Your fans and customers don’t have to spend a ton of money to create a basic video filming and streaming setup. Authenticity is the most important aspect of effective social media videos and he set up for an efficient space for shooting videos can be inexpensive. This guide will serve you and for teaching your fans and customers to create the very best video content for your brand.

What You Should Consider Before Starting

There are a few things you may want to keep in mind before jumping in.

Budget. The cost of creating your own content can be expensive. How much money are you going to designate to build your filming studio at home? Considering a good quality camera, lighting and editing software, you can certainly achieve a professional outcome with around $100, consider that the quality of your equipment does have an impact on the final result. Evaluate your options, always considering the available space you have at home and your skill level.

Space. The best would be to dedicate a room, especially for your filming purposes, but if you are tight in space, you can also transform a corner of a room into your video studio area if you don’t mind sharing the space.

The outcome. What are the results you expect to get out of your video productions? What is your objective? Do you want to attract customers? Is this just a hobby? Invest in this according to your plans.

The style. Will you be speaking to the camera directly? Are you going to be demonstrating something that requires a specific point of view in camera, like gardening, cooking in the kitchen or doing yoga in a studio? Will you need any kind of props or equipment for your demonstrations? The space where you decide to set up your filming area should make sense with the expected outcome; deciding on the best scenario for your video production should be considered even before thinking about the required gear and equipment.

Filming Equipment Required for Social Media Videos

Creating social video content can be done really easy; literally, anyone can achieve a compelling social media video with a smartphone, an internet connection and an editing app. But the reality is that successful and engaging content takes some planning time. To really take content to the next level, consider investing in good quality recording equipment since it will impact the video and sound quality.

Camera

For your video studio options, you can use your smartphone since it is an easy way of recording videos, and you can achieve a basic social media type of video. But your best choice would be to have a DSLR camera as your primary shooting device and a smartphone on a tripod for a second camera view.

When it comes to the video mode of your DSLR camera, you can try different lenses. If you are looking for cinematic video quality, a 50mm lens will give you a good view for a waist up shot, but you might want to use a 35mm lens for a wide-angle shot since it can compensate for the lack of space in a room.

When considering a tripod option, go for a clamp-on design that you can mount anywhere and that offers flexibility and the capability to change the camera position easily.

Sound

Built-in microphones are usually limited in capacity and can reduce the overall outcome’s quality; therefore, external microphones are the best option if you want to achieve high-quality video production.

There are a few options to consider:

An adjustable microphone arm or a USB desktop or clamp-on can be a great option if you plan to stay still speaking directly to the camera and won’t be moving your head and shoulders much. Consider a pop filter to eliminate the POP sounds that may appear in your speech.

A wired or Bluetooth lavalier microphone is your best option if you are going to be moving around while filming.

Soundproof treatments. If you need to muffle some external sounds because your filming area has echoes, or is noisy, try to add carpeting, blankets or sound panels to the floors and walls.

Lighting

Professionals use the 3 point lighting technique for video lighting, which consists of:

1. Primary illumination or Key light
2. Filling light, which is used to fill in the shadows created by the primary light.
3. Background light, which is used to add a three-dimensional sense to the shot.

There are other elements that you can include to help improve your lighting, such as:

• Use artificial light only, by blocking natural light to enter your filming area
• The bulbs to create a dimmer or brighter light
• A lightbox that can help maximize the brightness of the scene
• Using halo lamps for filming close-ups as the primary light
• Use a natural light scenario

Editing Software

If you choose to edit your videos on your own, you can evaluate whether to use paid or free editing software, consider which type is available for your computer. There is a wide variety in the market that goes from free apps to expensive software. Choosing the right editing solution will help achieve success, depending on your skill level, needs, and budget.

The Best Places to Set Up Your Video Studio at Home

There are a few things to consider when selecting your filming area:

• Is the area accessible and adequate for setting up and storing the equipment
• Is the lighting sufficient and practical for adapting the light setup
• Does it have a good acoustic for filming?
• Is it easy to set up the filming equipment?

