Using video in social media with Ian Laurie

Hey everybody. Welcome to another week in the life of the Agency Accelerator podcast. Hope you are having a fantastic week so far. Now today is an interview episode and I'm really excited to have an old colleague of mine, Ian Laurie, who runs a video production company called Snow Digital Media. And we ended up talking a lot about how to use video as part of your social media strategy and particularly how to use video on LinkedIn. There was loads of really interesting tidbits in this and if I'm honest, I learned a bunch of stuff too. So I know you're going to find this episode useful. So let's get on with today's show.

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Welcome to another episode of the Agency Accelerator. Now I am really excited to have Ian Laurie from Snow Digital Media. And Ian has been working in the video production space for 20 years and actually Ian and I have known each other for a number of those years. So I'm definitely interested to hear Ian's perspective on how the agency world has changed in that time as well as how we should be thinking about using video in our businesses from our from a marketing perspective. So Snow Digital media helps B2B brands create, produce and distribute engaging and meaningful video content across all social media channels. So welcome. Ian, do you want to just expand upon that sort of background about Snow Digital?

Yeah, absolutely. So as you say, I've been in the business for around 20 years, so I describe that to people as, as I'm old enough to remember VHS tape, but young enough that I actually have my own YouTube channel. So I'm kind of sitting somewhere, hopefully somewhere in between being very fresh and sort of past it. But yeah, I've seen a lot of change in the last 20 years in terms of how video production has changed. When I started, the only way to distribute was VHS tape and then dvd. It seems crazy now, but there was no way to distribute video online. All that sort of, in my experience is actually quite still quite a sort of young industry. Yeah, when we first started we were doing mainly corporate videos. So it would be 5 to 10 minute sort of all encompassing video about, about a company with a very rigid story in a script. In the sort of later, the latter years, more recently, that's evolved into sort of a huge range of content. You know, everything from sort of short videos for Facebook and then more long form videos which might go out on YouTube or sit on sort of, you know, internal service for a particular company.

Okay. So before we jump into the detail of, you know, using video in our businesses and how we should go about doing that and why we should do it, I thought it'd be good. Since you've been self employed running your agency for a long time, it would be really useful for our audience to hear a little bit about the journey of running your own business and perhaps some of the do's and don'ts that you would advise people, if they are just starting out or they're thinking about running their own agency or they're thinking about starting a video production company, what advice would you give them?

Yeah, so it's a, that's a great question and it's, I think what my advice and my experience is probably universal so it doesn't necessarily, you know, have to be a video production company. I originally left employment. I only actually worked for a couple of agencies. I did a graphic design degree in university. Left my first job was with a video production company. I'd done quite a bit of video at university as well and I only actually worked for companies for three years. So I worked for one agency for a year and then I moved to another agency for two years and, and then decided that I wanted to start my own business and I initially went freelance, which is I think what, what a lot of people do. I was sort of half working with a, with a, a friend. She'd actually landed quite a big brand as a client so I started helping her and that sort of grew into a bit of a business and then things grew from there and we stayed as a, as a, sort of, as a two person company for many years and, and, and just used freelancers to manage sort of capacity. And then for one reason or another we ended up parting company. I started working with another business partner and, and then that went on for sort of three or four years and then ended up leaving that business partner. And now for the Last sort of 10 years I've been running the agency on my own, which I really enjoy. I guess two of the things that pop up in that story are the two business partners. So I think it's worth sort of me covering what happened with that and what worked and what didn't work as, you know, running a company by yourself can sometimes be a bit lonely. Almost natural to sort of want to share that with someone, which I think is why a lot of people want to go into business with someone else. I think my experience with that was that there were really, really good bits to it. But I think the longer that you work with People, things like different, you want to, you might want to go in a different direction. And also you might have different home lives, different financial setups. So when you're in a situation where you're wanting to sort of push the company in certain directions or maybe you want to take money out of the company, those things can start to clash a little bit. It certainly wasn't doom and gloom. We had some great times. But in the, in the end, my experience of working with people in that, in that environment over that amount of time was that for me, personal. I prefer to be sort of, you know, running the organization as a sole owner, basically.

