Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
In today’s Q&A, we are helping Brad figure out how long he should make his Youtube videos for maximum impact and effectiveness for his audience.
Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you!
Click here to ask your question!
Resources Mentioned in this Episode
- Today’s expert is Amy from SavvySexySocial.com
- Amy on Youtube
- Amy’s Podcast
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to a Q&A with S&J.
Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Expert Q&A with S&J. This is where members of our Flip Your Life community get to submit questions about their online business and we go find answers from the best experts online. Jocelyn and I are always upfront and say we do not have all the answers but, we do know where to go find them. Today’s question is about video and there is nobody else on the planet that I would rather ask a video question to than our guest today; it is Amy Schmittauer. Amy, welcome to the show.
AMY: Well hello, what a kind, kind thing to say Shane.
SHANE: We have a lot of love for Amy Schmittauer; I’m just saying.
AMY: What a stroke for the ego
SHANE: That’s right, exactly. Bring the value now, bring the value to us.
JOCELYN: And some people, you know, we give them the questions ahead of time but not Amy.
SHANE: Not Amy –
JOCELYN: She’s such a pro –
SHANE: She’s so good, we said, you know what, we’re just gonna drop the bomb on her.
AMY: And if people send me questions in advance, I’m like, oh, I feel like I’m studying for a test.
SHANE: I know.
AMY: I can’t do it. Just on the fly, I’ll have the answers.
SHANE: That’s right, organic. Everything is organic right here.
AMY: Totally.
SHANE: Really we just have no time to prep but that’s beside the point. All right Jocelyn, let’s go with today’s question.
JOCELYN: All right, today’s question is from Brad, one of our Flip Your Life members, and Brad says, “How long should my videos be? All the videos I watch on YouTube seem to be long, but a lot of experts say you should keep it short. Which one is it and what works best?”
SHANE: This is very confusing because – it is true, when I read this question, I was like you know, that’s true; seems like I’m always trying to learn something that’s like 20-minute videos. But then I always hear, “Three to five minutes, get it out there and get it quick” kinda deal. So what do you think about that?
AMY: Well it’s funny – Brad, really, really good question because that’s absolutely right. We are constantly kind of fielding the search results to find the video that’s going to be best for us in that moment and no one is saying, “Man, I really hope I find a solid 25-minute video on this.”
SHANE: That’s right.
AMY: No one is doing that. Now, it depends on the situation, it depends on the content; I mean, if it’s an intense tutorial, then maybe you do need every minute of that. But I tend to tell people, you know, if you’re creating informational content on YouTube, you really want to be between two and five minutes. If you think about the fact that you can inject so much copy into your headline, your description, your tags and you can rank really well for something; but if you end up on the results page with a video that’s seven minutes and yours is twenty, and you’re supposed to be accomplishing the same thing in that amount of time, you’re just not gonna be the option that people choose. So it’s really sort of a human SEO factor that I like to talk about is you can tell YouTube how to rank you, but according to the human that sees you when searched, what decisions are they going to make once they have the results to choose from? If you go shorter, you’re better off. Now, if you do have a tutorial that’s like, “Oh it’s a seven-minute tutorial, it’s a little bit longer than five minutes,” that’s fine. I hope you needed every single additional minute and most importantly, I hope you dove straight into it in the beginning because the real problem is, most videos that are too long are because somebody was like, “Oh, I should probably explain who I am and why I’m credible and all the preliminary conversations that lead to this video coming to create –” no one gives a crap. Just get to the point of the headline and if you do that, you’ll have them hooked for a very good amount of time for that total video. It’s just that you have to prove you needed every one of those minutes.
SHANE: What makes me – and I’ll tell you another thing; it’s funny you say that because the thing that always makes me click ‘Back’ is when someone’s got like fancy, “I paid 400 dollars for my little logo to dance on the screen for 25 seconds.”
AMY: Exactly.
SHANE: And I’m like, man, this may have been the answer I was looking for, but I am totally hitting ‘Back’.
AMY: And what’s really funny is like it’s pretty hard to skim a video; I mean that’s sort of the nice thing about it is if you get somebody to click ‘Play’ as long as you do a pretty good job of staying on point, you can have somebody watch the whole thing. Or, a blog post are such high-competition now, if you don’t have like a list post or a bullet points or whatever, it can be tough to get someone to read the whole thing. They’re gonna skim through it.
SHANE: Yeah.
AMY: But the funny thing is that YouTube also looks at your audience retention rate as they are ranking you in search; and one of the things that affect retention is if people skip through your video. Now it’s not very effective for user experience but if they do see a 30-second, pre-roll commercial thing that you outsource to show off how pretty you look when you’re running on the beach and how successful you are, then they’re skipping over that part and they are moving the needle forward, trying to get to the point, trying to find out if you’re even going to do a good job. That drops your audience retention rate down because they are not technically watching 100% of the video if they are skipping to a further point in the timeline.
SHANE: Wow.
