Make Better Linkedin Videos // 5x Your Engagement With These Tips!
We no longer live in an era where you can just hide behind your logo. People now more than ever want to connect with you as an individual before they consider ever doing any kind of business with you. So in this blog I’m going to break down how you can use video on LinkedIn to grow your business, get more engagement, and hopefully close those sales. Let me break down some facts for you about LinkedIn. There are over 675 million users on LinkedIn. It’s actually one of the few social networks that’s continuously growing and has steadily over the many many years that it has been around. You might think the content on LinkedIn is going to be geared more towards recruiters and people who are looking for a job, when in fact, 15 times more content on LinkedIn is geared towards businesses than actually looking for a job. So this is a great opportunity for you to share your information with your potential customer in a way that you never thought possible before. And LinkedIn shows that year after year engagement is increasing by 50% because more people are finding success in building business relationships on LinkedIn than they were with Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. So how can you be using LinkedIn to grow your brand and business, make more money, convert those sales, all that good stuff? Well we’re gonna be focusing on three things in this blog. Keep Them Watching First things first, how to keep them watching, what really is going to matter, and what tips I have for you to find success. Now before we dive into these tips, I want to make sure you know that this is brought to you by Kapwing, my favorite social video platform that is available for you to use for free to create all of your videos for any social network that you’re using. I’m going show you in a minute how I use Kapwing to create progress bars to keep people watching my videos on LinkedIn so you can really see the power of that tool. But if you were wanting to do anything with social media, you definitely want to check out Kapwing. I have a link for you to check it out in the description, and like I said, it’s free, so what do you have to lose? So how do you keep people watching your LinkedIn videos? You have to remember, since the majority of people who are on LinkedIn are business professionals who are looking to do B2B business, they guard their time very sacredly so you want to be very respectful of that. So how I choose to keep people watching my videos is with a progress bar. There’s actually a ton of psychology that goes into this, but basically it comes down to people are more likely to finish watching your videos if they kind of have an idea of how long they can expect to watch. So how can you do this for your videos? Let’s head over to the computer where I’m going to show you how you can use Kapwing to easily add a progress bar to your latest video. Okay so, I have done a couple different tutorials for them in my previous blogs that you can find about how to add subtitles and size your videos and stuff. So I’m not going to go over that. We’re going to go directly into adding that progress bar. So once your video is ready, all you do is go up to shapes, and hit ‘add progress bar’. All right, and then you’re going to adjust the bar to where you want it to go. And once you place it where you want it to go, you’ll see the bar going along the top of your video, timing it to how your thing is going. And then once you are happy with where it is, how thick it is, you can change all that out, like you need it thicker or thinner. Change out the color, whatever it may be, you can do that, you can select a different color, or to put in a specific brand color. White is part of my brand color so I’m fine with that. I can make it more transparent. I can outline it. But all these are things I’m not going to worry about. To me, having the simple progress bar along with my closed captions is what I need. So I’m just gonna go up here to publish. So this is it when it’s all done. It’ll load up and you can see the example of it, you can play it, not play it. Download it, and then you upload it natively to LinkedIn. Invest in Good Equipment Some other ways that you’re going to want to keep people watching your videos is by investing in really good equipment. Now this doesn’t need to be a fancy Canon camera and all this three point lighting like us YouTubers use. This can honestly be something as simple as your cell phone which you already have. But there are some things that you can get that can make it a little bit better. Might I suggest something like Manfrotto handheld cell phone tripod? It’s very affordable and it has a bunch of different options for you to use it. You can use it to put your phone in horizontally or you can take the attachment off and make it so that your phone is vertical. This is actually one of my first tripods I ever bought, so I highly encourage you to check that out as well. So while you’re also using your phone, you want to try using other things to help make sure you can be seen, and that you can be heard, which are two crucial things to all video, but especially on LinkedIn. It’s very important that people can see you, so I’m
Locked Myself in an Airbnb and Wrote a Book!
