A few short years ago, people watched tv shows when they were aired; say Wednesday night at 7. Sound ridiculous? It seems so normal if you were there at the time.
Today we can watch our shows on our schedule. Heck, most of the time we don’t even have to watch commercials! People are conditioned to taking in information on their time, on their terms.
To reach more people today, let them watch your video whenever they are ready. Give them options; watch later, finish later, watch again. Facebook and YouTube have some basic functionality around saving videos for later; YouTube has a “watch later” and Facebook has “saved videos” although most people cant find it once its saved. There are also video hosting platforms that allow you to control even more about how your video is played, give the viewers more options for playback, and even do gated content. The options are great, but to get people to view your video on these platforms, you’ve got to drive them to a web page, leaving the social media site they were on.
Making your video mobile-friendly makes it even more accessible. In fact it’s necessary today and any video not mobile optimized will be penalized. A couple of basic things to keep in mind when optimizing for mobile:
· Use bigger titles. If you edit this video on a 24 inch monitor the Titles (words printed on screen) are going to seem plenty big enough. Now shrink that down to 2×3 inches, and imagine a middle aged person wants to watch it. It will be too small. Titles need to be really big, and printing out an entire paragraph on the screen is out of the question.
· Zoom-in your shots. If the spokesperson or interviewee is making gestures, or expressions on their face that are telling part of the story, you need to again imagine their facial expression is ½ inch tall and there’s glare. All shots must be zoomed in. There’s no reason to shoot someone from the feet up or even the knees up. Waist or belly up to 6 inches above the head is typically a good way to go.
Sales Perspective
Another factor in video accessibility that is often overlooked is video’s ability to multiply yourself a bit. This is a great advantage from a sales perspective. If you are featuring your voice or actually being in the video itself as a monologue, narrator, interviewer, or interviewee, you are giving the audience a little feel for what you are like. They get a sense of what kind of person you are and will start to like or dislike you depending on what you say and how you present.
People that are the face of an organization, or are in business development roles, stand to make giant leaps in rapport with prospects when they finally do get to talk. Omnipresence. Having never met the person in the video, the prospect feels they know the presenter a bit, and many find the building rapport and trust-ability happens a lot faster in scenarios where the prospect first saw videos featuring the seller.