It's hard to come up with fresh new content ideas, especially in certain niches and industries.
Once you've exhausted your best ideas, most relevant keywords, and frequently asked customer questions…
You may start feeling a little pressed for ideas.
If you're not using video content yet, why not start?
Video is just as important as text blogs these days, and with the right affordable software and a little creativity, it's not expensive at all to get started.
There are tons of ways to go with video.
You can reuse ideas from your existing blog posts, repackaging them for the new medium.
There's also live streaming, behind the scenes videos, and more.
In a recent Entrepreneur article, the author offers some great ideas for videos your audience will love.
1. Turn a blog post into a video.
4 reasons why engagement (not sales) is the future of social media and how we can adapt 🚀
👉 https://t.co/kx20N2SiYS pic.twitter.com/2e8IXxgzNG
— Buffer (@buffer) August 11, 2017
When we noticed that our videos were generating more engagement than our images and links, we started producing more videos. One way we get ideas for our videos is to look to our blog — here!
And one way we get ideas for video content is to look back at some of our best-performing blog content.
By pulling our key ideas and data from a blog post, we can easily turn blog posts into short videos to share on our social media channels.
Animoto is great if you want to create simple videos quickly — it’s one of Brian‘s go-to video tools. It provides many templates and stock videos and allows you to create square videos — which we found to be more effective than landscape videos.
If you want to create more complex videos like the below example, we tend to use After Effects.
A super-simple tutorial on how to make your own GIF from start to finish 🙌 https://t.co/Pe1WugKNAP pic.twitter.com/aMyIWadJPC
— Buffer (@buffer) August 14, 2017
Suitable for: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google+
An idea to try: Use Animoto (or your favorite video-editing tool) to turn one of your recent blog posts into a short 30-second video.
2. Create a how-to video.
Another way to utilize video is to create a totally new piece of content from scratch.
Here are some video ideas for you:
- Tips
- How-to guides
- Customer stories
- Behind-the-scenes
- User-generated content
- Product announcements
- Company announcements or milestones
You don’t need expensive, fancy tools and applications to get started either. Many of the videos we publish at Buffer are recorded using a smartphone.
No need to be a pro to get started with video! 🎥 Here's a simple 4-step guide on creating engaging videos using only your phone. pic.twitter.com/NIEcblJKwH
— Buffer (@buffer) August 17, 2017
As many social media platforms auto-play videos without sound, it’s great to add captions to your videos, too. This way, your followers can still understand your video even if they don’t turn on the sound.
Suitable for: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google+
An idea to try: Create a video with three tips or information that will help, educate or entertain your followers. Here’s a guide on social media video marketing to help you get started.
Once you’ve created your content, quickly and easily schedule posts for all of your social accounts and Buffer will publish them automatically, according to the posting schedule you put in place.
3. Go live.
Live videos are a great way to increase your organic reach and drive engagement.
- Reach: Facebook ranks live videos higher on the News Feed than non-live content. Also, Michael Stelzner, CEO and founder of Social Media Examiner, shared on Buffer’s Science of Social Media podcast that going live increased the reach of their non-live Facebook Page conten as well.
- Engagement: According to Facebook, “People spend more than three times more time watching a Facebook Live video on average compared to a video that’s no longer live.”
Like our live video above, your live videos don’t have to be professionally-produced or scripted (though, it would be a good idea to plan your video a little).
Suitable for: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (Periscope)
An idea to try: Take your social media followers behind the scenes live. You could show them your team-bonding activities, work sessions or simply a tour of your office.
If you are feeling a little stuck, HubSpot has shared 11 cool live streaming ideas for Facebook, Periscope and more.
4. Interview someone (live).
Another fun video idea you could try is to interview someone. If you like a bit of a challenge, you could try doing it live. But if live streaming scares you (like it does to me), you could opt to do a recorded video interview for a start.
For the Facebook Live video above, we used BeLive, which allows more than one person to be on the live stream.
To edit your videos, you could use a free video-editing tool, such as iMovie or Windows Movie Maker.
Suitable for: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+
An idea to try: Record an interview with a colleague, customer or industry expert and upload it directly to Facebook (instead of uploading to YouTube and posting the link on Facebook).
5. Post 360 photos or videos.
If you are up for trying something (fairly) new, play around with 360 photos and videos for Facebook. (The 360 photo above is my attempt at taking a 360 photo of the Buffer team during our recent Madrid retreat.)
To take a 360 photo, you need to take a photo that’s wider than 100 degrees using the panaroma feature on your smartphone and Facebook will automatically convert it into a 360 photo.
To record a 360 video, you could try Giroptic iO, a $249 360 camera which can be used for Facebook Live, Periscope and YouTube Live.
Suitable for: Facebook, Twitter (Periscope) and YouTube Live
An idea to try: Take a 360 photo of your next event and share it on your Facebook Page.
You can find more creative video ideas over at Entrepreneur.
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