Okay, let me just jump in there because I think there's some really interesting takeaways from that. So I think you're right that it can be really lonely at the top when you're running an agency. And it is natural to want to have some kind of partner. Although it doesn't always have to be a business partner. It can be a coach, a non exec director, a mentor, whatever. And I think that one really key thing, because I've seen what happened to you, happened to a number of people, especially where there's three directors, I often have seen sort of that third person exiting the business. And I think the key thing is that if you're thinking about working with a business partner, then you absolutely have to have shared values and you have to have aligned vision and goals for the longer term aspirations of your agency. And if you, if you're not able to have those very, very honest conversations early on when you're getting into that partnership, then you're kind of setting yourself up for problems further down the road. So if people are thinking about getting together with a business partner, of course a lot of, there's a lot of really positive reasons why you should do that. People. When I ran my agency, there was two of us and we had very different skills. My background was in software, my business partner's background was in hardware. I was really good at sort of running the team and growing the business. He was really gregarious and good at getting out there and speaking to people. So we had some really natural sort of fits together. So I don't want Ian's story to put people off from getting a business partner. But you have to have shared values and you have to sit down and have a conversation about the short, medium and long term aspirations of your agency and make sure that you are on the same page and that where you're not, you have to acknowledge that as well and then decide Whether that is going to work for you or not. Would you agree with that, Ian?

Yeah, absolutely. And I heard this, this described in a really great way recently on another podcast. On a Tim Ferriss podcast, he talked about making sure if you go into business with someone having, having an agreement draw properly before you start. But he actually said it's not an agreement that you're getting, that you're getting put together, it's a disagreement. Because what it's basically doing is it's covering you for when you, you inevitably disagree about things. You know, if every, if everyone agreed about everything, you wouldn't need any solicitors, you wouldn't need any documents, any contracts, anything like that. So that's something, certainly something that I never did and kind of came back to, to, you know, bite me in on a couple of occasions. And like I say, I don't, as you said, it's not, wasn't a really, really negative experience. It was, it was great. We had some fant times. Yeah, there's just that sort of warning to make sure that if you are going into business with a number of other people, you've got to make sure that you, as you said that you understand what you want out of the business and you have to talk about 5, 10, 15 years exit strategies and things like that. Because assuming that you know what, that what you want is what someone else wants is a very, very sort of, you know, dangerous way to go into a business, basically. Yeah.

If you don't understand that, then you're definitely setting yourself up for problems. What other kind of key learnings have you had in the past 20. Well, the past 10 years of being on your own, but the past 20 years of running your own agency. Any other nuggets of wisdom that you can share with the audience?

I think the picks and troughs, which I know have always been a big part of, you know, when we started working together, that was one of the big shocks. When you start your business and things go okay, revenue starts to build, you get more customers and you know, and things are going really, really well. And then sort of you go up and up and up and you get really busy and you stop, you don't realize, but you stop doing the marketing. Whether that's kind of very sort of direct strategic marketing or whether it's just sort of a bit of networking or just telling people what you're doing, you stop doing that and then eventually that sort of catches up with you. You know, different things happen in business. So someone that, someone that works for the company that you're doing a lot of work for might move. You know, there might be an organizational change which suddenly means that that client isn't a client of yours anymore. And then all of a sudden things can start to go the other way. And it's really, it's really scary the first time that happens because you think o we were sort of, I think there's this feeling now that your business has got to sort of be increasing revenue quarter on quarter and everything needs to keep going up. And if it's not, then there's massive problems. And actually the longer that you're in business, I think that's probably one of the biggest learnings from, from being in business for 20 years is that, you know, it's like looking at the stock market. Every now and then there are corrections and you can do everything right in terms of marketing and the work that you're doing, keeping that to a really high quality. But eventually things will just pop up that are going to cause problems for you. And it's, it's kind of realistic about the fact that, you know what, let's, let's not panic. We'll just keep doing what we need to do. We need to go back to marketing or we need to put some money over here, investment over here. And just knowing that you're going to have that sort of up and down from year to year, potentially.

