Video has well and truly taken over the internet.
In the past 30 days, more online video content has been uploaded to the web than in the past 30 years of television content.
That is insane.
Nearly everyone watches video online, whether it be through YouTube, a social media channel, or on more traditional websites.
YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine behind Google, and it is the second most trafficked website in the world. Because YouTube is ultimately still a search engine, it is important to optimise video SEO by choosing the right title, description and tags.
Schools should create content to meet this demand. Video content is often the most authentic and compelling for your audience. Remember, do not worry about needing expensive equipment or movie-quality production – just start creating. No one is expecting professional film level quality and most smartphones have the capabilities to create high-quality video.
With that said, try to avoid posting videos of terrible sound or picture quality. Basic video-editing software can be found for free on a lot of smartphones or downloadable online. Or you could outsource the raw, unedited footage to a video editor on a website like Fiverr for a small price.
Experiment with both long-form and short-form videos to determine what engages better with the audience. A great aspect about creating long-form video is its ability to be repurposed into many different smaller pieces of content that can be distributed across other platforms.
A long-form piece of visual content, such as a ten-minute video on YouTube, could be transcribed and turned into a blog post for a website, shorter clips posted to Instagram or TikTok, audio taken to form a podcast episode, articles for LinkedIn, the possibilities are just about endless.
Video content also allows for better, more specific, retargeting options when advertising through Facebook.
LIVE VIDEO
Even better than curating regular video content is creating live content, which has become a major feature of most platforms. Social media algorithms love live video and it often engages better than regular video posts.
Most of the major social media platforms allow you to go live using their in-app video features. Of course, you have the vulnerabilities of appearing on camera live, which may not be suitable in some settings, especially involving children.
There are many content ideas that will work for educational institutions. Some schools have decided to live stream important assemblies and universities have used live streaming for graduation ceremonies. Q and As or educational workshops are other content ideas that could work well with live video.
Live videos can also be saved and used to repurpose into more content.