Monday, December 28, 2015

The 2015 Wistia Rap-Up

2015 was a year of rapid change here at Wistia! As we’ve added a bunch of people to our team (we grew from **27** to **56** people over the course of this year), we’ve had the opportunity to get to know some amazing new people inside and outside of our walls and to work on lots of exciting new projects. **85,902** video marketers (a.k.a. all of you!) uploaded **over 4 million** videos to Wistia over the course of 2015, receiving **1,099,259,978** plays. That’s a lot of videos! Per Wistia tradition, we recorded a video *rap*-up of the year…

 
We also wanted to share some of the things we’ve been working on and sharing throughout the year, in case you missed anything! ### January - The new Wistia Status Page launched to keep customers updated on the status of our systems. - We introduced some new keyboard shortcuts to the Wistia app. - Chris and Trevor shared their lighting philosophy in the Lighting on the Fly guide and a live video AMA. ### February - Emily joined the team. - We threw a Friday the 13th party in our Cambridge office. - Meryl wrote about fostering better internal communication with video. - The Wistia camera cart made it easy for more members of the team to shoot video spontaneously. - Wistia’s BetaPugs beta tester program launched! ### March - Bobby and Lauren joined the team. - Two schools, Loomis Chaffee and Concord Academy, shared their video strategies. - Animoto’s Tom and Stevie shared some inspiring video production tips in their AMA. - We announced a fully native Google Analytics integration with Wistia. ### April - Anders, Camille, Kelsey, and Leo joined the team. - We launched our new Learning Hub and Library and wrote about why we made the changes. - We interviewed Sarah Green of Harvard Business Review… about how to conduct better interviews. - Things got kinda silly when we talked to Dollar Shave Club and MaryBeth Makara of ImprovBoston about using humor in branded content. ### May - Ron joined the team. - Timeline Actions, including email collectors, calls-to-action, and Annotation Links, launched, along with improved video analytics. - Adam Lisagor of Sandwich Video shared the creative process behind his iconic product videos. - We launched a guide to hiring an in-house video producer. - The second annual WistiaFest brought 300 video marketers to Cambridge! ### June - Gordie, Jonah, and Karla joined the team. - Multilingual captions, a new Trends page, and new video quality settings launched. - We made a video about choosing a video backdrop. - MailChimp shared their branding insights in a live video AMA in the community. ### July - Abby, Andrew, and Neil joined the team. - We made some data-driven conclusions about increasing your video play rate. - We collaborated with our HubSpot neighbors on a guide to video and social media. - We traveled to Seattle to learn and hang out with the Mozzers at MozCon. - We released a new album of free background music tracks by the ever-talented Dan Mills. ### August - Jenny joined the team. - We celebrated our Enterprise plan launch with an all-hands-on-deck, single-shot parade video. - We launched some improved tools for managing your video library. - Our friend Julian Moiwai of ZVRS shared some crucial suggestions for making your video content more accessible. - Meryl wrote about using B-roll to level up your video production. - The month without a social media manager necessitated some scrappy collaboration. ### September - Erika, Margot, Ryan, and Tom joined the team. - We hung out with HubSpot at INBOUND in Boston and traveled to the West Coast for Dreamforce. - Chris and Trevor documented our process for shooting videos of laptop screens. - Our new login page launched. - Andrew wrote about how to incorporate video in your user onboarding. - Chris shared Wistia’s company values and how they were developed over time. ### October - Aaron, Anthony, Jay, and Mike joined the team. - Chris wrote about how Wistia ditched a “flat” approach and opted for structure. - Our Non Sequitur Fridays series moved to a new, separate location. - ThoughtWorks shared their tips for recruiting with video. - We hosted our second-ever company-wide hackathon, The Hackening, and built everything from a bathroom speaker system to an office phone booth. ### November - Alicia, Dave, Luis, and Naike joined the team. - We launched our guide to video and marketing automation. - We talked marketing automation and shooting video solo in the first #WistiaChat conversations on Twitter. - Ezra explored how to incorporate video data in your overall marketing. - Video SEO got simpler and more effective with the launch of the new Wistia standard embed. ### December - We got familiar with how Zendesk, Wipster, and Litmus use video to build relationships. - We chatted with Unbounce about their latest educational video series. - We hosted our first live video #WistiaChat hangout, featuring Daniel Loeschen, Enget Dang, Jessica Webb, Steven Howe, and Bart Buerman as guests. **See you in 2016!**


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Thursday, December 17, 2015

The Familiarity Principle: Building Relationships With Video

Every marketer knows that just getting product exposure is hugely important. It’s a scientifically proven phenomenon. Psychologist Robert Zajonc was the first to demonstrate, in the lab, what he coined the familiarity principle: when people are repeatedly exposed to certain stimuli, they come to develop a preference for them.

