Two types of video

It is estimated that by 2021, video will account for 82% of all consumer Internet traffic, so it’s little wonder that most small business owners have been caught up in the recent trend and are producing video content for their brand.

But much of the content that is produced is spontaneous and ephemeral: it’s recorded with a webcam or a smartphone and transmitted live or posted on social media without any edition, only to disappear down the timeline never to be seen again.

Naturally if content is only going to be seen during a short period of time, there is little point spending a lot of money or resources on its production. But if you intend to put a video on a landing page – which increases by 50% the chances of the page showing up on the first search engine results page, as well as increasing conversions by over 80% – you might want to think about investing a little more time and effort.

And if the video is to be the focus of your business website home page, or feature in the digital presentation of your annual accounts or online company brochure, it really should be viewed as a corporate asset.

Even if the people who appear in the video are not professional performers and lack “stage presence”, professional filming and edition can raise the quality tremendously. Proper lighting and careful cuts and transitions can turn a potential embarrassment into a profile-raising asset.

There are a world of possibilities both of techniques and of applications, from green-screen filming and motion graphics, to talking-head case studies, to “picture in picture” glosses of technical screencasts, to personal introductions for company documents, proposals and reports.

So, if you want to really take advantage of video in your business, although candid and spontaneous content is a wonderfully accessible medium for social media, it’s worth considering how you could benefit from investing in more formal video production.