How to Use Shareable Videos and GIFs on Social Media

How to use videos and GIFs on social media

One of the things I love about digital marketing is that there is always something new to try. When putting together the social media promotion strategy for vForum Online, VMware’s largest virtual event for IT professionals that happens twice a year, innovation is always on the forefront of my mind. For last week’s event, I used CloudApp to record shareable videos and GIFs to leverage on social media to drive registrations before the event and encourage engagement during the event.

Using CloudApp to Create Shareable Videos

In an effort to share more varied content, I’ve been working on getting more comfortable posting videos of myself on social media.Being on camera can be really daunting at first, and I personally felt really vulnerable recording myself. I have to give a shout-out here to Dan Willis (@MLLNNLmotivator), who does a fantastic job of creating video replies to the questions posed in Twitter chats.

  • His videos really catch my eye when I scroll through Twitter chat responses.
  • Dan allows his audience get to know him better since his personality and his passion for digital marketing really comes across in his videos.
Screenshot from @elenacsalazar's Twitter including a video made with CloudApp.
I created video replies for a pre-event Twitter chat using CloudApp. This was one of my top tweets, achieving 7.6K impressions.

When @VMwarevSAN hosted a Twitter chat on How to Make the Most of vForum Online Fall 2019, I took the opportunity to film and post my own answers to the questions posed throughout the hour-long chat. This was a great first time for me, since I was very comfortable with the event and felt like I could answer the questions confidently.

CloudApp offers a couple of great ways to produce videos:

1) You can record a video using your webcam.

or

2) You can record a video of a screen recording with or without audio, and with the option of also adding a video of yourself talking in the corner while walking your audience through something on your computer.

Plus everything gets saved to the cloud so that it doesn’t take up space on your hard drive. It’s pretty intuitive to copy the link to your video, or download the video, to share on your social media channels, blog, website, email, Slack channel, etc.

Using CloudApp to Create GIFs

Example of a GIF made using CloudApp.
Here is a GIF I made using CloudApp to highlight the Q&A box within the vForum Online sessions. We had over 130 VMware experts answering questions throughout the half-day event.

The second CloudApp functionality that I really liked was the ability to create GIFs. The online environment of vForum Online is really robust, but people don’t know unless they’ve attended before. GIFs were a great way to show off all of the cool features that attendees could do at the online conference. To create a GIF in CloudApp, you simply have to click “GIF” to record an animated GIF, select the portion of your computer screen that you want to record, click “start,” and then click “finish” when you are done.

Twitter post screenshot with GIF
I posted the GIF on Twitter to encourage
viewers to ask questions during vForum Online breakout sessions.

What did I learn?

First of all, video isn’t as intimidating as I thought it would be. I plan to continue using live video both for my Twitter chat responses as well as to introduce my new blog posts. Stay tuned – you may also see some social media best practice demos from me in the near future.

Second, GIFs are actually super easy to make, and can really add a lot of value to my audience! I look forward to strategizing how else to use GIFs in both my own social media as well as posts on my company pages. Learn how to make your own GIFs from photos, videos, and a screen recording here.

In conclusion, getting out of your comfort zone can be hard sometimes, but there can be big advantages to doing something new.

Have you recorded video content before? Would you be open to giving it a try?

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2 Comments

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