We’re getting down and dirty with event social media today! As you already know, we live in a day and age where people communicate more through social media channels than any other platform. So, as an event planner, it’s extremely important that you stay up to date with technology. And trust us on this one, having good social media backing for your event is something you will want to do. Plus, it’s fun, and your attendees will engage with you in new and unexpected ways.
On this week’s episode of Whiteboard Wednesday, the floor belongs to Shaina Weisinger. And Shaina is here to teach you all about using video memes for stellar event social media. What’s not to like? If you’re curious about how to use this format to take your communication strategy up a notch, then don’t waste another minute. Press play, it’s time for Whiteboard Wednesday!
Well, hello and welcome to another episode of Whiteboard Wednesdays. I am Shaina Weisinger, founder and CEO of Repurpose House, and I’m hijacking your weekly awesomeness. So off we go. Today we are going to talk about how to use video memes for stellar event social media. We’re going to talk about how you’re going to crush all of your event social media stuff on social with video. So let’s get started.
First thing’s first, what the heck is a video meme? A video meme is going to be a video that’s formatted properly for all of the social media channels. We’re going to dive into the specifics, but basically it’s the stuff that you’re scrolling through that actually makes you stop and watch the video. And it’s basically formatted so that you don’t have any issues watching it, it grabs your attention and it keeps people engaged. So what makes an optimized video meme? Let’s talk about all of the little nitty-gritty pieces of that video that need to happen in order to make sure that it gets all that engagement. You’re going to want to make sure you have a big headline. As you can see here, the headline is going to be right above the video. Sometimes it’s below, but usually, it’s going to be big massive text.
It’s really helpful if you have it ask a question, try to get in the mind of the people you’re trying to get the attention of. So if you know that they have an issue that they’re trying to deal with or you know you can help them in their business in some way. Or if you know that you can answer a question that they have the answer to, ask the question in the headline. Because they might be like, “Oh, I have that question. This video is going to provide the answer.” Also bring up numbers. People’s brains, psychology knows that we love numbers. We love odd numbers especially. So if you can be like, “The seven best things to fix X, Y, and Z,” that’s an awesome, awesome headline.
All right, provoke emotion. Guys, emotion makes people take action. It makes people buy things, it makes people do stuff. So making sure that you provide some sort of an emotion or provoke an emotion from them is really going to get them to stop, watch and engage. When I say engage, I mean to click that like button, actually comment on it, share it with their friends. If you can bring some emotion with the content, with the headline, you’re in great shape.
All right, number two to an optimized video meme is going to be making sure you put captions on them. Captions. 85% of people on Facebook and Instagram scroll and actually watch a video without the audio on. Like, it’s crazy. But if you think that your audience on LinkedIn is doing it better, you’re wrong. Because 80% of people who are watching videos on LinkedIn are watching videos with the audio off. So you have to make sure that you put captions on your video so that they actually keep watching. Because if you’re a talking head like this and you don’t have captions running across the bottom and they’re watching it on mute, it’s going to be pretty quick before they start scrolling onto the next thing that they can actually listen to and engage with, while they’re not actually listening.
Progress bar. Progress bars are really cool, there’s a psychology behind that. People just like knowing what to anticipate. What a progress bar is is, is as the video is rolling, you’re going to see a little line going across the video of a lapsed time. It’s also going to show you the empty space of how much time is left. So people, even if it’s like a 60-second video, which you think a minute is not that long, people shouldn’t worry about it. But people will look down at the progress bar to see how much time they have left and see if they want to invest that much time in the content. Progress bars are really an awesome thing to add to video memes.
Lastly, you want to make sure that they are sized properly for every single platform. Every platform has, well, most of the platforms have different variations of how to post content. And making sure that your content is sized properly for that is going to be a big game-changer for you with your video. Anything on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter feeds, video-wise you’re going to want to have square. We’re going to go into this a little bit more up here, but then we’ve got things like IGTV, where now it’s vertical. We also have things like images for Twitter that’s landscape. It’s madness when it comes to aspect ratios out there, but we’re going to dive into that in just a couple more minutes.
