Tag: community engagement

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Shooting videos for social media on your phone

The Office of Student Life invited me to meet with a group of student bloggers who are keen to start storytelling using video. I ran through my top tips and I hope that they will be able to put the put tips to use making their blog engaging and informative!

Useful Apps

This list was provided by the UVic video coordinator:

  • Cinematography – Flixel, Cinemagraph
  • Special Effects – Super Power FX, Efexio
  • GIFs – Boomerang
  • Timelapse – Filmic Pro
  • Stop motion – Stop Motion Studio
  • Whiteboard animation – VideoScribe (useful to explain more complex topics)

Tips

  • Plan before you shoot: get a handle on the story you are going to tell, the locations you will use, your power supply, editing and accessories you will need
  • If you are interviewing subjects, make sure you have high quality sound by using a Rode mic or Lav mic
  • Keep each clip to under 15s
  • Keep your camera oriental horizontally
  • Use a tripod and image stabilization software
  • Don’t zoom in
  • Keep videos for Facebook and Instagram under 30s
  • Keep accessibility in mind: If people are speaking, turn on closed captions in YouTube; if you have captions, add these into the CC file in YouTube
  • You can use the YouTube captions to generate an .srt file and then use this as your subtitle file if you’re posting to Facebook
  • The libraries have lots of AV equipment for students to borrow like microphones and tripods

Editing your video

  1. Import clips
  2. Order the clips
  3. Add text
  4.  Trim clips
  5. Add music (make sure it’s under the creative commons license or Youtube will lay adds over your video).
  6. Export as an MP4 file for upload to social media

Useful links

 

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Top tips for using Hootsuite for Twitter

My Hootsuite Dashboard

I use the free version of Hootsuite and have set up my dashboard with four tabs:

Hootsuite dashboard

  • Interactions – Keeps track of my scheduled tweets, retweets and mentions. I make sure to acknowledge every person that takes the time to interact with me.
  • Listening – Has all the keywords I’m following and is dynamic. For example, I follow #HESM and #hootchat so I can follow along when people chat about these topics
  • Apps – You want to talk when your follower are listening to you, which means that you need to find out when they’re online. I have a number of apps installed on this tab and will cover my favourite one below. To see more of the app I like to use, go here.
  • Lists – This is my “social listening” tab. I have curated a list of the students who follow me in order to gage what they want to know without following them back.

Figuring out when to tweet

There are a huge number of apps to help you figure out what’s going on with your audience.

I rarely use the Hootsuite autoscheduler because it chooses a time for your tweet to go out based on when your tweets have performed the best. As this is based on historical tweet performance, I prefer to use the Audisense app.

One of the most useful features in Audisense is their ‘Best Time to Tweet’ report. The free version analyzes the timelines of your top 100 followers and then generates a weekly report that shows when you should be tweeting to reach the most people. You can then schedule your Tweets accordingly. Audisense also tells you more where your followers live and the languages they speak.

Because I schedule most of my posts way in advance at times that I can be sure my audience is paying attention, I can spend more time engaging with my followers.

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5 free tools for social community management and growth

Here’s a list of my favourite free social media tools of the moment. I use these tools in addition to Hootsuite.

Here are my tools, what I think their most useful features are and how often I check in:

  1. Crowdfire – Currently my favourite tool because of their recently updated Android app that perscribes actions once a day to increase engagement on Twitter and Instagram.
  2. Tweepi – Find Twitter followers from interesting accounts so you can follow them too. Many search metrics and filters to narrow your target. I log in to this page once a month and then watch my followers climb.
  3. Audisense – Analysis of Twitter follows/followers for any account. Learn basic characteristics such as location, demographics, and online activity by the hour, and the always useful Best Time to Tweet report that uses a
  4. Commun.it – Follow Friday helpers, shows who your biggest new followers and most engaged followers are. Very spammy auto-DM.
  5. Meshfire – uses AI to suggest new followers and possible posts. The mobile app is buggy on Android.

Want to see how I set up my Hootsuite Dashboard? Go here.

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Defining and showcasing your brand with a side order of social media

Here’s my cheat sheet to get to started building your online community. Use these tips and resources to grow your online presence.