So here’s the deal I’m writing a book I’m writing a book about the last 10 years of being a social media marketer! All the moments leading up to when I started my agency in 2010 to where we are now currently in the world and I was trying to figure out how to focus and get this done and make sure that my purpose is really clear throughout the whole process. So I decided to take you with me as I did a hardcore two day focus on writing this book. But first, coffee! First things first… coffee. So we’re in the middle of a pandemic and I needed a place that I could write this book so I rented an Airbnb. Let’s roll back the tape here, I’ve had this idea for this book since November, since Thanksgiving actually. I was talking with my husband about it while we were driving to do family Thanksgiving in Colorado and it just hit me, like, we gotta do this book. This book is the lessons that I have learned over the last 10 years of social media marketing and what you can learn from them. I wrote it with the mindset that anybody can take these lessons and apply them to their business right now and go on this journey with me while also learning about what you can do along the way. Home. Cleaning and focusing Since we’re in a pandemic everything’s getting sprayed down and wiped off. The reason I had to go to the Airbnb versus working at home is because there are five other people living in my house; my husband, my two kids, and my two in-laws who we brought in to stay with us through this pandemic just because of all the craziness. They’re older and that’s what you do, you take care of your family, but they’re just a lot and it’s a small house because it’s our house that we’re using to transition into our forever home. It’s noisy and it’s hard and my kids have 100% reached their limit on all of this because they’re sick of being inside. They hate that they can’t go see friends or do anything or go to school, there’s so much anxiety; there’s just so much struggle and frustration. I had put my payment in to my editor and my deposit, he’s like okay I need you to get me as many of your pages by May 4th well this whole series of events happened on April 29th and it literally occurred to me over the weekend that I don’t have enough pages! I have maybe like 40% done, maybe. I had been writing it slowly over the past couple months and I was NOT far enough along. I needed to focus so I reached out to my client and friend Brookes and I was like “hey, I know you have your bnb’s in Phoenix any of them empty so that I can step in and do this?” He’s said absolutely go use this place, total savior! But I knew I needed extra motivation, the novelty of getting to be out of my house and away from the noise and the kids was going to wear off real quick and I had get motivated. So I asked friends of mine to write me letters and I had them send them to my husband. I told my husband print them and put them in envelopes and label when I can open them. I’m so thankful to have the friends and support that I do. It’s one thing to have your ride or die friends, everyone needs them, and it’s even better when your ride or die’s can also be people who you can work with, like entrepreneur ride or die friends. So many of my friends that are awesome and wonderful don’t understand my world because they’re not in it. They are mothers, one of my best friends was a banker turned mom, one of my other friends she was a social worker turned mom and they get it, they understand the work but they’re not in this entrepreneur, own your own business life, while also being a mom and being a wife and dealing with all things that go there. so I was really excited to read these and let them pump me up and guide me through this crazy book journey I went on over 24 or 36 hours. Working through the memories Part of my story, like I said this is a memoir of what’s been going on in my life through this journey and I had to write out the story of giving birth to my second child, my daughter. Literally, every time I tell this story it makes me cry because there’s just so many things that go with it. I almost lost her and I can’t tell this story again, I can’t cry through it again but, it’s just so crazy reliving my life through this book. My hope is that these stories are as moving and helpful but, man, reliving it is intense. So I read letter number two and it says “Writing a book should be a piece of cake for me and by the way did I bring some cake? If not I need to order some asap.” So I responded by ordering Chipotle for lunch but now I need to order cake ’cause my letter told me to. I really wanted to stop writing for a bit, give myself a mental break. I went to Starbucks got myself a ridiculously large tea, got caught up in conversation and then put my kids to bed over video chat and it was just like ugh. I think my husband knew that I would feel the way I did because he’s my husband was the one in charge of doing all of the labeling of letters and when I was suppose to open things. He read all the