JILLYN: Hi, I’m Jillyn, Founder and Executive Director of Technology Aloha, and I’m here today with our Content Manager, Kelli, to talk about Video Marketing for Social Impact, Youtube, and Your Nonprofit. Our podcast today will be broken into four sections —
- What is social video marketing
- Youtube — The #2 search engine in the world
- How social video marketing can help your nonprofit
- Tools you can use to make polished videos that maximize your ROI
Let’s get started.
What is social video marketing?
KELLI: Ok Jillyn, let’s start with this question: how would you define social video marketing?
JILLYN: That’s a great first question. Social Video and Social Video Marketing is the practice of creating videos that are optimized for use on social media. Social media can be Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or any other social media platform that your organization uses. It’s important to note that each platform has its own specifications for video size and length, so be sure you’re adhering to those guidelines and requirements!
KELLI: That’s great info and a good rundown on social video and social media. But why should nonprofits focus on social video marketing?
JILLYN: Because everyone is on social media. Well, not literally everyone, but a pretty shocking percentage of the population nationally and worldwide. It’s where you’re going to find your donors and supporters and people that are willing to spread your message. Social media platforms are also designed to make it easy for your supporters and followers to share your video posts.
Also, Video marketing also proves to be more engaging than other forms of marketing, which means more of the people that see your video posts will take some sort of action, and those actions will ensure that more people see the posts.
KELLI: Which is a great way to spread your message without putting as much money behind it. When people like, comment, and share videos, they’re doing the advertising for you.
JILLYN: And when you have a post that performs really well on social media, it might be worth putting a little bit of advertising money behind it. Because, your social media platform already knows that that’s a post that’s doing really well, and you will get an incredible return on investment (ROI) on your advertising dollar — if that’s in your budget.
Youtube — The #2 search engine in the world
JILLYN: So Kelli, now that we’ve discussed what social video marketing is, will you tell our listeners why YouTube is so important when it comes to this kind of marketing? Why focus on YouTube over other social media sites?
KELLI: It’s actually a fairly simple explanation. People use YouTube like they use Google. YouTube is so popular in fact that YouTube is considered the second most popular search engine in the world after Google. There are more than 1.5 billion unique viewers on youtube every month. That’s 1 in every 5 people on the planet every single month.
JILLYN: That’s a crazy statistic! The people on YouTube follow organizations and celebrities they’re interested in too. If you’d like to see a great example of video marketing for a nonprofit organization, check out The Salvation Army Australia’s YouTube channel — there’s a link in the description for this podcast.
KELLI: They put out some incredible YouTube videos! However, I think my favorite thing YouTube is capable of, is allowing you to add video to your website without slowing it down. YouTube will host the video, and you just have to embed it. So your site speed won’t be affected by large video files.
YouTube is also incredibly popular for storytelling and spreading important news. Two things your nonprofit already has a lot of. Which leads me into my next question—
How social video marketing can help your nonprofit
KELLI: Jillyn, How does social video marketing help nonprofits?
JILLYN: Social video marketing has an incredible impact on your nonprofit. When done right, it spreads your mission and goal for you. It draws people to your cause and inspires the action needed to spread awareness.
KELLI: That’s amazing. Is there anything else you think is important about videos and nonprofits?
JILLYN: Yes. I know nonprofit organizations are spread thin when it comes to man-hours and money. That’s why video marketing is such a good thing to use. You can repurpose much of the content you’ve already created into short teaser videos to use on social media that will then drive traffic back to your site.
It’s also worth noting that nearly everyone is carrying around a smartphone that’s capable of taking great video. Use those devices! Ask volunteers to take videos while they’re volunteering. Set up times to interview your best volunteers about what they love about their volunteer experience. If your nonprofit serves humans, interview the recipients of your services about the difference your organization has made in their lives. All of these videos will make a powerful and very personal statement in social media.
KELLI: And we want personal statements. People love the feeling of personal connections and video is a great way to provide that feeling of connection.
Tools you can use to make polished videos that maximize your ROI
JILLYN: So Kelli, what kind of tools are there to make polished and professional social media videos?
KELLI: Luckily there are a lot of tools out there to help create amazing videos. Many of the tools are free, so it’s worth looking into them to see what your nonprofit already has access to.
First, start looking at tutorials for making great social videos. You can start on YouTube since we already know it’s full of great information that will show you how to do it. But first I’m going to have Jillyn mention YouTube Nonprofits.
JILLYN: Youtube Nonprofits, which was mentioned in October’s bonus episode: How to Take Your Nonprofit Virtual in a COVID and Post COVID World, offers a really great selection of resources and tools for Nonprofits. We’ll have a bonus podcast just about that soon, but it’s worth checking out in the meantime. We’ll include a link to that tool in the podcast description as well!
KELLI: Aside from YouTube, Canva has great tools that will help you create the right size for your videos and also lets you edit great images to include in the video.
Which brings us to getting footage. This is where you’ll use the video you’ve asked volunteers to make, or the video you were able to film on your smartphone. If you don’t have video footage from your organization available, use stock footage. But video from your actual organization will always be more impactful and personal than stock footage.
JILLYN: That’s a great point, Kelli!
Now that you’ve got your footage, let’s talk about how to use it! New tools are released all the time, but here are a few of our favorites:
Metricool is a free AI video editing site. Upload your video and image elements and Metricool makes the video for you. You can select different layouts different transitions and music. They have paid versions too and the paid versions are much more capable but — the free version is very nice.
Wave.video is another tool that we really like. It will automatically resize your edited videos for different social media platforms. The free version includes access to 2 million royalty-free images and videos, and you can create videos up to 15 seconds in length.
KELLI: I’m still blown away at how useful the free versions of so many of these tools are! And when it comes to editing videos, you can use paid software like Adobe Premiere Pro, or you can use subscriptions like the ones we mentioned above or free versions of Vimeo basic or Wave.video.
Also, many of these subscriptions have discounted prices for nonprofits that are very worthwhile. And in Wave’s paid subscription you have access to making longer videos and more than 10 million stock images, footage, and music!
Simply put, social video marketing isn’t cost-prohibitive for nonprofits. It’s a really great way to spread your message and there are a lot of tools out there to get you started.
JILLYN: There may also be community resources available to you to assist with your video needs. If resources are tight, try reaching out to high schools, colleges, and universities in your community. Many of them will have clubs or classes of students that may be excited to assist your organization.
If you have the available budget, agencies like Technology Aloha can plan, shoot, and edit your video asset library for maximum impact and reusability with very little work on your part.
Ending
KELLI: Well it looks like that’s all the time we have for today. We’ve included links in the description to several of our blog posts that cover the topic we discussed today. I’m Kelli —
JILLYN: — and I’m Jillyn. If you have questions about Video Marketing for Your Nonprofit or have other topics you want to hear on our podcast, please reach out on social media or contact us at TechnologyAloha.com.
KELLI: Thank you for listening to Into the Inbound with Technology Aloha. We hope we’ve added a little Aloha to your day.
Links to related posts
- Optimizing Video for Social Media
- Create Marketing Videos to Highlight Your Business
- YouTube Video: Maximize Your Video ROI
- Your Resource List for Social Video Marketing Success
- Social Video and How It Can Help your Business
- How to Take Your Nonprofit Virtual in a COVID and Post COVID World
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Into the Inbound with Technology Aloha
