Understanding Your View Count

Is a video’s view count the most important measure of success?

Mike Plenty, Dead Ready Productions Managing Director, demystifies this powerful metric in the vlog above.

Checkout the transcript below:

Hi, today’s video blog is about understanding the view count of your video. When it comes to judging the performance of videos, view count tends to be the most popular metric, and it’s easy to see why:

• It’s the most visible measurement, clearly shown on most platforms
• It’s easy to make sense of
• It can generate some impressive number

But looking at view count alone is a risky way to assess how well your video is performing, for a few key reasons.

Firstly, the view count itself doesn’t tell you anything about who your audience are. You may have 500,000 views on your latest video release, but if those views are all occurring in New Zealand and your target market is the UK, then you probably need to re-evaluate how to reach your audience.

Secondly, viewing numbers aren’t the same as viewer retention. If those 500,000 people are on average only watching 5% of the video, the vast majority of your content isn’t being seen.

Thirdly, it’s important to remember that different social media channels measure views in different ways. As an example, on Facebook if your video autoplays on someone’s feed for 3 seconds or more, you’ve gained a view. But on YouTube, the viewer has to initiate playback and play a minimum % of the video before a view is counted.

For this reason, it’s easier to achieve high view counts on Facebook than YouTube. There are different criteria for other social networks too, so it’s important to be aware of that before assuming that one of them simply performs much better for you than the others.

So if view count is a flawed measurement, is it effectively useless? Well no – but it’s best to think of it as a starting point when analysing video success; a headline figure that needs breaking down before drawing any conclusions. It’s like the turnover of your business, when what you really need to know is profit.

Combining view count with other metrics allows you to make sense of the numbers, and understand what’s working and what isn’t when it comes to production and distribution of your content. And it starts right from the beginning when setting goals for your video – by all means, incorporate viewing figures into these, but know the limitations and be aware that these numbers alone are not a measure of success.

So that wraps up our brief overview of viewer count. Until next time – like our Facebook page or subscribe for more, and share this video to help us boost our view count!

The Importance Of Quality Audio

As a video production agency, you’d be forgiven for thinking that 100% of our attention is on the creation of dynamic and engaging visuals for businesses, but the truth is that audio is every bit as important.

This was highlighted for me recently when Dead Ready partnered with the Sick of Health Podcast and for the first time, produced media that didn’t contain any visuals at all!

If you’re a marketeer, the chances are that you’ll need to produce media to feed your content campaigns, so this recent experience led to thinking that you might might be interested in some brief tips around audio recording.

There’s very little that can be done to improve poorly recorded audio, in the same way as there’s not much you can do to save out-of-focus visuals, so whether you’re producing your own vlog, shooting an interview or recording someone speaking in any context, make sure you think about audio, just as much as you think about the visuals.

We recorded Sick of Health in a purpose-built (if not quite finished) studio in London where Dead Ready supplied the appropriate microphones and recording equipment. This was a bit of a challenge as although the studio was sound-proofed, the three presenters were all in the same space, meaning that although I’d mic’d them all up individually with personal radio mics, every mic would pick up every voice to a lesser or greater extent.

This was a bit of a shame, as I was hoping to be able to edit each voice in isolation, balancing the audio levels for a perfect mix afterwards, but this level of precision is rare to achieve and not normally something you need to worry about when producing content for your campaigns.

Ideally, you’d want to put each speaker in a separate space, where they can hear (through headphones) and see each other (through glass or a screen). This wasn’t an option for us, so we might as well have used a single mic and ensured that each speaker was equal distance away.

Being close to the microphone is essential to record quality audio, so no matter the value of your mic, make sure your subject is as close as possible and make sure you do a test recording to check the quality. If you hear any distortion or buzzing when people speak loudly, don’t move the mic away; instead, reduce the sensitivity of your recording device.

If you’re recording into a phone or similar device, the mic sensitivity will probably be controlled automatically, but doing a test recording and listening back is the best way to be sure.

We really enjoyed the being part of the Sick of Health experience and found it a really well-researched and entertaining listen, so check it out here.

The latest episode on immunotherapy went up this week, and the other episodes are all worth a listen as well. I personally found the episode on the woman who could smell Parkinsons particularly fascinating!

Behind The Scenes Video Production: Easy, Effective Branded Content

Engaging with customers through dynamic, branded content has become hugely popular over recent years, but if you don’t have the resources of Procter & Gamble or Toyota, how can you find interesting ways to produce your own branded storytelling?

One easy solution is the behind the scenes (BTS) video. The popularity of these productions is evidenced by the hundreds of hours of additional content packed into every Bluray disc, as audiences love to see what our favourite actors are really like and what really happens on set, and this same curiosity to see behind the curtain can be applied to your brand.

Most modern brands will be producing videos or photographs at some point, which provides a great opportunity to tell a different facet of their brand story through a behind-the-scenes video.

Maverick entrepreneurs messing around between takes of a corporate interview, the precision and eye for detail it takes to photograph an intricate product – these are stories audiences want to engage with and need not require significant funds to produce.

In a lot of cases, behind the scenes videos can be produced by a single highly-skilled camera operator and so the cost of production is often negligible when compared to the primary video/photo shoot – many production companies would even offer a package discount, so you can start to build a video campaign that maximises the return on investment.

Here’s a simple and effective behind the scenes video from a corporate giant:

By allowing viewers inside access to one of their photo shoots, the McDonald’s Canada brand appears more trustworthy and engaged with their consumers.

Since being released in 2012, this behind the scenes video has been viewed over 11.5 million times on YouTube, and is by far the most viewed video on their channel.

This just proves that in addition to burgers and fries, their customers also have an appetite for behind the scenes video content.

And to round off, here’s a couple of behind the scenes videos we’ve made. You know, for fun!

How To Create High Impact Vlog Campaigns

This week’s vlog focusses on how brands can plan a regular vlogging campaign to drive up interactions with their customers on social media.

Check out the transcript below.

The value of videos to marketing campaigns is growing exponentially year on year, so marketeers are having to find more and more video content in order to maintain engagement with potential customers and to drive up interactions.

Video blogs do this by presenting a human face to your brand and if you get the content right, further your reputation as experts in your chosen market. Both of these factors increase viewers’ trust in your brand and encourage further contact and potential sales.

It’s really important, to produce your vlogs regularly. They don’t have to be released every Thursday at 12pm but releasing videos consistently will reinforce the image of reliability; releasing videos randomly can look unprofessional, so commit to a vlogging schedule and make sure it’s easy to stick to.

This leads me to point 2 – make your vlogging easy. Be sure you allow time to write and plan each video and choose how you’ll produce them. Increasingly brands are recruiting their own in-house video teams for convenience, but if your brand isn’t there yet, consider booking an external production company to regularly film at your premises – you and your team are far more likely to come up with the goods when it’s known that a production team is being brought in specially, and you can be sure that you’ll achieve professional production values.

The third step is to decide what benefits you’re bringing to your audience. There’s no such thing as a captive audience online; the only reason they’ll watch is because you’re offering something, so make sure that you are confident of who your audience is and that you’re giving them something they want.

Further to this, think about your brand’s style and make sure this comes across in the way you present your vlog, for example, if your product is relatively abstract, try adding motion graphics to explain your concepts to help visual learners understand your offering.

Finally, don’t make them too long – attention spans online are pretty short, only 59% of people will watch a 1 minute video all the way through so if you go over that, make sure you’re as concise as possible and get the important stuff said early to hook viewers in.

So with that said, I’d better go – Thanks a lot, see you next time.