“Can I do my content as a video rather than a post?”… is something I get asked a lot. 🙂
Here’s why a video is wholly different from a snappy, polished written post.
People will often say, “I find video easier than writing. Can’t I just do that?”
Here’s the thing: LOTS of people find video easier than writing. Maybe even everyone, or almost everyone.
Because with a video, you get to sort of ramble your way to clarity and not be that polished. You don’t have to edit to make your sentences clearer and remove redundancies.
All of that makes video easier… FOR YOU. 🙂
But what makes it easier for YOU to create, makes it harder for your audience to consume.
(It’s just like when people ask if they can send me a voice message rather than typing, because it’s easier for them. I get it, but it’s not easier for me to consume… 😉 )
It takes a lot of effort to try to follow something rambly, listen to redundancies, and mentally fill in gaps.
Even if your video had zero rambling or redundancies (which is very difficult to achieve unless you’re reading a script word-for-word, and that sounds weird), it simply takes longer to listen to words spoken out loud than it does to read them.
It’s true that writing amazing clear posts will take a while. Some of mine have taken me an hour or more.
But that results in something that takes the audience one or two minutes to read – and they’ll (usually) completely comprehend the point I’m making AND know exactly how to work with me.
Someone once said, “Easy reading is damned hard writing.”
That’s exactly the point of all the effort we put into writing: so that it’s SO easy and fast for people to consume and understand our point as well as our offer.
It’s also very easy for someone to miss the offer part of a video (they might just click away when they’re bored or distracted, and not even realize that an offer is coming), whereas that’s more woven into the written belief-shifting post and much harder to miss.
Written posts are just more convenient for the audience – they can easily find the salient points or the info they’re looking for rather than having to search through an entire video to find it.
Social media is noisy and people are more distracted than ever in this day and age. If we want people to pay attention and easily grasp our message, we pretty much have to smack them over the head with it. That’s what the posts do.
None of this means that I am anti-video. As you may know, I do videos sometimes (and am very proud of the quality and depth of the videos I’ve done).
But my suspicion (and this is hard to prove because we can’t study/test it directly) is that people watch those in-depth videos precisely because my posts have already gotten their attention and they are interested in going deeper into my message and teaching.
Most of my videos reside in my Facebook group (this website has only existed since April 2022). and I never invite anyone directly to my group – people have to request to join – and many have told me that they became curious after reading some posts on my profile and wanted to check out one of the videos that I mentioned (sometimes I promo the videos at the end of my posts). That’s what I’m basing this on.
So there’s a place for both. 🙂
Interestingly, a lot of people say that they simply “don’t read” or “don’t read long posts” but a lot of those people have told me that they read my posts in spite of themselves because “they’re just so engaging” or “just so easy to read.”
So even people who supposedly “don’t read,” will read posts that are written in Strong style.
Good to know, huh? 😉 Sometimes we humans don’t actually know ourselves that well.
If you want help writing these powerful posts, DM me on Facebook about my 30-day 1-on-1 intensive.
If you like, we can also use some of the intensive time to talk about what videos you might create and how to strategically use your written content to lead people to check out those videos for a deeper exploration of your teaching.