Okay, I’m getting out of the way of myself here. How do these video memes get people to your event? Great question. Awesome, Shaina, so now I’m going to create all these awesome video memes, but why does that matter? You’re going to want to include a CTA. Now, a CTA is a call to action. So you’re going to want to tell them to do something after they watch your video. Don’t just send them content that’s amazing and then not say, “Hey, for more info, or to have an awesome experience, go here.” In your guys’ case, in most cases, it’s going to be, “Dude, get registered for this event.” Have a place for them to go, tell them what to do next.
Use previous attendee testimonials as video memes. This is a really, really cool tip. Now, I’ve seen it done a couple of different ways. But while you’re at the event, just have people shooting on iPhone or whatever phones you’re using, just get people’s testimonials. “Oh my gosh, this is the best event I’ve ever been to.” “I learned so much.” “Some of the coolest people that I’ve ever imagined even seeing on stage right here.” I mean, if you can get people saying stuff like that a lot, you can use those video memes for the next event as testimonials. You can put great headlines like, “This event rocked.” Make sure obviously it’s got captions, all of the good stuff, but now you have also social proof that your event was awesome.
I saw one person do this in an interesting way, and actually I talk about it in a previous Whiteboard Wednesday that I did. And it was the actual event company that was promoting their event. But instead of just getting the attendee testimonials, they got testimonials from their speakers who they knew were going to be at the next event. They had the speaker be like, “Hey, I’m speaking at this rad event. It’s the best event I’ve been to. I don’t know, rah-rah, this event is amazing”. And what they did was they used those as video ads in front of that person’s YouTube channel and videos. Somebody who’s already searching for that video is looking for that person’s content, and now you have that person talking about your event. There’s not a much warmer audience than that, so that’s another great way to utilize testimonials to promote your event with the video memes.
All right, let’s talk proof. Because the proof is in the pudding, or in the video memes in this case. So we’re going to use Endless Events as our proof. With Repurpose House, we actually have a downloadable case study that was just Endless Events. These guys use HubSpot to track everything, which is so awesome when you want to find out if something’s working or not, right? So what we did is tested them using video memes that we produced for them for 90 days. And it was just with one campaign. Obviously these guys are content powerhouses, they crush content more than any other business that I know of. And they literally just tested their Event Icon series for 90 days and the video memes that they were using on social media without putting ad budget behind it.
Just using video memes that were repurposed assets from their Event Icons show, they got 138% increase in site sessions, a 300% increase in contact. So when people got to the site, they actually opted in and gave their information. And they had $0, $0 that they spent to get all of this. This is just using video memes across all of the different event social media platforms. So it can absolutely work to make sure that you’re getting contact site sessions, people engaging.
All right, so now we know what they look like, we know how they’re going to work. Well, how the heck do you make them? You can go to repurposehouse.com, we make these for you. Essentially, you take your content, you plug it into a ticketing system, and we make it gorgeous and pretty and format it for all of the different platforms. It’s a flat-rate monthly fee. Plug, plug, plug. You know the deal. Also, if you want to do them yourself, there is an amazing platform called headliner.app. So you’re going to go there, it teaches you how to upload your video, how to add your captions. It does all of this stuff, but you have to actually engage and create them yourself. So if you don’t have a ton that you need to create, it’s a really great tool. Very user-friendly. They have a free version, they have some paid versions as well. But those are two awesome resources for you to have these created for you or to create them yourself.
All right, let’s talk about how to use them. Earlier I said that you have to have them formatted in the right size for all of the different channels. Now, that’s where it can get kind of tricky. Because you’re like, “Cool, I’ve made it square, but square doesn’t work everywhere. And okay, then I made it vertical, but vertical doesn’t work everywhere.” So let’s break down what sizes work best for each platform and little subsections within platforms.
