Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

YouTube has released a cluster of new products designed to help small businesses and first-time video advertisers record and publish videos in a bid to broaden the pool of potential media buyers using the online video service.

The quality of the resulting ads is, of course, largely dependent on the performances given by the people in it. And getting potential customers to see such an ad is another challenge altogether, but the basic production tools have been provided for free....

Mistakes happen, especially when you’re getting started with video. But, just because you made a mistake doesn’t mean you didn’t learn anything from it.

Rocky hosted a Blab along with special guests Britney Clapp & Drew Keller where he talked all about video mistakes our team has made and what we learned from those mistakes.

Here’s some of the biggest mistakes we’ve made...

Wistia is a video hosting service designed for businesses, I use it to host my webinar recordings, but it does offer a free plan for new users. Wistia's free plan allows you to host up to 50 videos at a time. You can host HD videos and videos of nearly unlimited length. Wistia also provides a wide range of customizations that you can apply to your embedded videos.

Like a lot of other social studies teachers, I love videos. I often joke that I became asocial studies teacher so that I could run the filmstrip. (If you don’t get the filmstrip reference, ask someone born before 1980). Here are some tools for creating and sharing videos.

WeVideo (​http://wevideo.com/​) offers the most features of any of the tools in this list. Itis an online video creation tool that I have written about many times over the last few years. WeVideo offers templates that new users can follow to create their first videos. Advanced WeVideo users can skip the templates, use the full editor, and apply themes totheir videos by choosing them from the themes menu in the editor. In the video editoryou can upload your own media clips or use stock media clips to produce your video.

WeVideo's Google Drive app allows you to save all of your video projects in your GoogleDrive account. WeVideo also offers an Android app and an iPhone app that students canuse to capture images and video footage to add to their projects.Stupeflix (​https://studio.stupeflix.com/​) allows you to create audio slideshow videos up to twenty minutes in length. You do not need to register in order to create a video on Stupeflix. You can and should register if you want to be able to go back and edit your video after it has been published. To create a video on Stupeflix start by choosing a theme for your video then uploading pictures from your computer.

If you don't have any pictures on your computer you can importing some from your Flickr, Facebook, or Instagram account. Once your pictures are uploaded or imported you can drag and drop them into the sequence in which you want them to appear. You can layer text on each image. To add sound to your video you can select a soundtrack for the entire video or layer sound on each image individually. Stupeflix provides a nice gallery of free soundtracks that you can use or you can import your own audio tracks. When you're ready to see your finished product, click the preview button before publishing your video....

Build an Awesome Explainer Video in Minutes!

Choose the video template that's right for your business and start customizing....

Thanks to the ongoing advancements of technology, creating a high quality video is no longer an expensive or arduous process. In fact, it has become a common form of content marketing used by PR professionals.

Not only are videos incredibly engaging they are also far more efficient at transmitting information than either text or images. The numbers speak for themselves:

• By 2016, video user numbers are expected to double to 1.5 billion
• Online video traffic will make up 55 percent of consumer traffic by 2016
• YouTube has more than 1 billion unique visits per month
• 76 percent of marketers and PR professionals plan to add videos to their site....