Getting to know your own brand

You can’t promote what you don’t know.

  • Answer your “Big Why” in 4 words. Yes this is shorter than a mission statement, but you can do it! Now start signing your email with it!
  • What are your core values? Reflect on peak experiences that hit you emotionally.
  • Who is your hero? Who is your tribe? Tell a story about one of your heroes – this is your hook

My preferred methods of growing an audience: IRL, SM, content marketing (blog with sign up button at the end, guest posts, Q&A with segment leaders), email

  • Speak to people already following using the mom test

Your website

  • The sign up button: newsletter sign up, auto login after sign up
  • Send a personal email w/in 24 hrs asking why they signed up
  • Ask: What’s the main benefit of our product to you? If our product went away tomorrow, how disappointed would you be?
  • Once 40% are “very disappointed, it’s time to grow!

UX tools

Math

Hustle

Social Media

Instagram

  • quick 150 WD bio, direct CTA w memorable URL that opens to unique high value landing page (promo code)
  • only talk to ideal user
  • reply & flood #
  • Audisense to find audience
  • Canva.com to make memes
  • hootsuite to schedule posts

Your FB group

  • Get your group going by inviting engaged FB page users and newletter subscribers to join
  • Posts to a group always show up in people’s feed
  • Paid ads need a custom audience, find it with spaceship.rocks
  • Fanpage.karma lets you track the competition’s FB page

Twitter 

  •  Send tweets when audisense bttt tells you to
  • Copy followers with tweepi
  • Build hootsuite searches on your audience themes
  • RT compliments
  • Tweet the same thing 5x/day
  • tweet anatomy: picture, link, CTA
  • tweet lots 10-50x/day

Tumblr – youth oriented, only go here if your audience is here

Pinterest – if you blog about beautiful things, audience is female 30+, remove any pin not repinned 6x in 48 hrs

Reddit – search for your niche, post in 10 subreddits

Snapchat – v. important if your company = your personal brand

Community mgmt

  • Not on Sunday night
  • Use hootsuite
  • Shorten links using bitly or owl.ly to track what works/doesn’t work
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Digital storytelling as a community engagement method

I was lucky enough to get a seat in the recent Community University Engagement workshop “Research with Community:
Digital Storytelling as Method and Engagement” hosted by ISICUE and UVic Fine Arts.

I was hoping to learn more about using visual methods and digital storytelling to engage communities.

The workshop was facilitated by Dr. Tamara Plush, whose research focuses on how participatory video can raise citizen voice in international development contexts. Tamara has worked in Africa and South East Asia facilitating a multi-day (or week) process that she condensed into a half-day workshop.

Here’s an example of how Tamara has used participatory video and elements of good practice for using videos to build agents of change:

We broke into groups of four and followed Tamara’s framework where there is a prompt that helps the individual experience inform the collective central theme. This is followed by the creation of a story arc and then a two-phase storyboarding process. This approach emphasizes the building of empathy from the personal to the group and then to the policy maker.

The prompt: Tell a story about a challenge you’ve faced in your work around community engagement.

We reflected individually and then discussed to pull out a central theme:

“Recognizing the imbalance of power that’s inherent when you have a diversity of the participants”

If we’d had time, we would have also come up with some visuals to represent the theme. Care needs to be taken to make sure that the personal experiences connect to the theme.

I opted to be totally engaged to the process instead of trying to divide my attention by capturing our progress on camera. Thankfully, Tamara provided more resources on her site that are useful to fill in the details about the techniques we used to work out the story arc and storyboard.

Storyboarding: Phase I

My group brainstormed how to tell the story that would illustrate our theme using sticky notes and then arranging the sticky notes onto pages labelled with one of four icons.

[👂] Who should hear the story?

[🤔] What do you hope they will think?

[😀] What should they feel?

[🗣 🗯] What is the dialogue you want the film to spark?

Storyboarding: Phase II

Using four pieces of letter paper, we created 4 frames that would make up our film.

Remember

The video itself sparks the conversation. It can be a point of interest that enables the larger dialogue to happen – the video doesn’t need to do it all.

Tamara mentioned other creative processes that can be used to explore the topic to help create a compelling story including body mapping, looking at a collection of photos, or conducting interviews.