Absolutely. And I think a really good point that I'd like to make at this point is that no one should define their success based on increasing their revenues by 20% year on year. Some people, that isn't why they run their businesses. So there is no blueprint of success. You just need to make sure that you are in control of your own destiny. So if you're creating kind of a lifestyle business that you make sure you get a work life balance right, you make sure you're earning the profits that you want to earn. But no one says that the success is determined by how much a business grows at year on year. So I think that's a point that I would like to make because sometimes people beat themselves up because they haven't beaten last year's profit numbers. But that might be okay because they might be having a fantastic work life balance and be able to pick the kids up from school and all the rest of it. So that's good point, well made. So let's move on to talk a bit about video because obviously in 20 years you, you described in the introduction how technology is having such a huge impact. But why do you Feel like video should be part of an agency's marketing strategy.

When we started making videos, they were, they were VHS that we were sending out to clients. That was, that was the sort of final deliverable. In order for them to get someone to watch this video, they either had to take that to a prospective customer, put that into a VHS player in the meeting rooms, which actually people, weirdly people used to have and play that video and everyone had to sit around and watch it. And then that moved to DVDs and then obviously in 2006. It feels like it was longer ago, but actually YouTube didn't come about to 2006. We were suddenly able to sort of host video online, which was huge. Like I say, I can still remember when you couldn't get a video to play smoothly on a computer. It seems crazy now, but yeah. And as soon as YouTube came around and then the sort of, the other platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn then started to kind of use similar technology that meant you could host videos on their own platforms. It's just changed everything. I mean, YouTube was really useful because as I say, it was a general sort of video hosting company. The issue with sort of, I guess for agencies and specifically sort of in a B2B world, it's seen as quite kind of B2C and it's seen as sort of lots of, you know, children and teenagers playing computer games and it's still kind of got that reputation. So even though you've got big brands who have a presence on it, if you, if you check out subscription subscriber numbers, you know, you'll get a 15 year old who's got sort of, you know, 1.5 million subscribers and then you'll, you'll go to someone like BMW and they've got a hundred thousand subscribers. YouTube is still not that platform that brands have adopted in terms of a sort of video hosting way. So when video sort of moved to platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, it suddenly became more interesting to business. What I'd probably want to focus on, because we're talking in an agency perspective, is LinkedIn, which is such a huge, huge opportunity in the B2B space at the moment. In terms of video, I think in, in five or six years time, people are going to look back and be like, oh my God, there was such an opportunity there. Why didn't we get in then? Why did you know, it's really crowded now. You know, we thought it was crowded then. It really wasn't. I think in terms of sort of social media, there's quite Often this idea that if you haven't got a really strong presence now, you sort of miss the boat. Do you know what I mean? You know, if you haven't got an Instagram account with, with thousands and thousands of followers, it's too late to start. If you haven't got a YouTube channel with loads of followers, if you haven't got a really great Facebook page, it's too late. And it's. The thing is, it's just not. And B2B has been quite late coming to this area. So I think creating video content for LinkedIn is something that every agency should, should be looking to do in the next 12, 12 to 18 months.

Okay, so let me just jump in there because I think there's a real mindset thing here because I know I suffer from this sometimes that it' and it's very easy to look at other people and think how fortunate they are because they've got thousands of followers or viewers, but it is never too late. I guess I would completely concur with you, Ian, that we're at the cusp of the world of video and how it can be used and how it can represent our brand and how it can play a significant part in business development. And I believe that LinkedIn is finally catching up with the live video like you can do on Facebook and YouTube. I know I actually applied ages ago to LinkedIn to be a beating beta tester for their live video, but not heard back yet. So I'm not sure that's good or bad. But do you know much about that?

