Presentation Skills for Social Media Stars

Using video has become a high priority for social media marketers in any niche and creating your video can be a fun and interesting experience as long as you follow a formula that guarantees success.

There are 3 main types of video that are used by business to market themselves online these are:

• real person talk or  interview style – this can be in a setting or in front green-screen ready for business branding to be overlayed onto the screen. These can be done in various ways as a straight video or a ‘walk on’ person for your site.
• slide show with music or slide show with voice over great for viral videos and the more informative video.
• ‘How to’ or ‘follow along’ (Camtasia type)- as it says great for showing your viewers how to do something, particularly good for how to use this website, the internet or social media tutorials.

One of the things I so often see is videos  that have no structure or seemingly no purpose to them. Now this doesn’t mean your video has to be perfect, or that you have to be serious and business like, in fact the most viral videos are the ones where there is fun, laughter, inspiration, leadership or great ‘how to’ tips. What I am talking about is treating your video just like you would any other marketing tool by defining the purpose, vision, outcome, call to action, headline, keywords or tags etc..

Next storyboard it, sit down and either sketch or write down what is happening in each frame, this is particularly important for a slide show or ‘how to’ Camtasia type video, if this is live video of you or someone else or an interview, know your questions and flow beforehand so that there is some idea of how the conversation will flow.

Now for those all important star quality video presentation skills:

• Have a catchy headline and I don’t just mean the headline you put into YouTube as you post it, I mean start your video by giving your viewers a reason to watch. Define the purpose of your presentation up front right at the beginning of the video in a clear statement of purpose. “Hi, I am here today to talk to you about…” now you may want to spice this up a bit, however this is the essence of what you are going to say.
• Open and Close with a beginning, middle and end. If you have several points to discuss, of course remembering that it is also very important to keep it short for internet viewing. Make sure you open and close each one of them clearly, with a beginning, a middle and an end. NOTE: if your video has to many transitions of subject I might be worth considering making more than one video.
• Be enthusiastic and passionate, allow all that passion for what you do to be clearly transmitted out from your video, use words that clearly lay claim to your enthusiasm like, fantastic, awesome, amazing …without sounding cheesy, this is about authentically transmitting your passion, not about false hype.
• Keep it visually simple without being boring, if you are using voice over on a slide show type video, keep text on the slide to a minimum, rather use emotionally engaging images to enhance and display your main points.
• Give them a show! No this is not the opposite of the last skill. Make your video appealing with the addition of slide transitions, video, green screen tech behind you, perhaps even a little CGI or special effects.
• Remember you are selling an experience, not a product or service, so make sure that you know your WHY? And transmit that across to your viewers in a way that is relevent to your viewers. Why should they care about what you are saying, why they need to know this, why you are speaking about this… Why?
• Identify the main points and memorable moments before you begin, this is what storyboarding is all about. Knowing the flow, how to get your point across, what is important, and where and when you will place your memorable moments in an emotionally engaging way.
• Practice, practice, practice – even an impromptu video needs at least a mind rehearsal or you will end up with a load of um’s and ah’s and a disjointed flow, unless of course you are a video master who has been doing this for years.
• Add value, add value, add value right from the beginning to the very end make sure your content is so valuable your viewers won’t want to miss a minute of what you are saying.

Here Steve Jobs himself putting these skills into practice and a break down of those skills via BNET:

Related articles

• The Week’s Best Viral Videos & Video Marketing Lessons – 12/24/2010 (reelseo.com)