Episode 55: How to Create Videos in 5 Minutes with Lumen 5

Click the button below to be reminded when Lights, Camera, Live® is on air.

Click to read transcript +

Stephanie: Hey, what's up you guys It's Stephanie Liu and welcome to another episode of Lights! Camera! Live! I've got an amazing guest for you today. We're going to talk about how you. Yeah, you, how you can create video in five minutes with content that you already have. Isn't that like bananas? Alright guys go ahead and hang out with us. Let me know where you're tuning in from because we have a fantastic show and I'm super excited to bring my guest onto the show. So let's go ahead and get started. All right, I'm going to bring you on. Are you ready? Are you all set?

Kaegan: I'm ready. I'm ready. I was born ready!

Stephanie: Everyone! This is Kaegan, Say what's up!

Kaegan: Hello! How is everyone doing?

Stephanie: They are doing good. So for those of you who don't know, Mr. Kaegan Donnelly. Keegan is the head of growth and community at Lumen five and as an experienced brand builder with a background in customer success. Hey, hey. His customer first mentality allows him to make customer acquisition about how they can be successful by using their product, which is the limited five. He enjoys connecting with marketers and anyone eager to grow their audience through video. In fact, he's actually, he's on Linkedin connect with him.

Kaegan: I see. Do or find me on Instagram if you like pictures of food .Uh, I'm just Keagan on there. I got in early. I got my first name on instagram.

Stephanie: Keegan, you know your name. I've never heard anyone's name like years before. You're the first Keagan I've ever met. Yeah.

Kaegan: Yeah. And I think Keegan it's quite common but Kaegan is a little unusual.

Stephanie: Well cool. Cool. Cool. So for those of you that are tuning in and watching the live and let us know where you're tuning in from. I'm here in Sunny San Diego. Kaegan, where are you?

Kaegan: I'm from Vancouver, Canada and I see Desmond is tuning in from South Wales. That's very cool. I've been to Wales, my family, the name Kaegan is actually I think a Scottish name and my dad's from there. So Hello Desmond. I've been to, to where you're from.

Stephanie: That's awesome. And for those of you that are watching the replay, go ahead and leave the comment. Hashtag replay, just so we know that you are here. The shallots said Darryl Stern, Desmond, Mike, Alton, you guys are absolutely amazing and you're going to be here for an amazing tuck with Kaegan. So Kaegan, let's get started. Yeah, let's do it. Okay, so let's talk about Lumen five first just because I feel like Lumen five is pretty bad ass and when I first discovered it I was like, hold the phone. You guys check this out right now. And I like shirts. Every single one of my clients and my clients were just like, where has this been my entire life So can you tell us a little bit about Lumen 5.

Kaegan: Well, we love people telling other people about Lumen 5. We've barely spent a dollar on marketing. We basically put the product out there. People try it, they love it, and they tell their friends about it and that's how we've managed to grow. Which is the best way to grow a product, I think, right If you're really solving problems for people. I think really what we wanted to do with Lumen 5 is traditional ways of making video or just really difficult, right I don't know if anybody hears use final cut pro or or those sorts of applications. They're clunky. They're difficult to use, their time consuming. You need a lot of skill. I've been using final cut pro 10 years. I probably know how to use 10 percent of that application at this point, so we wanted something that anybody could use, could use to make a video in just a few minutes. So that's sort of the. Oh, I see. Kelly says I love Lumen five. That's what we like to do.

Stephanie: Oh my gosh. Yeah, I like it. Kelly is a big, huge fan. Like as soon as she found out that you're going to be on this show, it was like hard spring arches. Like, let me tell you about this. And in fact you guys, I'm on Lumen 5 website. They have this really cool video can. I didn't even tell you about this, but can I play this quick video and just show them what it's all about Okay. So one second you guys, let's go ahead and hit play

Video Narrator : It's a video creation platform driven by artificial intelligence.