If you are going to be filming outdoors for a gardening show, you will need to set the space up for the shooting, same if you are planning to do a cooking show, you’ll need to set up your kitchen as your filming area. For example, if you will be doing a Yoga class in a spare room, a shed or a garage, set up your ideal Yoga space to convert it into your new filming studio. If you are tight in space, you can even arrange the corner of a room, hang some art, a backdrop or place some sound-absorbing panels to make it look like a dedicated space. Still, the most important thing to consider is to keep the area clean and organized and make sure that it’s not a very distracting spot.

Social Content Planning Tips

If you don’t have a plan, your content can lack structure and coherency. These are a few tips for planning your content:

• Always have a content calendar with a social content weighing strategy where you mark in advance which topics you want to cover and prepare accordingly.
• Create storyboards that will help planning out the structure of the video from beginning to end
• Create stories for your social media channels using short clips taken from the finished video to promote content on different platforms.
• Stay up to date with trending topics check out your favorite brands and influencers to know what’s of interest to your audience.

• Animate your viewers to like and subscribe. Ask your viewers for feedback and to opt into your newsletter or mailing list.
• Interact with subscribers. When someone writes a comment for you, always reply!
• Start collaborations with other influencers. Partner up with an expert on the topic you are covering or with another influencer that can give a different point of view.
• Create an online course or give an online class covering essential topics in your field of expertise. This will expand your audience and engage more subscribers.

As you can see, with some planning and craftiness, and investing in the right tools for your needs, anyone can create professional-looking videos.

For brands, the opportunity has never been greater to gain access to and leverage this high-quality and engaging content created by fans, customers, and users. Request a demo of TINT to learn more.

The post How to Create the Ideal Dedicated Space for Social Media Videos appeared first on TINT.

We debuted a new session called “Social Reset: Leave Your Old Content in 2020.” We had a packed house, virtually that is, and had plenty of engagement. Unfortunately, we ran out of time to answer all the questions that were submitted. We’re answering all those questions below. 

If you are encouraging content from employees and customers, do you usually want to have an approval process in place before it posts live?

Your standard approval process for social content should remain in place. A good user-generated content (UGC)/employee-generated content (EGC) program will complement and supplement your existing strategy.  

UGC/EGC is a content source and driver of engagement. 

When looking at UGC, I generally do a little research on who is sharing the content before pushing it live. Then I’ll reach out to get permission to reshare if I’m not using a native reshare feature. Native resharing could be things like sharing a tagged post on Instagram, clicking share on a Facebook post, or retweeting on Twitter. Those are generally safe avenues to share content. It is when you grab content and move it around that people get into trouble. I encourage you to check out our blog Understanding the Importance of UGC User Rights as a primer to the conversation.

On the employee side, many brands and organizations have content agreements built into their employee handbooks or contracts. Even then, I think a head’s up is still a common courtesy and helps build rapport with your employees.I also let people know if we’re doing any modification to their content, i.e. watermarking, photoshopping.  Circumstances will be different from company to company and always vary depending on the goals of their EGC program. 

Here’s more reading on Employee Generated Content, particularly how it affects recruitment. 

What are some ideas for engaging customers and community members in social strategy to create user-generated content?

First, and foremost, think of yourself as an Experience Builder. There will always be incidental social shares, but to drive any sort of significant content creation you should make it into an engaging activity. We’ve found that activities like scavenger hunts, countdown timers, social walls, hashtag wars, polls, and microsites really drive action. Pull together the content from multiple sources and display it quickly so that participants get instant gratification. Set a deadline for each “experience” and launch several throughout the year. The FOMO will keep people contributing. 

For both customers and employees, recognition is an important part of the process. Even if you’re capturing content and obtaining legal rights, you should still call out the contributors. This helps create a recursive content relationship. They appreciate the love and attention, so they make more content. You share their content and give them love and appreciation. 

Learn more about becoming an Experience Builder. 

What is the best way to get employees as internal influencers for a restaurant company?

1. Design an outcome-driven program
2. Incorporate into daily processes
3. Make content submission easy
4. Deploy, Test, Analyze, Repeat

1. Design an Outcome-Driven program

Have clear outcomes before you begin. What is the content that you’re trying to capture? What will what content contribute to your existing marketing programs? What is the amount of time you and your employees are willing to spend on this? How will the content flow from employee to the marketing/communications team? What are the metrics for success?

