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Image c/o Garret Voight on Flickr
As I noted in a previous post, one of the things that we’ve really focused on over the summer in preparation for the coming year is putting together some fresh video content that we can use on a variety of social media platforms. As yet we haven’t really used much video content, and our existing YouTube channel didn’t have much content on it. We decided that we needed to change this and, alongside a focus on photos and images, we should go down the route of creating videos that we can use to promote our services and support our students.
At the beginning of the summer, we recruited a paid intern (Louise Leolin – who recently featured in Wired no less!) to produce new video to replace our old study skills videos. These long form videos (around 3mins) were for hosting on our intranet pages, as well as on our YouTube channel. Alongside these more expansive videos, she also produced some short instructional videos on how to use the printers etc. What has been particularly great, however, is that the longer form videos have been constructed in such a way that it is relatively easy to pick elements out and create shorter videos that can be posted elsewhere (ie Instagram). So we have ended up with a series of longer videos going into some depth on key study skills, but also some short clips that focus on particular elements (eg evaluating information).
So, for example, we have this long form video on how to using resources for assignments:
And we’ve broken it down into several smaller videos that we can use on social media:
Ok, admittedly they were a bit of a faff to create. I had to use iMovie on my iPad to edit the videos, detach the audio and play around with it so that it fitted the shorter format, add a title page (using a time lapse video I created earlier in the summer) and make sure the music ran smoothly throughout the video. I also wanted to make sure it had an end card that pointed to all of our social media channels as an extra promotional push. Those three short video clips took me a morning to produce. I intend on creating some more before the start of term, but I’m finding I get bored very quickly with the process after a couple of clips so decided it was better to space it out!
We’ve also put together a few promotional videos, some acting as trailers (see my previous post as an example), some as fun clips we can use at key points of the year.
I’ve also tried to put similar content together onto playlists on YouTube to make it easier for people to find particular types of content. For example, we have a “How can we help you with your studies” playlist and a “Finding your way around” playlist. I’ve also tried to make sure the titles of the videos are as descriptive as possible, so that people can see exactly what the video is about before the watch it. Hopefully this should help in terms of views and discoverability. Hopefully.
Obviously all these videos are hosted on YouTube, both the longer videos and the short, sub-one minute clips. Although we will push links to the hosted YouTube content on Facebook and Twitter, the idea is to also upload the original files to Instagram and share from there. By mixing up images and video content, hopefully this should make our Instagram account more varied and interesting…that’s the plan anyway!
There are still more clips to create, but I certainly think our YouTube channel is much more interesting as a result…and hopefully this will help to grow our Instagram account too. Let me know what you think!
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