 
“How you like me now?” For instance, in one study, college students were exposed to previously unfamiliar tropical fruit juices and asked to judge them. The researchers found that the students rated the juices in proportion to how frequently they were tasted. It was mere exposure that had these students developing preferences—the basis of the familiarity principle—and it works the same way with marketing. Product placement is the primary avenue through which marketers have accessed the power of the familiarity principle, but we actually seem to be hitting a point of diminishing returns when it comes to its effectiveness. The problem is one of overexposure: now that we’re all constantly bombarded by images of products and advertisements, marketers need to do more to actually stand out. That’s why it’s time to start thinking about cutting through the noise. You can’t just hide behind your product. You need to step up your familiarity principle game and get face-to-face exposure with the people that you want to reach without overstepping your bounds. The underlying psychological mechanism is still valid—you just have to access it properly. ### Building a personal connection Companies have found all kinds of ways to break through the noise and reach out to consumers on a personal level. General Mills, for example, appears to have taken advantage of the height of their target demographic when it comes to selling cereal. When a parent and their child are wandering down the cereal aisle, they’re bombarded from both sides by images of cheesy mascots beaming down at them. A Cornell lab found that brand trust was 16% higher and brand connection was 28% higher when the Trix rabbit made eye contact, and though it sounds strange, participants in the study also indicated that it made the cereal taste better. The same phenomenon, in fact, has been used to make Facebook ads more effective, in pop-up holistic health experiments, and to help public speakers connect with their audiences. Eye contact cuts through the noise and suggests trust, friendliness, and a sense of humanness. It’s a very powerful technique, but we can push even further into the realm of human connection if we take advantage of an even more powerful tool: video.
“Eye contact cuts through the noise and suggests trust, friendliness and a sense of humanness.”
### Scaling the personal connection with video A lot of companies start out forging deep connections with their customers by doing things that don’t scale. Whether it’s handwriting thank you notes or calling to check up on their customers, some of the projects that startups take on to build this kind of human connection with their users cannot be sustained over the long term. As companies grow, however, this personal connection always seems to be one of the first things to disappear. Not enough time. Not a high enough priority. Whatever. One thing I’ve learned at Wistia is that it is very possible to scale the human side of your business. The reason that handwritten notes are great is because they have that personal touch, but over time that personal touch is also what makes it nearly impossible to scale. You can’t spend hours a day writing little notes to your customers. But videos also have that personal touch. Because of the depth of the medium, you can express the full range of human emotions, explain things in great clarity, and generally appeal to the viewer’s humanity. And, best of all, one video can speak to thousands of customers. ### Case study: Zendesk When Zendesk realized that the phrase “Zendesk alternative” was starting to get real traction on search engines, they decided that they wanted to get their name into that stream of results. “We knew that people searching for Zendesk alternatives were probably familiar with our brand already, so we wanted to show them why we’re a great company to work with,” said Creative Director Matthew Latkiewicz. “We hoped that if we gave them something tongue in cheek, it would be hard for them to be mad.” It comes back to the familiarity principle: they wanted to take advantage of its effects and promote a friendly vision of their brand without having it come off the wrong way. After all, these people were not sold on becoming Zendesk customers. Yet. The challenge was to show them something endearing and valuable that might make them change their minds or even share it without breeding contempt. Thus was born Zendesk Alternative, a down-on-their-luck Seattle grunge rock band:

 
Other companies might have used that video to explain the benefits of their product over its competitors to show curious consumers why they don’t want an alternative after all. Zendesk, on the other hand, crafted a storyline based around the idea of Zendesk’s CEO purchasing a grunge band, commissioning them to write a concept album about customer service, and subsequently putting the lead singer in a moral dilemma about his artistic authenticity. It’s a gripping, funny narrative that gives you a great sense of what the people who work at Zendesk are all about. They’re creative, imaginative, and they have musical talent! All in all, they’re awesome, and you should feel comfortable and confident working with them. When a company grows to the point that searching its name in quotes with “alternative” tacked on is relatively common, it’s time to remind people why they came to you in the first place. It’s not all about price, or features: it’s about the personal connection that they feel when they think of your company, and that’s what the Zendesk Alternative video was all about demonstrating.
“It’s not all about price, or features: it’s about the personal connection that they feel when they think of your company.”
And it looks like it’s succeeded, because when you search for “Zendesk alternative” today, this 90’s grunge rock band comes up as the fourth result. ### Case study: Wipster Wipster is a video editing and review software that allows you to comment on and annotate individual frames and events on the fly. It’s for production companies and individual videographers who are collaborating either with their teams or clients and need to get quick, productive feedback on their work. It sounds boring, but Wipster’s actually taken a process that used to be horribly tedious and turned it into a workflow that’s simple and even fun. To demonstrate that core value, it’s easiest to use the very thing that Wipster’s all about—video. They did just that. They shot a 30-second product demo and made it the first thing you could interact with on their homepage, going for maximum exposure. But they also went the extra mile and made a video unlike any you’ve seen before.
 
Rollo Wenlock, Wipster’s founder, stands in the center of the frame, looking into the camera, and he explains what the product does. But he’s not alone; behind him, dancers race in and out of the shot at his whim, the music is adjusted, and whole parts of the script are cut as a friendly editor deems them “too boring.” It’s engineered to appeal to the familiarity principle. Not only do you get to be face-to-face with the CEO and founder of the company, but the cloying or overbearing parts of the video are literally edited out before your eyes. It’s a short and sweet 30-second video designed to show you what the product does. But it also creates that human connection. CEO Rollo Wenlock is personable, funny, and clearly devoted to his product. You get the sense that he wants you to use it, and that he wants you to succeed. ### Case study: Litmus Litmus just raised $49M in October, and they have a lot of expansion ahead of them. To get the best candidates possible for all the openings they have now, it’s more important than ever that they help people understand what Litmus is all about. People need to feel, when they see your job ad, like they might fit in and belong at your company.

 
Your average text-based ad on Indeed or Craigslist tries to give some description of what your business is like, but it’s always going to fail. Why? Because so much of what makes your workplace unique is intangible. With video, you have a really powerful tool for conveying what a workplace is like without having to use a single word. Make no mistake: A job ad is not that different from a product you’re trying to sell, and you need to make sure you’re giving a comprehensive, 360-degree picture of the precise opportunity you’re putting out there. Litmus’s video is simple in its execution—just clips of their employees going through different parts of their days, set to music—but it says a lot. Where other companies might talk through the perks they offer, or show each one off in detail, Litmus takes you through everything in a kind of whirlwind tour. The familiarity principle kicks in again. By showing you the members of the Litmus team going through different parts of their day, the video shows you that the company feels like a community and even makes you feel like a part of it. By the end, you don’t feel like these are strangers; you feel like they might well be your coworkers. ### Stepping up your game Scaling the emotional, human side of a business is difficult. If you try to craft a genuine relationship with your customers, you’ll often find that you have a hard time quantifying what you’re doing. Attribution models are not yet a total science. You rarely have any way of knowing whether a customer converted because of a phone call or a handwritten note or a personalized email. Video, and Wistia in particular, changes that. With video, marketers can get a deep understanding of how the familiarity principle is playing into their conversion rates—it’s all in the metrics. From minutes watched to where viewers stopped watching to where they clicked through, these new tools can help marketers not only identify valuable leads, but also comprehend what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.
“With video, marketers can get a deep understanding of how the familiarity principle is playing into their conversion rates—it’s all in the metrics.”
Some companies are more up to speed on this technique than others, and they’re already seeing the benefits. Using a scalable method of creating human connections means not only finding the touchpoints that create converting customers, but understanding how it’s done and having the data to prove it.
BLOG » STRATEGY
Be (Super) Human
These five companies are using video to show the human sides of their businesses.


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Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Our First Video #WistiaChat: Learn From the Experts

The first video #WistiaChat was so much fun! We had a blast chatting with video marketing experts from around the world—all a part of our Wistia Community. We talked about video marketing strategy, SEO implementation, marketing automation, and everything in between. Our guest speakers were Daniel Loeschen, Enget Dang, Jessica Webb, Steven Howe, and Bart Buerman. You can read more about them in this Community thread. Missed the chat? No worries, you can watch the whole recording!

 
### Make your customers the stars Across the board, folks in our chat use customer story videos to market their products. Shooting stories allows you to promote your product through customers who’ve succeeded in using it. These videos give prospective customers relatable content, and help them identify with current customers using your product. You can watch Daniel Loeschen’s video of their customers, McClure’s Pickles (yum!) below.