2. Incorporate into daily processes

The best programs for internal influencers or employee-generated content are ones that can become part of the daily routine. It shouldn’t feel like a burden. It should feel like a part of the day-to-day processes. There is certainly a learning curve to this, but with the support of an experienced UGC/EGC specialist, you can swiftly overcome it. 

If you do not encourage content creation as a daily habit, it’ll quickly fall to the wayside as additional “sidework”, particularly when employees get busy during things like holidays or weekend. (Probably the best times to create content too.)

3. Make content submission easy

How will the content flow from the frontline employees to the marketing and communications team? We’ve found that people, particularly Millenials and Gen Z, do not like sending photos from a mobile device to an email address.  

Our recommendation is to deploy a social aggregation tool to make it easier. Pull in content from hashtags, set-up a phone number that employees can text content to, and create a microsite that allows direct uploading of larger content types like video. 

Learn more about TINT’s content aggregation process. 

4. Deploy, Test, Analyze, Repeat

As with any marketing or communications program, the process should be iterative. Design your program in sprints, get feedback, and repeat. There may be blind spots in the process that participants can diagnose more easily than administrators. 

Remember, marketing is not a light switch. It can take time UGC, EGC, and social campaigns to “rev-up”. 

Talk to one of our UGC specialists today and explore your options for managing internal influencers and employee-generated content.

I work in healthcare and we try to get content (EGC) from staff in multiple divisions. Rather than contribute to the main account, all the departments want their own social handles. How can I manage that?

This sounds like a power struggle in the making. You should nip this in the bud before it sprouts into a tangled mess. 

First, be upfront about the time commitment and expectations for having their own social handles. Show them a style guide and create a guide for how often things will need to be posted. Depending on the degree of control that your team has, explain the content approval process and design standards. Talk about HIPPA rules. 

This will likely scare off the less committed.

Another option is to let them have their handles. They can post content and you can aggregate it into the main feed. While this does dilute the power structure, it could be easier trying to force content out of non-compliant departments. You could use the one-two punch of TINT+ Hootsuite Amplify to ensure any secondary Twitter feeds are getting pulled into the main handles and messaging from the main is being pushed to the secondaries.

Beware if your policies are too draconian. I ran into some similar issues when I worked in Higher Education and sometimes departments simply set up their own handles and started creating. What is your action if that happens? 

This is a tricky one. Feel free to reach out to us and we can brainstorm specifics. 

How should one go about creating UGC for a B2B brand?

It always starts with planning. There needs to be a serious conversation upfront about outcomes and content needs. We’ve seen amazing campaigns from brands like Cisco and Securian that have focused on customer and employee advocacy.

Also, consider all the different types of UGC. People often go straight to photos, but reviews are also user-generated content. B2B organizations can greatly benefit from that type of social proof.

Can you talk about the need for approval to reshare content by platform?  

The rights conversation revolves around ownership. If you’re natively sharing, like we’ve mentioned above, generally you’re okay (with a few minor exceptions).  The legal liability begins when you “take possession” of content that is not yours. If you have to download it or otherwise capture it, you’ll need to deal with rights management.

We have an on-demand webinar that introduces the Rights Management process. 

You can also learn about the TINT Content Rights Management process. 

If one of our customer partners tags us and/or uses a hashtag linked to our brand, are we okay to reshare that without formal approval? 

My initial thought is… it depends. From a risk management perspective, I don’t think you’re likely to get sued by a customer partner. In a perfect world, you would build it into the customer agreement with clear terms around what the shared content would be used for. 

I still believe that common courtesy would say that you give them a heads up whenever you do it.

Continue the Conversation

We’d love to continue the conversation. If you’d like to have a member of TINT talk at your next event, podcast, or team meeting please email events@tintup.com You can also speak with one of our UGC specialists to learn how TINT can drive engagement for your marketing in 2021. Schedule a call and demo today.

The post Ask TINT: November 2020 – Digital Summit at Home appeared first on TINT.