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Content for social media

In this session, we’re going to look at different formats for the different platforms, and how to make sure that your content is both discoverable and engaging for the viewers.

Spoiler (click to read)

Welcome to this final video in the series on mobile journalism and optimizing content for social media. Now in this session, we’re going to look at different formats for the different platforms, and how to make sure that your content is both discoverable and engaging for the viewers. Number one, make your own custom thumbnails. When you look at platforms like YouTube, they will basically sample the piece of content that you’ve uploaded and will randomly select three thumbnails and it will recommend one of those thumbnails as the holding slide that people will see when they’re looking at the directory of content that includes your video. All the professional vloggers know that you can actually upload a custom thumbnail. And that’s key to making sure that your content is discoverable on YouTube, particularly when there’s so much competition. So create an image, it can be a screen grab from your video, but I’d strongly encourage you to take an actual posed photograph, and to add graphics onto that photograph, so that basically engages the viewer and makes them want to click the content. If you look at just recent posts by some of the top vloggers here, this was about the launch of the recent Sony’s ZV-1 vlogger camera, Supersaf, iJustine, Philip Bloom and Tyler Stallman all did reviews of that same camera, and every single one of them had a catchy thumbnail to engage the viewer and make them want to click that link. Interestingly, Philip Bloom specifically wrote a catchy headline as well to basically try and set his review apart from all the other ones that are several hundred on the day of launch. So here’s one as you can see, not just another Sony ZV-1 review, and in the background of his thumbnail, he has screenshots of loads of other vloggers who have reviewed the same camera. So think about that thumbnail because that is the single frame the single picture that’s going to try and lure your audience in together with a good caption to want to watch your piece of content. Now in this case of the other social media platforms, you have to apply the rule of best shot first. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, hold on the first frame of your video in the timeline. So that basically that’s the image that the person will see as a still frame with the play icon on it, or in the case of Instagram, it will autoplay once they scroll over. So it’s really important that you give a lot of consideration to what the very first shot in your edit is going to be. Once you’re going to publish it on social media, you can really stack this in your favor. If you put a lot of thought into that shot and assess it like this. What does that image give to the viewer? What is it that would provoke the viewer to click on that link and watch the actual piece of content. Really put some thought into that. In old school, traditional filmmaking, they always spoke about this idea of an establishing shot, which was always a wide shot to set up a scene. That rulebook is completely out the window now when it comes to social media. Now, a great visual close up is actually a key to engaging the viewer. If you can sum up your story and One single image, let the first shot of your edit be that image be at the one that represents for the viewer what they can expect if they click and watch your content. The next one you need to consider is resizing appropriately for the different platforms. And this to be fair is a bit of a minefield, there are so many different shapes and sizes, whether you include headers, video layouts, timeline, photographs, and everything else that goes with all the different social media platforms. Now, I know it seems like an awful lot to wrap your head around. But if you do a quick Google search on social media sizes, you get an awful lot of actual reference points that will actually give you the layouts and the templates that you will need to be able to make the content optimized. Now in this case study I’m going to show you a colleague of mine from RTÉ, the Irish broadcaster took a TV style report and then basically shared the three different edits and the three different aspect ratios that were effectively used for social media content. So you can See on the TV version on the right hand side, it’s led by VoiceOver on the social media vertical story, which would have gone on Instagram stories and on Snapchat, for instance, and on Twitter because Twitter can reveal a square frame to a full 9: 16 vertical story as long as you do a call to action in the actual tweet itself, and then the normal widescreen version for the website, but it has subtitles and captions. And we’ll come to that next. First of all, though, check out the three re-versions, there’s just a snippet. If you want to see the whole version of this piece, go to his channel on Vimeo His name is Phillip Bromwell, bottom right hand corner of the slide. And you can watch the entire piece of content and the three different edits that were used for Social Media, TV and online.

