Video Tips For Home Service Contractors
Videos are a major player in today’s marketplace, especially for small businesses. I want to give you four quick tips on how to use videos effectively for your business.
1. Keep it simple.
Just use your smartphone to shoot these videos. There’s no need to go out and invest in video equipment, or high-tech cameras! Smartphones today are capable of shooting high-quality video. I shoot all of my videos with my iPhone 6s Plus. So if you have a smartphone, that will work just fine!
But please note: When you use your smartphone to shoot a video, please shoot it horizontally! It will show up a lot better in news feeds, and it will be a lot easier for people to watch. So please, please, don’t shoot them vertically, shoot them horizontally. You can invest in a little tripod to hold your phone—that’s what I do to shoot my videos. Or, you might have an employee hold the phone to shoot your videos.
2. Keep it short.
You want your videos to be about a minute or two—not much longer than that, because we are in a “microwave culture.” We want everything quickly! When someone sees a 10-minute video come up in their news feed, they’re probably not going to watch it. But if they see something helpful, or maybe something on a topic that they’ve been researching that’s only one or two minutes long, they’re likely to watch it.
3. Get it out there.
Once you have the video done, the first thing you want to do is to upload it directly to Facebook. Facebook auto-plays these videos. They show up right in the news feed, nice and big. There’s no sound, so someone has to actually click on it to hear your video, but if the title is engaging enough they will click to listen.
Secondly, you want to upload it directly to your YouTube channel. Once you have a series of videos on YouTube, people can go there and they get kind of caught in the “YouTube vortex” where they see one helpful video, then another one, and another one … and slowly but surely, you’re gaining their trust.
4. Don’t go for perfection!
Finally, do not rehearse or script these videos! Before I make a video I have an idea of what I want to say. But if I were to write out a script, it would sound … well, scripted and robotic. You want your information to just flow from the heart. Just talk about your topic! If a public speaking expert were to come in and critique my videos I’m sure they’d have plenty to say about how many times I say “um,” among other things! But I don’t care about that. I care about you getting the actual content to help you in your business. And that’s the thing with your potential clients and customers: they don’t necessarily care about a perfect delivery. They care about the actual tips and the content you’re providing to them. So do not worry about making this perfect. Just make a video today, upload it to Facebook and YouTube, and I can’t wait to see you become a video superstar!
If you need help with any of this, we can manage that for you!