 
Shooting customer stories also allows you to collect other amazing footage, such as company B-roll that can be used in future videos and short testimonials. Video content is a great way to keep your customers engaged with your brand. It’s also an effective way to capture visitors’ attention. We love creating video content for our community members at Wistia, and the larger video community around the world. How do you create video content? You can hear what our panel said about their video marketing strategies in this section of the chat. ### Never stop learning We all have our marketing fails. Learning from our mistakes makes us better marketers, and admitting our mistakes gives us the opportunity to ask for advice from those who have been there. What was a marketing mix up that you learned from? Let us know in the Community, and hear all about our panelists’ mistakes in this part of the chat. Jessica Webb and Daniel Loeschen spoke about personas, and how waiting to create them for their contacts was a costly mistake. Laying out personas for your audience creates a clear map for your marketing strategy, so you can spend time creating the most valuable content you can. How did you start your persona creation? Let us know. ### 2016 is all about video We all agree—quick, real-time, and approachable video is coming up in 2016. SnapChat, Periscope, and Meerkat put real-time video on everyone’s phone, and we believe companies will soon be inspired to create more videos as part of their content marketing and social media strategies. An overwhelming amount of #WistiaChat-ters said mobile video and quick reaction times will be key in 2016. Wistians like Dan Freund are making timely professional quality video a reality by editing on mobile through apps like iMovie for iOS. You can hear more about what our panel predicted for the new year in this part of the chat!
COMMUNITY
Join the Community!
Ask your own questions and learn from our friendly crew of marketers and video producers.


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Thursday, December 10, 2015

Why We Built an Untrendy Company

Wistia has never been flashy or cool. The tech press has never been interested in us, and we never scored the blue chip Silicon Valley investors. The truth is, not many people grow up with the dream of helping companies host their business videos. Okay, fine. I’ve been dreaming about video hosting since I was four. Just look at that scheming smile. But seriously, it was in being untrendy that we found our best opportunity. We carved out our niche behind the company in the limelight, and avoided becoming the focal point of attention ourselves. It’s strange to say, but one of the biggest reasons for our success is simply that we were able to work on something so “uncool” for such a long time. Call it inner beauty. ### Location, location, location Wistia’s first office—after we moved out of Brendan’s bedroom—was in Lexington, Massachusetts, about thirty minutes outside Boston. It’s a town with a lot of history: The first shot of the American Revolutionary War was fired there, and in 1955, the Air Force and IBM chose Lexington as the test site for a prototype computer designed to control a national air defense network. But in 2006, it was a pretty unlikely spot for a startup to emerge. Our office wasn’t a former pencil factory with exposed brick and lofted ceilings. It wasn’t a co-working space where we worked side by side with other startup aspirants. It was a nondescript office park with a big parking lot and harsh fluorescent lighting inside. Our neighbors weren’t hot social-mobile-local apps, freshly graduated from a prestigious startup accelerator. They were accountants, doctors, and insurance agents. There were no glitzy launch parties around or tech journalists to pitch, no conferences to attend, no distractions whatsoever. We were completely shut out of that world. At the time, I was worried that we weren’t famous or lauded, but now I’m grateful for our time in solitude. When we first started Wistia, we were incredibly immature and inexperienced. We needed time and our own space to make mistakes, learn from them and improve. In fact, I’m convinced that if we had been handed $1 million and plopped in the middle of San Francisco, we would’ve bombed, and Wistia would not exist today. Working outside of any kind of startup nexus meant that we had to build up our business doing things that no Silicon Valley startup would be caught dead doing. We took credit cards over the phone! We made cold calls! We did all the old-school business stuff that everyone now tells you is a bad idea—and it worked for us.

