From the course: Social Media Video Strategy: Weekly Bites

Transforming written text into video - Premiere Pro Tutorial

From the course: Social Media Video Strategy: Weekly Bites

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Transforming written text into video

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- The power of video in social media is immense. Comprising 80% of web traffic, video is pervasive, dynamic, attention-grabbing, immediate, and emotional. Video also greatly improves your odds at appearing higher in search algorithms, so it's no surprise that many marketers are transforming non-video content into video so that they can capitalize on video's effectiveness. One way to do this is to convert text from articles and blog posts into video. You might not have any video experience whatsoever, but fortunately, with a little planning and creativity, you can easily convert your writing into compelling video content. First, you should determine what would be the best candidate for this transformation? Take a look at all of your past articles and blogs and explore which would lend themselves the best to video. Which are the most interesting? Which are inherently visual or emotional? Which reach out to your audience in the strongest way? Also, consider if any of your written content can either be broken down into several smaller videos or expanded upon to create a more robust series of videos. Series are a great way to keep people coming back for more, and if some of your writing is a little more complex, a series of videos might be a good way to break things down. Once you've decided on the best content, I recommend that you make a script. You can begin by extracting the best text from the article and arranging it in a general storyline. Try focusing on fewer words, boiling down concepts into chunks so that you end up with proper pacing and flow without overloading the viewer with too much information. I often like to arrange this content into a two-column script. This is where you put the text in the left column, which will likely be presented in the video in the form of on-screen text or narration, and then you put the visuals that you want to use in the right column. This is where you find ways to bring in photos, graphics, and short video clips to help tell your story. You can do this fairly easily in a spreadsheet, and then translate the results into a basic video editing software like Adobe Spark Video. Spark Video lets you easily arrange text, images, video, and music together into a dynamic movie with different themes, aspect ratios, and more. There are also specific apps that help you through this process of translating text to video. For example, there's a tool called Lumen5 that walks you through everything in an easy-to-follow, step-by-step manner. It begins by asking you how you want your video formatted and where you want it to live. And then it asks you for either a link or text so that it can populate the story. You then choose a theme that best depicts the style and tone you want to go for. The program has an AI component that chooses sentences and chunks of text to include in the storyboard. You usually do need to comb through this and do a fair amount of editing, but after you do, you can usually put together a pretty good story. Then it's just a matter of choosing your media. You can use any of the free images or video clips or animated gifs in their library or you can purchase media or upload your own assets. Let me just show the video that I made from the text of this tutorial. (upbeat music) As you can see, with very little effort, you can create a dynamic video that will speak to your audience in an entirely different way than your written content.

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