Video Narrator:..Using our platform, you can easily turn any blog post into a video to create a video simply and easily link to a blog post on user. Using natural language processing. Lumen five will automatically create a storyboard for you. We then use machine learning to match each scene with media files that are relevant to your cart. The length of each scene is algorithmically determined based on the amount of text.

Stephanie: No, I just put you on mute. And hey can hear me. Hi guys!

Video Narrator:....to media library contains over $100 million assets and you can use these with a simple drag and drop within a few minutes. You video is ready to be shared across your social channels. Video posts on Social Media Get 12 times more engagement than photos and texts combined. Lumen 5 has helped over 200,000 businesses create over a million videos to start making your own videos. Get started with a free account today.

Stephanie: That was hilarious because I totally put you on mute because you're drinking your coffee and I was like, Oh yeah, you know, and I didn't even put myself on mute and then I'll always. And then, I saw like the little laugh emojis and I was like, Oh, I love my audience, but you just know like the little thing with you or at me. They're laughing with me, but yeah. Hey, if you guys are using Lumen 5, go ahead and let us know in the comments below. We'd love to go ahead and give you a shout out if you've never heard of Lumen 5 before you guys. Again, it's absolutely brilliant. Like I was telling Kaegan, you know, I just, I shared it with my clients. I was like, look, you can hook up your rss feed and then all of a sudden boom, these beautiful wonderful videos come out. You do a couple of edits and wham Bam, you're done, right

Kaegan: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that I know a lot of marketers have kind of struggled with is they spent the past, you know, five, six, seven years building this catalog of written content, right Because for a while blogs were the best way to drive traffic and then all of a sudden things switched to video and people have this backlog of content and they don't know what to do with it anymore. And the whole great thing about Lumen 5 is that you can take that backlog of stuff that you have and turn that into a video with minimal effort and minimal work.

Stephanie: That's nice.

Kaegan: You says the magic of machine learning and artificial intelligence. We have some very smart people who are here who are much smarter than me, who have figured all this stuff out to to try to make the experience kind of magical, which is really cool.

Stephanie: Cool. Well, you know, everyone is talking about video and why video needs to be a part of their marketing strategy. And I always love to hear this stats. So I've been really interested to hear like what is changing in 2019 as far as video goes or what have you seen that's really helped out your user base?

Kaegan: I think um, people are starting to shift to have a video first mentality, right? So video used to be sort of an accessory to your social media strategy. It was something, you know, maybe one out of every 10 posts would be a video. Now you really need to be video first, maybe only 10 percent of your posting is text posts going forward. Uh, and that, that, that's been a trend that's been sort of emerging over the past couple of years now. Uh, I think Mary Smith recommended 80 percent of your content needs to be video in 2019, which to some people is a very overwhelming number to have to hear it. Right. How do you make all that video?

Stephanie: You get yourself in front of the camera.

Kaegan: I think you just, you turn on Facebook live and you never turn it off. I guess

Stephanie: I actually had a client once who, when facebook live first came out, right It was like, oh, what does this live button And then she got distracted, but the phone in her lap and the whole entire time she was just streaming, like looking up here. No, it was just the funniest thing ever. Okay. So when it comes to video in a.... what makes a great video? With what should people be mindful of?

Kaegan: Imagine when you've read a book and then you know, books often get turned into movies and I know some die hards with the books will get upset because things will get left out, right? You know, you'll read the Harry Potter Book and you'll say, oh, they missed that whole section and they didn't include that and I'm angry, you know. But there's a good reason for that. Like video is a very different medium. It's, it's, you really want to distill your message down and make it very simple and easy to get. And ... you don't want to just include too much information, right. So you really need to take your story and take the most important pieces of that and use that in your video message and just try not to overcomplicate things too much.

Stephanie: Oh, that's so very true. I find that I find that most videos that add a little bit of intrigue is what hooks me in. Right Like I think of like all the movie trailers, like don't give away too much. Right Especially if you're going to use like a lumen 5 video to tease what your blog post is about. Like maybe I'll just say like, hey, you know, here are five ways that you could create videos in a matter of clicks and then maybe I'll just give you the first two. And then for the rest of it, you head on over to the blog post.