“Working outside of any kind of startup nexus meant that we had to build up our business doing things that no Silicon Valley startup would be caught dead doing.”
Our time in Lexington is where we cut our teeth as entrepreneurs and grew as a small team. We’re still reaping the benefits of having that time etched on our company culture today. We avoided getting influenced and confused by the latest startup trends, and we were forced to think for ourselves. We had to put our few customers first. And we made work fun for ourselves and became incredibly tight-knit and reliant on each other as a team, because all we had was each other. ### Hustle, not hype Over the first 4 years, we raised $1.4M in seed investment from Boston-area investors, but we’ve been profitable for 5 years now. From early on, when faced with the choice, we elected for profitability over growth. Even after we raised money, we hardly spent it. 5 years into the life of Wistia, we were still only a team of 5. What drove us to profitability was that our fear of failure exceeded the appeal of taking a moonshot at hyper-growth. We just really, really wanted the business to survive and we really, really didn’t want to fail. We were willing to do an insane number of things per person to keep the lights on. Psychologically, I admit that it was tough to have peers who had raised money walk into an event and talk about their massive team growth as a barometer of success. We couldn’t get the press interested in us because people assumed that we couldn’t possibly be doing well with such a small team and without having raised subsequent rounds of funding. But that time forever defined our approach to work and our relationship with money. The profitability constraint made us achieve growth by being more creative and more scrappy, instead of getting good at spending money. We got good at doing more with less. That helped us grow so much faster and do more with less, even when our years of profitability started to add up. ### Avoid the popularity contest When consumer apps become successful, it means popularity and fame for the founders. But they also have to be popular to be successful—it’s inherent to the project. Consumer products need millions of users just to be interesting. With Wistia, we were able to build a business right from the beginning, with just a handful of customers. We structured our incentives to guide ourselves into building the right business over the long term. Think about YouTube. Their incentive is to drive more views on their own videos because that lets them serve more ads, which is where all of their revenue comes from. Or Vimeo. Their incentive is to drive user transactions to their iTunes Store-like marketplace because their revenue comes from charging for on-demand video rental and purchases. Our pricing plans tracked our customers’ business success with video. Customers paid for increased bandwidth and more videos to own the entire video experience from analytics to lead capture. That meant making sure our customers got credit for their awesome videos and the results they generated, because for us to succeed, we needed to put our customers above everything else. We meet inspiring customers every year at WistiaFest. Our business model wasn’t flashy, but it put us squarely in YouTube’s blind spot. It made it possible for us to sidestep getting crushed by them, and it gave us the space we needed to flourish. ### Inner beauty This company’s come a long way, from two kids in a bedroom to a company of sixty in Cambridge, and along the way, we’ve paid real close attention to nurturing the kind of culture that would attract good people and make them feel like they were doing something worthwhile at Wistia. Right, there’s not much that’s inherently trendy about business video hosting. But there’s a funny thing about less flashy business ideas—push through, survive, and then thrive, and it’s your company culture that’ll become what’s most attractive about your business. As Peter Thiel put it—a startup is “the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.” A startup worth being a part of is all about the people, the fun you’re having, and the experiences you’re sharing.
“But there’s a funny thing about less flashy business ideas—push through, survive, and then thrive, and it’s your company culture that’ll become what’s most attractive about your business.”
After all, a company culture that shines isn’t about buying the best perks you can afford or designing the sweetest about page for your website—it’s about the adventures you’ve been through together as a team and the adventures to come.

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Tuesday, December 8, 2015

A/B Test Your Videos. Here's Why.

We’re constantly testing copy, images, and designs, and measuring their impact on conversions. But sometimes, video gets a “set it and forget it” designation. At Wistia, we’ve been guilty of this oversight from time to time, but recent tests have convinced us to pick up our game. We should be measuring our video’s impact and iterating continuously. Video is more compelling than anything static on your website. It’s a medium that greatly impacts how viewers feel about your brand, and it can motivate those viewers to take action. Failing to measure and track its impact is a huge mistake. ### Video onboarding We’re a SaaS company. Without new users, we don’t grow. That’s why we’re constantly asking ourselves, “How can we help our new users be successful?” Throughout onboarding, we aim to connect, teach, and inspire, and video is a big part of our strategy. We have the benefit of having a lot of new users sign up for Wistia each day, so small tweaks to our signup flow can have big ripples in our business. Lately, we’ve begun to dig into which videos are most effective in motivating our new signups to use Wistia. ### Deciding to test Because we have so many new users every month, we could test and measure the impact in the data relatively quickly. Right after a visitor signs up for Wistia, they’re sent to our “Welcome to Wistia” page: Uploading your first video is the main call to action for new signups. The first version of this page featured the “Wistia in 5 Minutes” demo video. It’s a video that reinforces our value prop, explains our most popular features, and serves as a warm and fun welcome to our software. Overall, the page and the video performed pretty well, but we kept wondering, “Could we inspire more people to use our product with a different video?” #### A data-driven hypothesis The original video on the welcome page was 5 minutes long. We thought the content was super helpful and engaging, but over time, the data suggested otherwise. The video play rate was 18%, and our engagement rate was 54%. Additionally, there wasn’t a clear call to action in this video. Since our goal for the page was to get new users to upload their first videos, we decided to experiment with the video content and add a CTA within the video to improve our conversion rate. Spoiler alert: we were right. But our work was far from done. At an 18% play rate, we weren’t getting enough eyeballs on the video. Normally a 54% engagement rate isn’t too shabby, but we suspected that those who only watched the video up until this point didn’t get the whole message. They were missing a lot of the meat. We had 2 options. We could edit the existing video to create something slightly different, or design something totally different. Usually, drastically different designs produce drastically different results, so we decided to take a home run swing. - We figured that we could increase our engagement rate by creating a shorter video (around 2 minutes). - We decided to swap out our customer success team with our co-founders to underscore the importance of the message. - We added a clear call to action to the end of the video to drive more users to engage.
“Usually, drastically different designs produce drastically different results, so we decided to take a home run swing.”
We hypothesized that by making these changes, we could increase the percentage of new users uploading videos by approximately 10%. #### Hypothesized results ### Running the test Based on our hypothesis, we designed a video that was short and sweet (to increase engagement). We also decided to doubly reinforce our main call to action for the page. In addition to including a clickable CTA at the end of the video, we wrote, “so create a new project, and upload your video,” right into the script.