I know that they're still running the beta program. There's still quite a lot of, as far as I know from, from speaking to people at LinkedIn, there's still some things that they, they want to iron out. So as far as I know, what they're doing at the moment is it's, it's mainly being offered to the big brands and agencies. So I think there might be a couple of influencers, sort of specific video influencers that have got access to it. I mean, by all means apply, but I don't think the likes of you or me, unless we've got a huge following on LinkedIn, are what they're interested in yet.

So I guess, Ian, what you're saying to me is that I haven't got much of a hope of LinkedIn actually accepting me to be on their LinkedIn Live, but I guess, guys, it's coming soon. The other thing I believe about LinkedIn is that when you're posting videos on there you're going to do much better in terms of their search algorithm if you load it natively onto LinkedIn rather than putting a link to say, YouTube or Vimeo. Is that right?

Well, this is an interesting one in theory, yes, that's, that's the advice that I would be giving to everyone. Normally I would say that I watch a couple of sort of very regular video creators on there who seem to do a mix and I always see their videos, whether they are YouTube or LinkedIn native videos. So I've been told by LinkedIn that their post feed is still sort of moderated by humans. It's not an algorithm. I don't know how much of that is true, but apparently it is still, you know, it is still looked at as is this content relevant? You know, is it good, high quality content, therefore it gets through? So I would say it's probably safer to, to keep the video native. The other reason to do that is that you get some quite nice metrics on, on video. So you can go in and you can see if, if people in your network have viewed it, you can see exactly who's viewed it, who's liked it, for example. But it also allows you to see, you know, it will something like, you know, someone in the food and drink industry has viewed this video, or, you know, someone in the automotive industry has viewed this video. And I think that's, that's some quite interesting metrics because you can look at sort of what countries have had a look at it and it just gives you some general, you know, if, for example, you are aiming your content at the automotive industry, for example, you know, if several people from that industry are looking at it, then, you know, you're sort of going in the right direction. You don't get that sort of those, those metrics from YouTube to, to summarize, I would still look to Uploaded natively to LinkedIn if you can.

Yeah, and I think that's a good, that's good advice. So let's just stick with LinkedIn for a moment. Let's imagine. So I'm an agency. I have bought into the idea of creating some video. What kind of video content would I put on there and what would be the ideal length to post on social media, but particularly LinkedIn?

Yeah, so these are really, really hot questions. And these, these are what, these are the questions that get asked over and over again. What video content should I create and how long should it be? You know, the answer is, obviously it depends. So in terms of what sort of content you create, you need to look at the outcomes that you're trying to generate. So you need to work out where in the funnel that video is working. Because obviously a top of funnel video is going to be very, very different from a much, you know, lower down the funnel video. So top of, top of funnel might be just be general awareness of your agency. For example, if you're a relatively new agency or you're relatively new to posting video and LinkedIn, it might just be, it could be like an agency tour, okay? It could be just an interview with a couple of the sort of people in the company, quick overview of what you do, tour of the office, showing sort of, you know, how many people working for you, the kind of environment they work in, things like that. And I guess as you go further down the funnel, it might be customer testimonials, which is obviously a really popular, a popular thing to do. So I think you've got to work out, you know, is it, are you trying to generate awareness? Is it just general sort of agency brand awareness? Is it, or is it, you know, hardcore sales that you're trying to do? You know, do you want people to watch these videos and, and say, wow, these guys look amazing. We're going to use them for our next project. And then in terms of, in terms of length, again, this is a really contentious question. There was a, there was some research that came out a few years ago which said that the human attention span had actually got so bad that it was now shorter than a goldfish's attention span. Actually, you know, you will have people that say, oh, it needs to be a 5 second video, it needs to be a 10 second video. I would go, I'd go the other way and I'd say that if it's a good piece of content, I think you, you've got to hook them in, in the first five seconds. So, you know, this video is about or drop some really interesting or controversial content that I don't want to say clickbait, but it's that kind of thing that's really gonna, oh my God, I need to watch this. This is the, for example, you know, a headline like the biggest thing to hit marketing this year, something like that. As long as you can roughly deliver on it in your, in your video and then you can go into it whatever length you want. And I think if, if, if a video is really, really good, it can be 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes long. Because what will often happen is people will, will find that video, they'll have a look at it, they'll like it or they'll, they'll make a note of it to watch later. So, yeah, I think if you, if you get people in with a hook and the quality is really, really good, I don't think, I think the length is sometimes a bit of a red herring.

