Better social media videos start with a strong first frame, a relevant hook and a story that matters to the audience. TV news reporting offers a useful model: get to the point, show what matters and make every shot serve the story.
Before I started producing content at PhotoShelter, I worked as a daily news reporter. Reporters, photographers and multimedia journalists working for local television stations have to produce stories at high speed. They may have a minute to tell a story they’ve worked on for hours. Their stories compete for your attention when you’re getting ready for work or making dinner.
Brand storytellers can learn a lot about creating engaging social video by studying the way journalists tell stories. These seven tips draw on my time in a newsroom, with campaign examples that still offer useful lessons.
1. Catch your audience’s attention with the first frame
The first tip I got in TV news was, “always start with your best B-roll.”
If you’re covering a fire, the first shot in your story is the blaze, not the interview with the fire chief.
Plan your video visually. Make sure the first shot is eye-catching. Think about what will make your audience choose to wait and see what happens next in your video, rather than scrolling to see what’s next in their feed.
Show the result, the action or the question that makes the story worth watching. Cut any opening that delays that moment. Make the message understandable without sound, using clear visuals and accurate captions where needed.
2. Give your video a relevant hook
A news story has to have a hook. Why is this story important right now? For your brand, the hook could be a trending conversation, a current event or even a holiday.
In an early example, Hootsuite launched its pop culture reference, A Game of Social Thrones, just before the Game of Thrones Season 4 premiere. The start of the season gave the video a timely, relevant hook and a reason for fans to share it.
Think about the events and conversations where your brand could add valuable input. The right hook can help your video have a bigger impact on social media. Relevance matters more than joining every trend.
3. Make the audience and the story the focus
When you’re creating video content, think about your audience. Why will I want to watch your video? Does it teach me something? Make me smile? Pull at my heartstrings?
When you focus on the bigger picture and put your brand on the back burner, your audience has more opportunity to relate to your content. A story people connect with gives them a reason to share it.
Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches illustrates this approach. The video doesn’t lead with product features. Instead, it tells an emotional story about the difference between how people see themselves and how others see them. The focus is on the audience’s experience, rather than a sales pitch.
The takeaway? Tell a great story. Add value. Give viewers something worth remembering or sharing before asking them to take the next step.
4. Partner with your customers to create great content
News teams often have special access. A press pass can get you a preview, a behind-the-scenes perspective or an exclusive interview. But a news team can’t be everywhere at once. Photos and videos from people at the scene can offer a perspective the crew could not capture. This is the role of citizen journalism: people sharing firsthand coverage that a newsroom might otherwise miss.
Your citizen journalist is your customer. And sometimes, your customers’ real-life experiences can be more powerful than a story crafted in your office.
PhotoShelter’s UGC guide reports that 84% of consumers trust brands more when they use user-generated content.
When firefighter Cory Kalanick captured a kitten rescue on his GoPro camera, the footage became a powerful example of customer storytelling. GoPro shared the rescue in its Fireman Saves Kitten video.
GoPro’s PR team could have dreamed up the idea to attach a camera to a fireman’s helmet, but they couldn’t have achieved a video with this level of heart. Partnering with a customer allowed the brand to tell an incredibly compelling and authentic story.
GoPro credited and thanked Kalanick for sharing his story. Giving the creator clear credit reinforces the relationship behind the footage, rather than treating it as anonymous content.
Before reusing customer footage, obtain and record permission for the uses you plan, agree on attribution and confirm any other necessary rights. Our guide to social media copyright mistakes explains why public posts are not a blanket licence. These copyright case examples also show why brands need to check the rights behind the content they share.
5. Keep clutter out of your message
In daily news, you may have about a minute, sometimes less, to tell the story you’ve been working on all day. A reporter’s job is to sift through the details, highlight the most important points, and share the story in the most compelling and concise way possible.
When you are creating a video for social media, every choice you make should have meaning. Highlight the most important details and don’t include extraneous clutter that will muddle your message.
When the PhotoShelter team created our own video ad for social media in-house, we had to cut out a whole scene to keep our message clear and concise. We also went through an extensive review process to make sure our copy was as short and to-the-point as possible. Review your content with a critical eye, and be as willing to cut the clutter as a daily news editor.
Give reviewers one clear message to assess. PhotoShelter’s collaboration tools help teams gather feedback and approvals around the content they are reviewing.
6. Give viewers a clear call to action
Journalists are masters of storytelling. As a brand communicator, you can combine that storytelling with a clear next step. When you’re sharing a video online, consider what you want your audience to do and give them a clear path. Do you want them to share your video with their friends? Do you want them to make a donation?
A powerful story that drives your audience toward a clear call to action can help you achieve your goal. These two campaigns show how the next step can connect to the story. Their original sharing features and app are historical examples, rather than current instructions for viewers.
Always: #LikeAGirl
The goals:
- Raise awareness about the #LikeAGirl campaign, an effort to change society’s perception of what it means to do something like a girl.
- Position Always as a brand supporting that change.
The call to action:
- Invite viewers to share the message and get involved in the campaign.
- Connect participation to the emotion of the story, so sharing feels like a contribution rather than an unrelated request.
Chipotle: The Scarecrow
The goals:
- Introduce the campaign’s perspective on food culture.
- Promote the brand’s values.
The call to action:
- The original campaign invited viewers to explore its themes through a companion game and further information.
- The lesson is to offer a next step that continues the story. For your video, that might be a relevant article, a demonstration or a campaign page.
7. Organize your footage so you can reuse it
Newsrooms need systems to store and find archived footage. When news breaks, the team needs easy access to relevant imagery. Having file video for frequently covered topics, like B-roll of schools or city government offices, allows news teams to save time on a deadline.
Video is an important brand asset, and you can get more out of it when you have a system for storing and accessing it again later. This opens the door to tailoring and repurposing video content for new projects and new channels.
If your brand released a two-minute video for Valentine’s Day, you could create a shorter edit for a future campaign. Or, if you shot beautiful B-roll of your storefront or corporate headquarters for one project, you may be able to repackage it for another project, saving your team time and money. Just because the footage didn’t make the cut this time doesn’t mean it won’t be valuable in the future.
Take, for example, the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. The nonprofit reused footage from 2012 in a 2015 campaign with Shell. Its archival video case study shows how an organized library can give existing footage a new purpose.
The trick here is to keep your video footage well organized and easily accessible, so that when the time comes to repurpose it, you don’t waste time searching or reshooting footage you already have. These library setup tips from DAM experts cover planning, metadata and how people search. Record the subject, location, capture date, creator and usage restrictions alongside your content.
PhotoShelter’s video asset management tools help teams find footage, create clips and share video from one library. Before reusing an asset, check that its rights and context still fit the new project.
A version of this post was originally published in the PR News Visual Storytelling Guidebook 2016.
