So, as of late, you may be contemplating "should I be filming myself for social media?"
Filming yourself for your business or personal brand and throwing it up on social media isn’t only a good idea – I’d argue that it’s almost the only social strategy that you’ll need this year to experience massive growth and further your success.
“But Jay,” you exclaim “that’s preposterous! What about testimonial videos?” Yeah, they’re good too. But not as important as filming yourself. “And what about product photos, action shots and the like?? What about everything else?”
Oh yes, they’re all important too – but I do gotta say that filming yourself is still going to come out on top on your list of content priorities. Here’s why.
Filming yourself is personal, it’s vulnerable and it’s relatable. The people want to see it! So, just give the people what they want.
Let’s run through my list of the 5 benefits of filming yourself for social media.
1. You get to know yourself better. Well, since everything starts with the self and your own individual mindset – this is a great point to kick it off on. If you don’t know yourself, how is your ideal customer or client supposed to resonate with your marketing messages? By filming yourself multiple times per week, you’ll be able to actually hear yourself speak – yep, you’ll become an outside observer to your own words and body language.
Now, I know that it’s obvious you’ll then be able to make micro adjustments and change your approach over the course of more filming – but watching yourself has benefits in real life too.
You’ll start to notice that as you enter a sales meeting or even just a casual conversation, you’re becoming more and more aware of your energy. You’ll be able to recognize when you’re acting just a little bit less than savory, and adjust quickly.
You’ll be able to gauge people’s reactions to your own words and body movements, and then make the changes you need to quickly shift to a place of alignment with how you want to be received. Trust me. This is huge!
2. It removes the guess work for your client base. You know, when we put up imagery or a video of inanimate objects, we really leave a bunch of guess work for our online audience. “What did she mean by that?”, “How did they do that?”, “I wonder how old that is?”, “Should I just look somewhere else? I don’t get it...” You may not realize it, and truth be told – it took me a long time to come to this conclusion as well – but folks are going to be asking these questions.
From this standpoint, we really are doing ourselves a disservice by not filming ourselves. Take it upon yourself to get out and ahead of your customer’s questions, answer them ahead of time and get the outcomes you desire.
3. You get to use the power of the movies. Okay, hear me out. What do we watch on tv? “I don’t watch tv, Jay. I don’t got time for that.” Yeah, yeah yeah. Stop it, you’ve watched tv before and you’ve seen movies. And everyone knows about that guilty pleasure you sneak into your schedule every Thursday.
And why do we do it? We just can’t get enough. We’re able to feel. These tv shows and movies that we watch, they provide dopamine for us – they make us feel good by sharing stories with us. We get to watch trials and tribulations. Characters go through challenges and then come out on top.
Now, I ain’t suggesting you start comparing yourself to Spielberg here, and you're also not Cameron Diaz or Keanu Reeves.
However.
You’re going to become the main character of your own small business or personal brand movie, and you’re going to share the challenges you face, the wins that you have, and the lessons you learn – all while promoting your product or service and growing a following of raving fans.
4. You’ll be able to look back on your progress. Inevitably, as the months and years go on – you’ll eventually have quite the storehouse of videos to look back on. By looking back, we can remember where we came from – and we’re better able to connect the dots.
Have you ever experienced that? A time when you find yourself watching old videos and you realize “Oh WOW! I really did not need to be that concerned about that thing.” Or “I was really bad at making videos… I’m pretty damn good now.”
Having access to this personal historical data to review at our own will is going to pay dividends when it comes to knowing ourselves, understanding where we’ve come from, where we’re at and where we’re going.
5. By including a call to action, you’ll increase sales. Now this is a big one, probably the biggest one. I mean, the rest of these benefits have really been added benefits. They happen by consequence of attaining the main desired outcome – the main desired outcome being sales. After all, you are running a business whose entire intention is to sell stuff.
When you make video content for your business, you’re able to craft custom messages that tell your audience exactly what you want them to do. Now we do need to walk a fine line here – you don’t want everything to feel too salesy.
So what am I saying? I’m recommending that you have fun with the process, share the journey and include a call to action at the end here or there. Great call to actions include “Call us today for more info,” “Click the link below to fill out our questionnaire,” or “visit our website to check out our wide array of products and services.”
Really anything goes, just remember that telling your potential customer what they can do next is infinitely valuable!
And that about does it. There’s the top 5 benefits of filming yourself for your business or personal brand. You know, I’ve only just begun to do this myself, and I’m already seeing all of these benefits.
It’s something that I’ve dabbled with over the past few years, but now I’m really seeing that it’s a strategy that needs to stick. It’s amazingly beneficial, and everyone should be doing this. With the accessibility that phones have created now, there really is no reason not to.
Other than that, if you’d like to know specifically how to film yourself, go check out the blog titled How To Video Yourself for Social Media. Why it’s Important and Secret Tips & Tricks.
Also! Hang tight for the next post, where I’ll be going into depth on the hacks you can use to make a writing and filming routine stick.
To Your Success,
Jay Ashcroft
four32 MEDIA