 
The upload rate was the metric we chose to measure the success of the test. We used the sample size calculator from Optimizely, and determined how long it would take to run a proper test with a pre-determined confidence interval. Then we showed 50% our new signups the control video (the original) and 50% our variation (the new video). ### Results To our surprise, our original video won the test. Our fancy new video actually decreased our uploads by 3%. While a 3% decrease isn’t an earth-shattering loss, it’s definitely not the 10% lift we were hoping for. Interestingly, some parts of our hypothesis were correct. Play rate increased by 8% and our engagement went up a whopping 30%. We were pleased by those results, but those were input metrics. We didn’t achieve our main goal.
“Our fancy new video actually decreased our uploads by 3%.”
#### Taking a deeper dive We were even more shocked when we looked deeper into our app usage for new users who had seen the variation… The percentage of users who used the Wistia customize functionality decreased by 5%, and the embed rate decreased by 3%. What a disaster! A 3% decrease might not seem like a lot, but with a high volume of new users, it produces a costly ripple in our business. Less people embedding videos on their website means less active users. Less active users means less potential customers down the road. On the flip side, a 3% increase could represent a significant bump in our revenue per year. ### So, what’d we learn? Our existing 5-minute demo video was more convincing than we thought. Maybe that’s because our new users don’t fully understand all of the Wistia features when they sign up. Maybe they just didn’t like the actors in the variation. No matter the reason, our new users were more likely to upload a video (and use more Wistia features) after they watched the 5-minute demo. But the variation video did receive a much higher engagement rate. If only we could capture the best of both worlds and increase our play rate and engagement rate in our 5-minute demo video. Hmm… ### Follow-up tests As the saying goes, if at first you don’t succeed, pick yourself up and test again. After sharing the results with our video team, we decided to make some changes that we hoped would increase all of our metrics. Here’s the breakdown: Play rate: We removed the “Wistia in 5 minutes” text on our thumbnail. Why call attention to the length of the video and distract from friendly faces? Engagement rate: We edited the video to be shorter—around 3 minutes instead of the original 5. Upload rate: By making the changes above, we’re hopeful our main metric will improve. In case you’re curious, the most recent version of the edited demo video is below. Stay tuned for the results!

 
BLOG » STRATEGY
Onboarding New Users With Video
The best onboarding videos demonstrate your product’s benefits and answer your users’ most pressing questions, so they can hit the ground running.