Okay, great. So there's some really interesting points I just want to pick up on. First of all, the idea of, of thinking about the outcome you want to achieve before you actually shoot your video is really sound advice. And of course that's, that's advice that we should apply to all of our marketing activities. Whether it be video or writing a piece of content, or doing some Facebook advertising or going to do a speech, whatever it is, we have to think about what are we trying to achieve from this and then that will influence the actual content that you create. So that's, that's a really good piece of advice. I think the other thing about LinkedIn that I know compared to say, Twitter and is that your posts that you put on LinkedIn are going to hang around a lot longer. I think Twitter's got like 18 minutes or something before, you know, the post has just disappeared. Whereas LinkedIn, if you're getting engagement, it's going to keep being shown to your audience. That's one of the reasons why LinkedIn is such a great platform, especially in that B2B space. If you're thinking about producing your first pieces of content that you're going to post on LinkedIn, for example, do you think it's better to do top of the funnel or middle of the funnel? Which of those two is likely to get more engagement?

Yeah, that's, that's an interesting one. I mean, just to go back one step, I think when we, when you think about video and posting on, on LinkedIn and this, this covers a lot of social media, it's not really a campaign thing. It needs to be an always on thing.

Just explain what you mean by that a little bit more.

If you make a video and you, you make one video, you put it on LinkedIn and that's all you do, you know, that month or that quarter or even that year, the chance of you gaining anything from that is, is so small, you know, unless it was some kind of standout viral success for whatever reason. And when we think about campaigns, which we do, we often do in marketing, you know, we might think, well, for this month or this quarter, we're going to run this campaign. And I think the problem is that as soon as you, it's like a tap. As soon as you turn it off, it just stops. So I think the, the thing that people get wrong with social media, you know, very specifically video, is this idea that you just post, you know, well, we'll do, we'll do a few videos and then we'll just sit back and wait. And I think, think the real opportunity is regular content. All the social platforms reward regular content. I think it was YouTube that started doing this originally. If you post regularly, it will sort of update the algorithm more. And even with even Google, the reason that people started putting, originally started putting blog posts on websites was because Google liked new content. So as it was looking through and trawling the web, if it looked at your website and you had new content, new fresh content on there, it would think, well, actually this is a bit more relevant than this other website which has been, been, you know, hasn't been touched for 12 months. So that's kind of moved over into the algorithms for social media. So that's why, for example, if you spend any amount of time on LinkedIn, I'd imagine you've come across Gary V. Gary Vaynerchuk and you know, he was virtually unknown on LinkedIn maybe two or three years ago. And now I don't know about you, but I can't sort of scroll for more than sort of 20 minutes without saying something from Gary Vee or one of his associates. So I think when you think about doing video, I think, think you've got to think about just doing it regularly. Now if that means that you can only do, you know, one video a month, you're looking at the amount of time you've got to spend on it or your budget and you think, okay, well, I can only do, I can only assign this to sort of one video a month. Do that. I mean, ideally you want to do more than that, but it's, it's about that consistency and that, that sort of keeping it regular, I think that's going to give you the biggest return on investment for sort of any amount of money that you put into the, put into the video. I mean, we're talking specifically about organic here rather than paid, which is a whole nother ye area.

So the really, really important point here, if I just step back from what you're saying, is that we should think in our marketing that content is the center of our universe. And when we've produced a piece of content that is a video, in this case, we have to think about how many different ways we can use that video. And like you say, posting it once and hoping you're going to get tons of engagement and inquiries, you're going to be seriously disappointed. So obviously if you're producing a video for LinkedIn, you can also post it on your YouTube channel. You could also post it on a Facebook group or a Facebook pa. You could send it out as part of an email campaign. You just need to think that the video is this piece of content. Now, how many different ways can I put this content out to my audience through different channels such as LinkedIn.