“There’s never been more focus on the problem of plastic pollution. But here’s something you can do to turn soft plastic waste into a resource….collected up and stored in these bottles. If you possibly can…”

Again on social media, you have to pay attention to the fact that you may be cropping a widescreen image into a vertical video. And one of the strategies that they use when making these type of reports in RTÉ is they shoot everything on a mobile phone in 4k resolution. And then they can crop into that master shot in pretty much any shape that they want to match the requirements of the specific platforms. Also, all the graphics that they use in their reports are actually done on an iPad using Luma fusion, which we covered in the course. Now, I mentioned a moment ago that that content from RTÉ was driven on the website and on social media by captions and subtitles. And here’s the reason according to a Facebook report from a number of years back, they reckon that up to 80% of social media content was being watched with the sound turned off. This is partly because of the social environments that people were in that didn’t necessarily want to turn the sound up on their phones when they were looking at content because the people around them would hear it. I suppose. And also because of privacy. This is really, really important though, because if you’re used to telling stories that are designed for television where the voiceover and the interview is the narrative, you really must rethink the storytelling for social media. And this is part of the reason why when we looked at the filming techniques part of this course, we talked about this idea of filming in sequences. Sequences are essential to conveying the core pieces of information that someone must understand from a story with visuals rather than with audio. Now, on top of the fact that the sound okay 20% still listen to it, but the sound predominantly will not be listened to, you then need to think about how can you address it. And like I say, the key thing is to use captions and subtitles. Now here’s a couple of apps that you might find very useful for this both iOS and Android. Each one of these apps uses the latest voice recognition software to allow you to automatically generate subtitles for your videos. Some of them are free, like this app Vrew, unfortunately, has limited voice support, so only five or six languages supported, but it is free, other ones like Mix Captions, Otter AI and Autocap have broader language support, but do require either a subscription, or the purchase of in app credits. Nonetheless, it really does take the hard slog of adding subtitles to your actual videos, that can be very, very tedious when done manually. Now at the same time, if you’re doing the large format captions, as done by BuzzFeed and Aljazeera+ and others, then that really should be done in the actual editing application. You can develop your own style by importing your own fonts and your own color palette into the likes of Luma fusion. Another thing, which is a huge and ongoing raging debate, is what is the ideal length for video on social media. And while there’s lots of discussion about this, I cannot say that there is a hard and fast rule, but there definitely is a general consensus about some of the principles. And for this again, if you do a search on Google, you’ll find services like HubSpot, who regularly publish surveys and reports on what is performing particularly well on social. And recently enough, they published this piece of content that basically shared, what they discovered were the optimum durations for the different platforms. So here as you can see, on Instagram, 30 seconds performs best on Twitter, 45 seconds performs best on Facebook a minute or longer. And remember, for Facebook Lives that needs to be 10 minutes or longer to get any level of proper engagement. And then YouTube, it says two minutes. But I personally would say that if you think about most of the vlogs that you watch on YouTube, they can run 10, 15, even 20 minutes in duration. At the end of the day, it’s all going to be dictated by how engaging and entertaining is the content. That’s what’s going to keep people watching. Now when it comes to reversioning your photographs and your video content for the different platforms, there are a number of apps that will help you to actually figure out all the different aspect ratios and all the different sizes. So here’s three of my favourites, Adobe Spark post, which is a free app, you just need an Adobe ID, which is basically an email address to be able to access the account. There is a paid tier for more premium features, but you can use it for free. There is Canva, which is both online and an app that will allow you to reversion for different platforms. And then there’s Over which is an iOS app, which again offers templates for different purposes like header on Twitter, main post on Twitter, vertical stories, and Instagram timelines, shots on Instagram and so on, so forth. These are three apps that are definitely worth checking out. And if you’re publishing on Instagram stories, specifically, two more apps, well worth checking out are Mojo and Unfold. Now be warned both of these apps are premium apps. In other words, they’re not free. You do have to pay an annual subscription or in app purchases for some of the templates, but they do allow you to do customized layouts and animated text and animated video layers and specifically designed for publishing within the vertical format of Instagram stories.  The key thing I would say is again, with research, you will find lots of advice and loads of services offering you information on what makes your content work on social media. But there’s a huge part of it that is, try, fail. learn from those mistakes and try again. And truthfully, that’s probably the best way to learn.

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