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Thursday, December 3, 2015

5 Lessons Learned from Tweet Testing

I spend a lot of time tweeting. As Wistia’s social media coordinator, it’s the most tactical part of my job, from writing copy and scheduling tweets, to creating compelling images to accompany them—Twitter accounts for a pretty significant portion of my day. When I joined Wistia a few months ago, I decided that we should be tweeting more. I changed our strategy from one that felt somewhat organic, to one that functioned like a well-oiled machine—two tweets per hour from 9 am – 6 pm, with about half of that frequency on weekends. After a couple of months, I noticed that our numbers were trending positively across the board. Success! Time to sit back, relax, and turn on autopilot. ### Now, let’s throw that plan out the window. Truth be told, that got boring, fast. One day after feeling particularly complacent and uninspired by our Twitter feed, I asked myself, “Could we be doing an even better job at this?” The answer was… well, maybe… probably. Yes. So, I decided to run some tests over the course of two weeks to determine how frequency and timing of tweets affected our overall engagement on Twitter. The findings from these two weeks would then influence our strategy moving forward. ### Methodology #### Week 1: The Normal Nancy One tweet per hour from 9 am – 9 pm = 12 tweets per day. Compared to an average week, which was two tweets per hour from 9 am – 6 pm = 20 tweets per day. After a week of tweeting only 12 times a day, our Twitter stats were trending downward in a number of areas, however not by much. The number of link clicks and retweets we received was only slightly lower than average, despite tweeting much less often. Our impressions dropped significantly from roughly 22.2K per day to a measly 15K. Engagement, on the other hand, fared a bit better. We had more likes, replies, and a higher engagement rate than average, but yet again, not by much. #### Week 2: The Insomniac One tweet per hour, 24 hours a day = 24 tweets per day. Compared to an average week, which was two tweets per hour from 9 am – 6 pm = 20 tweets per day. From a strictly quantitative standpoint, the Insomniac week blew the Normal Nancy week out of the water. We nearly doubled our average likes this week and saw a significant increase in link clicks and retweets. Our engagement rate, along with our average impressions per day, also increased. During the Insomniac week, we exceeded all of our normal weekly averages, except for one: replies. 3 retweets and 7 likes at 2:12 am. Who knew? So, what does the fact that we got less replies this week tell us about the type of conversations we’re having on Twitter? When it comes to determining your tweet strategy, it’s important to ask yourself what your goals are, as they will likely affect how you define success. ### What We Learned: #### 1. Tweeting constantly will get you nowhere. The old saying “If you don’t have something nice to say, then don’t say anything at all,” applies to Twitter in a big way—just replace the word ‘nice’ with 'valuable.’ You can spot an inauthentic Twitter account from a mile away. Queueing up several tweets an hour, every hour, two weeks in advance isn’t going to necessarily increase the number of likes, retweets, or replies you receive. In fact, it’ll probably do the opposite.
The old saying “If you don’t have something nice to say, then don’t say anything at all,” applies to Twitter in a big way—just replace the word 'nice’ with 'valuable.’
Monitoring real-time activity and being responsive is crucial. Knowing when not to post is a huge part of managing a social account, especially Twitter. We learned that by tweeting less frequently (one tweet per hour versus two) and by tweeting over a longer period of time, you can actually encourage engagement. #### 2. Don’t make too many assumptions about your audience. Lots of folks like to use Twitter at work as a way to take a quick mental break, or to check in on what’s happening in the world. Or, at least that’s what I thought. As it turns out, some of the most unexpected times of day proved to be the most successful for engagement. It’s counterintuitive, but it’s true! Out of our top 20 most-engaged with tweets during the Insomniac week (when we were tweeting 24 hours a day), 15 of them happened after 6 pm, many of them occurring between midnight and 2 am. One explanation for this could be that we have an international audience who’s active at that time, or perhaps some people just like to cruise Twitter during the wee hours of the night. Alternatively, it might have to do with what other people are doing (or aren’t doing) at that time. If there’s less tweet-noise at 2 am, there’s a greater chance your tweet will be seen and interacted with. #### 3. So many variables – it’s not an exact science. Someone will always be shouting a little bit louder than you on Twitter. It’s just the nature of the beast. On any given day, world events from politics to pop-culture can literally take over the space, so be lenient and set realistic expectations. While there are always factors you can’t control, there are a few aspects that I, personally, could have better managed. During the first week of testing, we held our TweetChat, #WistiaChat, which drastically affected our weekly averages. Our stats were tainted. Luckily, I was able to manually delete these tweets from our data, recalculate all of our averages, and subtract any likes or link clicks garnered during that period. If I could go back in time, I would’ve picked a different week altogether to save some time and effort. Can you say #lessonlearned? I can. #### 4. Be wary of your stats. Awesome, you got a bunch of likes on a hilarious .gif! While this might look great on your weekly social report, what did you really accomplish with that tweet? What type of content are you promoting? This is another key factor that could affect your numbers. If you plan to run a test, try to stick with the same few pieces of content for that period, otherwise your data could be skewed based on the popularity or accessibility of the content itself. Twitter is a highly sensitive space. Sprinkle in a popular hashtag a few times throughout your tweets and suddenly your total impressions are through the roof! This puts a pretty meaningless spike in your data. Much like with lead scoring, you have to place a value on these interactions to understand whether they are actually qualified or not. #### 5. Think about the state of your audience today. Every great brand on Twitter tailors their content to the needs of their audience. These needs often vary depending on the state of that audience. If your brand has an established presence online with thousands or even millions of followers, then your goals are going to look drastically different than those of a brand that just hit their 200 follower mark. The bottom line is that there’s no one-size-fits-all measure for success on Twitter. I was under the impression that changing how often we tweeted and when would have a dramatic effect on engagement. And the truth is, it really didn’t! Our engagement rates consistently hovered between 0.9 - 1.1 % over the course of these tests regardless of what we did. If the simple fact is that those two metrics don’t really affect engagement, then at least now we can cross them off our list and try to determine what will. ### Now what? Keep testing. Running tests is like eating chips—you can’t have just one. Our next set of experiments will look at how language (straight-forward versus flowery) affects overall engagement. What are you waiting for? You’ve got nothing to lose. Start experimenting with Twitter!

