The Four Ways to Use Video in Your Community

March 5, 2016

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According to numerous sources, 2016 is the year of video. We couldn’t agree more, and last week, Margot Mazur from Wistia and yours truly talked about visual story-telling in your community. There are lots of compelling facts about the importance of video in the buying process. This also extends beyond just the simple act of people buying more things. Video offers your community a few benefits:



  • It helps build brand rapport
  • It humanizes your brand
  • It keeps folks’ attention
  • It helps to explain complex ideas and is great for support

As a community manager you can use videos in a couple of ways. These are all very powerful in engaging and growing your community. So without further ado:


The Four Ways to Use Video in Your Community


Introduction videos: Introducing yourself to your community, and having others do the same, will create a real connection between community members and your brand. Each person who gets in there and introduces him or herself will make new folks feel more at home. It’s hard to feel a connection with a bunch of usernames unless you’re able to put a face to them and video lets you do that really easily. Just that one introduction video will help build lasting relationships inside your community.


Collaboration videos: This is basically a video where people in your community come together to add their own individual pieces and, in the end, create something awesome. Collaboration can really help bring your community members closer together—working on a project with others and seeing it come alive really has your community invested in the result. As Margot shared with us, the Wistia community came together to create a collaborative video project that focused on getting new Wistians excited to engage in the Community, while trying to increase engagement in the active community members who participated in the video. So Margot went out there and asked community members to film themselves saying hello and welcome to the community so that new Wistians would see it and feel connected. Once they had all the videos, the team at Wistia stitched the videos together to create an on-boarding flow with the full video.


How-to videos: One way video and community go really well together is the how-to video. This is a perfect fit where you have a community passionate about a subject, but there are complex ideas or skills to be learnt. Video is a great way to bridge the gap of text or when something is difficult to explain. When you see it used in in forums about Painting (Draw Mix Paint), Golf (Callaway Golf Community) or BBQ (Big Green Egg), you realize how powerful it can be. Not only does video make the community a great place where experts can share tips, it helps new enthusiasts to enhance their existing techniques or learn new ones.


Feedback videos: While a how-to video has the benefit of explaining a topic, video can also be a powerful tool when members of your community want to share feedback. It’s a great way for someone to share their point of view and for others to imagine how their own experience could be. So when someone shares a video at the edmunds.com community about an experience with a vehicle, it has much more impact then any written review. Why? Because the viewer can see the results for themselves. Video is also a powerful tool for video game makers. We power numerous gaming communities and video is used for walk-throughs, as you can imagine, and also for sharing/providing feedback to the production teams when new games are still in beta.


As you see, Video has many practical applications for your community. Oh, and rather then read about it, you can check out the video of our webinar below to learn more:



 

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