You can share videos on numerous platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube. Bear in mind that different platforms have different limits on video length. Sprout Social keeps an up-to-date list of the correct formats and lengths for each platform.
Why share your story as a video?
- It's powerful - The meaning and impact of your story can be even more powerful when your audience can see and hear you telling it.
- You don't need to be an expert - All you need is a mobile phone. Anyone can get their message across effectively, as long as the picture is clear, and your voice is loud enough to be heard
- It's accessible - video is a great platform for sharing your message and experiences if you find it tricky to write blogs. Just remember to include subtitles, so everyone can access it.
Top tips for recording video
Setting up
Make sure you think about the following things:
- Sound - Make sure that your voice travels and you can be heard clearly. Choose an area with minimal background noises, echoing and interruptions.
- Lighting - Whether you're indoors or outdoors, make sure the light is behind the camera and not behind you; otherwise you’ll become a silhouette on the video.
The best way to check these things is to do a short test before you start recording properly - film yourself talking for a few seconds and check to see whether the sound and picture quality is what you expected.
Do I need fancy equipment?
Not at all! These days, most mobile phones and tablets have good-enough cameras for someone starting to create videos for the first time, as long as you're in a well-lit space. Some of our most engaging Time to Change social media content is filmed on a phone!
The most important thing is to make sure you can be heard clearly - if you find yourself creating a lot of video content, you might want to invest in a dedicated microphone to improve the sound quality.
Making your content engaging
- Keep it brief - Aim for between 1-3 minutes in length, keep it short and sweet with one main message.
- Prepare - Drawing up a rough script, or some bullet points of what you want to say, will help guide you through your recording, but don't feel like you need to follow an exact script either. Giving yourself some space to speak more naturally will help to engage the audience.
- Be yourself - it doesn't matter if you trip over a word, lose your train of thought, or show some emotion. Your video doesn't have to be perfect, and it'll be more powerful if it shows you as you really are.
Editing
If you're filming short clips for Twitter or Instagram stories, you might be able to post the video straight after filming. But if you're making longer videos for YouTube, or for your blog, you might want to use some editing software to put your videos together.
The best app for editing will depend on what device you are using, but there are lots of free ones available.
- For Mac, iMovie is a free programme that you can use to edit videos.
- For PC, Lightworks is a popular free video editor
- For Android, check out this list of the best video editing apps
- And here is a similar list of free video editing apps for iOS
- YouTube offers some basic editing tools when you're uploading your video too.
Top tip: if you're making video content for Twitter or Instagram, you might want to use an editing app to put subtitles on - research shows that most people watch video in their social feeds without sound. In Instagram Stories, you can do this within the app using the 'text' tool over your video.
Developing your skills further
If you decide that video is your passion, you can learn a lot of helpful tips online.
Your first port of call should be The YouTube Creator Academy, where you can find lots of great tutorials about creating video inside and outside of YouTube.
There are also plenty of tutorials shared by experts on YouTube itself, or you could try a paid learning platform like Skillshare, Udemy or Lynda.com for a more structured course. Your local college will often run video production courses too.