You've absolutely hit the nail on the head. And going back to the question about what sort of video should I create. This is why thinking about sort of slightly longer form content is potentially a really, really good strategy. And if I, if I give you an example, one of the, one of the kind of, I guess the hot sort of hot topics for video at the moment. If we look at creating a video podcast, okay, that's a really good, that's really good example. So you produce that podcast with members of your agency. So you have a kind of an agency or industry discussion or you get some clients involved or you get an industry thought leader that's going to sort of be a real, of an industry celebrity that's going to pull people into that podcast. If you shoot, for example, a 30 to 60 minute podcast, the amount of video content and other content actually that you can get out of that is huge. And actually I'm in the process of making a video about this, so I've got sort of stats in my head already. But if you start with the video podcast, you've got your full length, let's call it an hour long podcast. Okay, so you've got the full length podcast that you can put out as a video. You can then cut that into a shorter highlights video and you can have several versions of that. So you can have a sort of, you know, one minutes highlights, a kind of a real sort of teaser trailer for the podcast. You can have a sort of five minute highlights version, a ten minute highlights version. So already you've got three or four pieces of content. Then if we're looking at kind of really short, short, tiny bite sized bits of content, you can make sort of little, tiny social pieces. So if someone makes a really interesting comment, you could cut out maybe a sentence that's really, really interesting, quite impactful. Then you can make little square social videos that you can put onto Twitter or Facebook or still LinkedIn and use those again as little hooks. Then you can transcribe the podcast so you can stick that on a blog post. You can get the audio, the podcast and upload it as a traditional podcast. So already there I've mentioned sort of seven or eight pieces of content. That's enough to go, you know, maybe two months of dropping stuff on all the different channels, all from one hour video podcast.

Yeah, so such good advice. And listen, the big message here, everybody, is that you need to have a strategy for your content production. So that when you are, for example, in Ian's case, you said you're shooting a video of a podcast recording, you've already considered the various different ways that you can cut that up and use that across all the key channels that you use to reach your target audience. I actually do one of those things with my podcast. So when I shoot a podcast and I create some cover artwork for the podcast, I then create a series of audiograms, which are those little videos that show the sort of wavelength that someone's talking. And I'll pull out two or three key points that my guest made and turn that into like a 10 second audiogram which I can post on various channels to actually promote the full podcast. So I am good to hear that I'm doing one of those things. I just want to take a step back because one of the things you said earlier, which is a really good tip for me, and I don't think about this enough, is that when you're producing video, those five seconds at the beginning are really, really important for hooking someone in and for getting them to want to want to say tell me more, which means watching more of their videos. So that was a really good, good key learning. And I think the other thing, just to summarize the last section, is just when you're producing a piece of content, think about the different ways you can not only disseminate it across different channels, but edit it down and use it in different ways, as Ian just outlined. I think that's a really good tip. Ian, just before we wrap up, have you got any other good tips that you wanted to share with the audience about producing video?

I think really it's just, it's just the message just start, you know, I think one of the, one of the hardest things to do, do with video is sometimes just starting. It's, it's kind of getting the, getting that first video out. I heard this from a big film director. He described it in terms of making his making your first film. He said, make your first film, he said, because it will be crap. But he said, until you make your first crap film, you can't start making good Films. I think that's probably not dissimilar to video. You know, if potentially your first video or your first few videos aren't going to be great, but they will improve from then. So the sooner you sort of, of you, you start that process. And then the other thing is, is just to echo what I said earlier, which is there's a huge opportunity. There is not. There are not hundreds of videos like this on LinkedIn at the moment. There will be in the next five years, but at the moment there's not. So you've got a massive, massive opportunity to stand out. And as I say, we're all, we're talking completely about organic here. We haven't even gone into to paid, which is a whole, like I said, a whole nother area. But there is a huge, huge opportunity for agencies to be real sort of thought leaders on video within LinkedIn.