AMY: So it’s funny how many people think they need to do TV-quality type of stuff on YouTube while meanwhile back at the ranch on TV, when was the last time when you actually watched a full theme-song of a television show? They’re usually getting straight into the content at the top of the hour, if you watch TV on even regular TV. Even Netflix I think tend to do the same thing. They’ll start the show, and then once they’ve got you hooked, they’ll play their theme song and those are getting shorter all the time. So we’ve got people getting on YouTube trying to do TV kind of stuff while TV is like, “Man, people really don’t like that, I don’t think we’re gonna do that anymore.”
SHANE: So if I’ve got a 20-minute video and let’s say that the content is really, really good – just a quick follow-up here and then we’ll close this question ‘cause that’s a great answer, but like should I, like you said, use every second, use every minute as long as you’re delivering value and people are saying “That’s fine” but would it still be better to chop that up into parts?
AMY: That would have been the second option on this question because what’s funny is so many people want to jam it in and that’s usually the issue. Even speakers sometimes forget that their job is to get on stage and deliver a few key points. They are not a professor, they are a speaker; but we want to jam so much content into something that we forget we can break it up and that’s what’s really nice. If you have a tutorial and you’re like, “Oh, this is definitely gonna take 20 minutes” give yourself the opportunity to have multiple pieces of content and say, “This is part one of a four-part series.” And then you’ve got people are like, “We’ll, I’ve got to come back tomorrow.” I actually have a friend of mine who does really interesting animation, dating talk kind of videos and who is talking about his first hickey, which is hilarious, by the way. And he’s getting into this story, and he literally gets to the part where the girl finally comes over to his house to hang out. And he’s like six minutes in and he’s like, “Yeah, so I’m gonna put a stop here because this video is too long, you can watch the rest of this story tomorrow.” And he’s like –
SHANE: Oh cliffhanger.
AMY: – freak out and it’s actually a really good way to get people to come back, which is the whole thing about video. You’re trying to get them addicted, you’re trying to get them to subscribe to you. Subscribe isn’t just something we are trying to accumulate in numbers, it’s an actual emotion, it is like, “I want to come back and see everything you do.”
SHANE: We do that with our podcasts actually. We were trying to cram too much into each episode; they were getting 45 minutes long so I said, “This is crazy. Let’s do three 15-minute episodes or 20-minute episodes.” Now each one of those parts gets more value, but it’s less of a chunk basically.
AMY: Right, totally agree.
JOCELYN: So I have to know, did you go back and watch part two of this –
AMY: Oh yes absolutely. I mean, well, he’s a good friend of mine as well, and he was actually the first episode of my podcast. His name is Adande Thorne. He got really big on YouTube because he used to work at Disneyworld actually in Orlando, and so he would talk about like experiences of working at Disneyworld. So even though he talks about like dating and cute stuff like that, he still kind of has a young audience, like high school type of audience. So I mean, it was just so perfect. Of course, you definitely go back and watch ‘cause he’s also telling you this story through animation.
SHANE: Yeah.
AMY: So it’s like –
SHANE: Very entertaining.
AMY: Oh my God, how is he gonna animate this – hickey? You just have to go back for more on that.
SHANE: This Flipped Lifestyle podcast has totally derailed so I’m gonna pull it back on the rails here. Jocelyn.
JOCELYN: All right, you never know what you’re gonna hear here on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast; just saying.
AMY: [Unclear 0:08:43]
SHANE: There you go.
JOCELYN: Okay Amy, so tell people in our audience, where they can find you, what you’re up to these days, and what you’re doing on YouTube.
AMY: Yeah, sure; I’m at savysexysocial.com, I publish three videos a week, Tuesday through Thursday, and if you can’t get enough then the podcast is on Mondays and Fridays. Lots of stuff about social and marketing for your brand, so that’s what’s happening there; I mean, really what have I been up to? I finally just got back from yet another trip, and I’m like trying to figure out, you know, what my schedule is next week when I’m, again, not home. I’m travelling a lot for speaking right now.
SHANE: You’re never home. You speak a lot.
AMY: Yeah, that’s really what I’m up to.
SHANE: Awesome. Well, thanks for being on the show, that was an amazing answer to that question, and if you would like to submit a question for our experts, you can do that in our Flip Your Life community. All you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife to figure out how to join. And until next time, get out there, take action, flip your life guys. We’ll see you next week.
JOCELYN: Bye.
Do you have a question about online business that you would like to have answered on a future episode of the Q&A with S&J Flipped Lifestyle podcast? If you do, it’s super-easy to submit your question. All you have to do is text the letters ‘QASJ’ to the number 38470 and we will send you a text message back with a link to our website, where you can submit your question. That’s ‘QASJ’ to the number 38470. Send us your text, and we will shoot you a link back where you can ask your question, and maybe you can be featured on a future episode. If you are outside the United States or near a computer, you can also submit your question over on our website, at flippedlifestyle.com/qasj.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Leave a Reply