is how videos go viral. When friends share with more friends and so on, this is how the most popular videos reach 100s of millions of views.
Video for Businesses
It is often not easy to gain a reasonably quick grasp of what a website is offering, particularly if they offers a brand new concept in using their service. A video can convey what it is about interestingly and quickly without the user needing to read information or explore the website.
It is now commonto see a video as an introduction to a business on its homepage. These videos often explain what the business does in an interesting and entertaining way. These are often created in Flash or After Effects, which are recognized as the best programs for this style of animation. Other times, it willshow a film. One example of a video thatwent viral was “Will It Blend”. This is one of many of their successful videos, which have received millions of views. As a result, their sales have vastly improved.
Video for Ecommerce
The trend has now taken off where online stores are providing videos to promote their products. Videos show demonstrations, reviews and responses. There are many video hosting and video providing companies specifically geared towards ecommerce and products. Some of these include Vzaar, Invodo and Treepodia.One example of a merchant is zappos.com, who use videos to promote their products. Studies have shown that videos motivate people to take action and that videos increase conversion rates. In fact,Zappos’ sales have increase between 6% and 30% as a result of using video.
The following are some tips for using videos to promote products in ecommerce. Continue to use text descriptions. Videos should not replace these descriptions and should be used to enhance them. Keep the quality as high as possible. The quality can make a lastly impression of potential customers. Lastly, do not mention the prices in the video. Prices might change, and can be quite difficult adjust for this change in a video.
Mitchel Xavier works in a team of Magento Developers creating Magento websites for ecommerce businesses in Sydney, Australia.