Brilliant. So, yeah, guys, get out there and do it. It's really interesting that people really put off videos because they think it's really complicated. I've got a couple of people who say to me, oh, I hate looking at myself on video. And I just say to them, guys, it's not about you, it's about your audience. Stop being egocentric. It's not about how you look on video, it's about whether you're creating content that your audience will really engage with. And I think we haven't got time to go into today, but I think a couple of things. As long as the people can see you clearly and they can hear you clearly, then you just need to get on and start doing it. I know for sure, and Ian knows as well because he helped me with some of my early videos that when I first started getting in front of the camera about, I don't know, four or five years ago, I was terrible, I was wooden, I wasn't looking at the camera, I was self conscious. And whilst, whilst I've still got a long way to go to get fantastically polished on camera, I know I've got a lot better and I know I feel a lot more comfortable. And the only way you're going to do that is by getting out there and creating videos. And like Ian says, the first few may not be great and you may not even use them, but it's all about practicing makes perfect and it's about getting out of your comfort zone and sort of learning a new skill as well.

Yeah, absolutely.

So let me ask you the last question, which I ask everybody who comes on as a guest on my podcast, which is what Advice would you give your younger business self who's just starting out? If you could go back in time and give that younger Ian one piece of advice, what would it be?

I think we did sort of touch on it earlier. I think there's a couple of pieces of advice. The first one is just be, try and be sort of clear about your outcomes. I think starting a business is an incredibly exciting thing to do and I think you immediately get wrapped up in just trying to make money. And I think once that starts happening, it's just so exciting. You just sort of, you know, you carry on doing that without necessarily, you know, looking to the future. And then I think the other thing is I certainly looked around me at my sort of peers and thought that what they had was exactly what I should have or should strive for. So, for example, you know, an office with 20 people in and, you know, being the MD and sitting in the office on my own and it took me quite a few years to realize actually that really, really wasn't me. So I think you've got to be able to sort of take time out and be really, really honest with yourself and honest with the skills that you've got and say, am I where I need to be? Am I really happy doing this? Because you're going to be doing it for a long time and it's something that you've made yourself. So if you're not happy doing it, then there's, there's, there's something wrong.

Really good advice. It's interesting that when we are trying to create a plan for our business, we often end up creating a plan of what we think think we should be achieving rather than what we really want to achieve. So if we could get that right in the early days of running a business, we are going to do so much better. Ian, really interesting conversation today. Now, if people want to get hold of you or find you online, where would they go to find more about Ian Laurie and Snow Digital?

So I'm on LinkedIn. Feel free to drop me, drop me a message or connect with me on LinkedIn. That's the kind of where I'm sort of most the of active or if you put my email in the show notes, if they've got a video question, you know, I'm more than happy to reply to email to anything. And once again, thanks for having me on.

It's been an absolute pleasure and we really just touched upon one area of video, so there's lots more to talk about. So I'm sure we'll have you back and I will include your LinkedIn profile and your email address in the show notes today. But Ian, really appreciate your time today and I will see you again soon.

Thanks.

Watching for so there you have it. There were some really useful insights in this episode, especially around using video on LinkedIn, and for me there were five key takeaways. First of all, make sure you are thinking really strategically about all your content and therefore how you can repurpose it. Never think about a video in isolation, that is in a binary way, but think about how you can cut it up and use it across different channels, as Ian outlined. And also before you produce a piece of content, think about the why? What is it you're trying to achieve with this content? Why are you doing it? Because that way you can measure success. Fourthly, the first few seconds of a video really count because that's the time you're going to hook your video in. And if you do that well then actually it doesn't matter how long the piece of content is. And the last point was on LinkedIn and other social channels. Post natively if you you can, rather than hosting it on YouTube or Vimeo or whatever and then just posting a link. So I hope you found that episode useful as ever. Please make sure you've hit the subscribe button so that you are the first to be alerted to every new episode each Thursday. And lastly, if you found this episode of value, then please consider leaving a review because that really helps other people find the podcast as well. So until next Thursday, I hope you have a fantastic day and a great weekend and I will see you next week.