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Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Behind the Scenes of Unbounce's Educational Video Series

Here at Wistia, we’re always trying to think of new ways to create meaningful connections with our customers and generate helpful content. When Unbounce launched the Landing Page Sessions in November, we were impressed that their video series achieved both these goals simultaneously. In this educational series made up of 12 episodes, Oli Gardner, co-founder of Unbounce, breaks down real marketing campaigns and offers his expert advice on what works and what needs improvement. Thus far, with three released episodes, their campaign’s videos have received over 3,000 views and captured over 600 email addresses via Wistia’s Turnstile email collector. The lean production team at Unbounce had their work cut out for them from the onset, but their scrappy tactics kept everything moving forward, even with some unexpected roadblocks. ### The team Oli Gardner, co-founder of Unbounce, lent his landing page expertise and starred in the series. Stephanie Saretsky, Multimedia Producer at Unbounce, concepted the series, managed pre-production, shot all 12 episodes, and edited the footage into sequences. Then, Felix Cha, the team’s videographer, used After Effects to smooth over transitions and add animations and bumpers. Finally, junior campaign strategist Chelsea Scholz managed all of the marketing strategy, from the microsite to PPC to email campaigns. ### The gear - Camera: Canon 60D - Lens: Sigma 30mm 1.4 - Lights: ARRI Fresnel lights - Audio: Sennheiser lav mic connected to the Zoom H1 ### Pre-production The Unbounce team asked their audience to submit their landing pages with explanations of why they wanted to be critiqued. After sorting through hundreds of entries, Stephanie and Oli chose 12 pages and asked the respective companies to send emails and ads related to their campaigns. After deciding on each episode’s theme, they wrote out loose scripts to dictate the general flow of each episode, and began to shoot. ### The shoot With a limited timeline, Stephanie shot all 12 episodes with Oli over the course of three days. “We shot from 12-5 for three days straight,” Stephanie explained. Shots included Oli at a computer, Oli’s computer screen, and occasionally, Oli at a whiteboard. Since the shoot was over a short time period and the series lasts until February, they changed some details accordingly. “We wanted to make the shoot seem longer, and we wanted viewers to know that Oli had more than one shirt,” Stephanie joked. The team started their first day of shooting in the general office space in hopes of creating a casual vibe. When the shoot proved to be too disruptive to their teammates and the “background” audio wasn’t what they expected, they moved to a meeting room for the following days. “Lighting was the trickiest part,” explained Stephanie. “Both the whiteboard and Oli’s glasses posed problems, but we ended up opting for quality audio over perfect lighting.” ### Post-production After Stephanie edited the content into sequences, she passed the videos to Felix, who added effects and overall polish. “Since our episodes weren’t entirely scripted, some of the cuts didn’t match up perfectly,” Stephanie said. “We decided to use interstitial music to denote a change in ‘scene’ and make the change in cuts less abrupt.” After completing a first pass of edits, they uploaded each episode into Wistia and emailed the link to stakeholders for review.


Often, companies seek out external actors and experts to teach their audiences, but odds are, you’re surrounded by capable experts on your team. Why not document their candid advice and offer it up for free (or in exchange for an email address)? Video series like the Landing Page Sessions, while time-consuming to produce, can offer tons of value, while serving as effective lead generation tools. Luckily, with a scrappy and creative production team, a video-centric campaign is well within your reach.
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Concepting, Shooting, and Sharing an Effective Business Video Series


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