For people who share content hoping to attract an audience or to grow a following, the most important thing is to keep your audience engaged. Content here could mean blog posts, informative articles, product promotions; whatever the content, you want your audience to consume it, share it, like it, perhaps even subscribe to your mail list.
Using short videos as a visual tool is a great way to spice up your content and get engagement.
Statistics
Whether your aim is to promote a service, tell your company story, or explain benefits of a product, statistics show that you should use videos more often.
I agree because most of the people I’ve met are visual learners.
According to John Medina, a molecular biologist, vision is the most powerful of our senses. Let’s see what other stats reveal:
- Using videos on landing pages will increase conversions by 86%. (Wordstream, 2018)
- Video content is 50 times more likely to drive organic search results than plain text. (Omnicore, 2018)
- Having a video thumbnail in the search results can double your search traffic. (Search Engine Journal, 2018)
- Video is the best performing content type on Facebook. (Social Media Today)
- Tweets with video see 10x more engagement than those without. (Social Media Today)
- LinkedIn users are 20x more likely to share a video on the platform than any other type of post. (Social Media Today)
Keep It Short
Twitter lets you upload videos of up to 2 minutes, 20 seconds long, while Instagram uploads are limited to 60 seconds. However, given that social media is crowded with lots of information competing for attention, I’d say keep videos as short as possible… if they’re destined for social media platforms.
Want to Create Your Own Videos?
For freelancers, small business owners and bloggers, making videos for your content doesn’t have to be a chore or an expensive affair. Platforms like Powtoon, Lumen 5, and Animaker have made the process affordable. And easy.
How to Make Videos with Powtoon
My favourite platform for creating short animated videos is Powtoon. What I’ll do in the rest of this article is outline six simple steps to help you understand how to make animated videos… for free.
1. Register an account
First things first, you need to register for an account at the Powtoon website. With that done, head over to your Inbox and confirm your email address.
2. Choose a template
If you’re new to this, I doubt you’d want to create videos on a blank canvas. My preference is to learn from studying pre-made templates as I edit them to suit my message. Scroll through the Powtoon library to find something relevant or use the category filter. Some categories you can choose from are:
- Training
- Explainer videos
- Marketing videos
- HR
- Internal communications
3. Edit the pre-made template
After you select your template and create a storyboard, you can edit the video with your content. It’s as simple as swapping or customising different elements! You also have access to the video timeline to adjust entry and exit times for different objects if you wish. In edit mode, you can:
- Import images or video clips
- Edit any text
- Add or delete a slide to make the video longer or shorter
- Change the theme song/ tune
- Add voice over
4. Preview
Click the Preview button to test your new creation. Keep editing until you’re sure the video is exactly as you wish it to be.
5. Publish and Export
The free version of Powtoon allows you to export to Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, HubSpot, Wistia or PowerPoint slides. The paid version allows you to remove Powtoon branding and download the video as a file.
6. Downloads
How about downloading the video from a free account? There’s a workaround to get downloadable MP4 files. After exporting your content to YouTube, use one of the many online tools available for downloading YouTube videos. For example, paste the YouTube link to Y2mate and then generate an MP4 file to save on your computer, transfer to WhatsApp, or whatever.
Check out My Powtoon Sample
Of the many hats I wear, my favourite is podcast assistant–doing guest research, episode transcripts, show notes, and audiograms. With this in mind, I used one of Powtoon’s Video Ad templates to create a 17-second promotional video. All I had to do was add brand colours, add relevant text, change the font type, and change the music. It took less than 30 minutes to complete the job!
In Conclusion
It’s obvious that anyone with a message to share should consider spicing it up with video. There is so much content out there competing for eyeballs and video is definitely an attention-grabber. With Powtoon’s free plan, you need not stress over how or where to get meaningful, quality videos. Go on, try Powtoon and have fun!