The square is going to be for feeds. A feed is anything that you’re scrolling with your thumbs. So that’s a Facebook feed, that’s going to be an Instagram feed. We’re going to actually tweak that Instagram thing a little bit, but we’ll talk about that in a second. It’s going to be a LinkedIn feed, it’s going to be a Twitter feed. Anything that you scroll, scroll, scroll, you want square, all right?
Now, for stories and IGTV, you want that nice, beautiful vertical video memes. So you’re going to make sure that it’s going to be tall, basically, the whole screen length of your phone is what that vertical is going to look like. The reason that we don’t want you to post square to Instagram feeds is that you’re going to post the vertical one to IGTV.
You’re going to still put the same copy, the same hashtags, all the same stuff, but right now Instagram is defaulting to giving more engagement to people who post on IGTV than they do to people who just post on the feeds. But the cool thing is once you post to IGTV, there’s a little toggle button and you can click that and it will allow you to preview it to your feed. One tricky thing is that it’s going to crop a little bit. Instead of it being this size whenever it gets to the feed, it’s going to crop in a little bit, so you’re going to lose a little bit at the top and the bottom space on that video meme.
So when you’re creating them, just make sure you give a little extra space just to make sure that you don’t crop into your content or to your text, your headline, your captions, anything like that. One other small thing to note is that whenever it lands on your actual profile on Instagram, it’s going to crop down to an actual square. They crop it a couple of times, but if you’re prepared for it, then you know it’ll still look gorgeous whenever you go to post it.
Lastly, the landscape version is the wide version. You’re going to want to create one like that and post that to YouTube. Now, some people are like, “Well, why wouldn’t I just throw the video by itself up on YouTube? No problem”. And that’s a valid point, but lately a lot of people are putting the big headlines and things on the YouTube video. Because if the mentality is that the headlines grab engagement, then why wouldn’t you do that across the board everywhere you post your video memes?
All right, so then let’s talk about how we know how we’re posting them. When, when are we going to post to these platforms? You’re going to post one video meme on your channels on different days. so the trick is not to post the same video on every single platform all at the same time. You want to make sure you stagger your content. That’s what Endless did to get all of the engagement. Instead of posting the same video on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all these places at once, they made sure that they took the same video meme and posted it and on different days at different times throughout the week. In order to get more engagement, because maybe if somebody follows you on two different platforms, maybe if they’re on Facebook, if you post on Facebook on Monday and let’s say they’re busy, they’re not able to be on Facebook.
If you post on Thursday on LinkedIn and they happen to see it, great. Even if they did see it Monday. Reminding them of the content on Thursday or Friday across all these different platforms is a really great thing. Because you’re just in front of people more often and you’re bringing brand awareness and a reminder to the content if they didn’t watch it or if they did to share it and engage even more.
And that’s it. That’s the whole enchilada, folks. Video memes can be really, really powerful for you to be able to get people to go to your event. Just because people engage with them. It’s the most impactful form of content you can put on social, and if you’re going to make an impactful form of content and then optimize it so that it gets a ton of engagement, then honestly that’s a win-win for you and for your event. I hope this was super helpful. I hope you guys are going to start crushing your video memes.
Make sure that on the video, you do your like, your share, you’re ringing the bell, you’re doing all the cool, awesome stuff. I want to know in the comments below, have you used video memes for your event? And if you have, what kind of results have you seen? Tell me all the things. Because I just told you my things and I want to hear how you guys are using them already. So anyway, we’ll see you next week for another Whiteboard Wednesday!
How To Repurpose Event Content To Sell More Tickets – Whiteboard Wednesday
Best Social Media Groups For #EventProfs – #EventIcons Episode 104
Successful Social Media Campaigns for Events
You’ve heard this before, but it bears repeating: Gen Z is unlike any generation we’ve…
Navigating event attendee data requires the right balance between collecting valuable information and respecting event…
The events industry is a melting pot of talent and diverse backgrounds, with event professionals…
A recently published Freeman report highlights a significant shift in the demographics of B2B event…
The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution is more than a passing fad. Thanks to the increasing…
Imagine an event where the audience takes the reins, curating the perfect musical experience by…