Kaegan: Yeah, we are. We're working with some news organizations as a Forbes for example, has been making videos with Lumen 5 and that's often what they'll do. Then we call them an article teaser, so you'll just get this little snippet of the article, you know, it hooks in the audience and then they'll click through to actually read the whole thing. Right. So it's kind of combining the best worlds, the best of both worlds with video and written content.

Stephanie: That's awesome. And I also love the fact when you said that most people as marketer, like even marketers are thinking video first, right Like Mari Smith absolutely love her and I'm an analyst. I always tell this to my good friend Mike Alton because he's a blogger and he's like, I could, you know, I could watch one live stream and I could blog the heck out of it. And like for me it's, it's like I'd rather just answer it in a video and then take that video and then turn it into a blog post into a podcast. And like that's where I go first. Especially when you could transcribe videos for free on YouTube or just like a dollar per of Rev. Yeah. Very good.

Kaegan: Cool. Yeah, rev is like when a dollar a minute for transcription or less. Now it's so simple to do it that way, right So I think Lumen 5 and you know, Facebook live and those things, it's really just you. You need an channel approach these days and any tool that can help you take one piece of content and use it across different channels in different mediums is just such a time saver. You know, it's, it's such a struggle for marketers today to, to make their content though as far as it needs to go.

Stephanie: Oh yeah. Well it's funny too, cause you know I, I taught, I spoke with Jeff . See last year and we were talking about how most marketers, they'll push out a video and if it falls flat they're like okay, that wasn't a success, but it's like maybe you need to test it out. Right So when you import, let's say a video into Lumen 5 you could easily like redo the title, maybe change the title, change the hook, push it back out again. Maybe even changed like the starter image. That way you could like really draw people in and then see if that works.

Kaegan: Yeah, exactly. It's really about experimentation and being able to, you know, do low cost things to see if your messaging works. I've heard horror stories from people who've invested hundreds or thousands of dollars in like a piece of evergreen video content and you know, they say this video is going to go on my website, it's going to be there for three years and it's going to drive all these sales and drive all these leads. They get the video done and the message isn't right or the story isn't right or something's wrong with it, but they've already sunk so much money into it. There's no going back. Right So with tools like Lumen 5, you can really like what you said. You can experiment with titles, you can experiment with more information, less information, short videos, long videos. You can really just see what works best for your audience and adjust as needed. Yeah,

Stephanie: okay. Like, I'll give you an example and like this is like for you Mary, Mike, Brad, all of you guys that are watching, like for one of my clients it's a national conflict resolution center and we're all about how to mediate disputes in a way that's still civilized, which is probably a good thing we need in America right now more than ever. We need to be civilized with. Okay. So I used the Lumen 5 to create like this promo video, the awards gala that they have and it said, you know, the date, the time and all that jazz. Well it's an annual gala, so now all I really have to do is this April because that's going to be the year I could just go back in there and change the date, change the time, maybe even put like an updated graphic, but in seconds like my video is already done. So it's brilliant. It's such a time saver.

Kaegan: Yeah. So not only are you saving time in the first go around, you're repurposing the content and saving more time the second time. So that's awesome.

Stephanie: Yeah. And so Mike Alton just said, oh my God, yes, I wasted 10 grand on a marketing video at a prior company. No way

Kaegan: You don't. I'm not trying to say you shouldn't produce great videos. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the sandwich video, that company, they do a lot of ads that are like really cheeky and kind of funny. They're really cool company, but they cost a $100,000 typically to make something. But you can experiment with Lumen 5, get an idea of what message your audience likes and then commit to a big investment. Right Don't jump in on the big investment before you know it works.

Stephanie: Yeah, I love that. You know, just fail fast, right. Just test it out real quick. See if it's really going to hook your audience in. And then if you want to go ahead and move on to like drones and all that other stuff.

Kaegan: Like VR and 3D.. 360 ... yeah!

Stephanie: Yeah, you could definitely go ahead and do that. So having said that, you guys, we've got this really cool video example that Kaegan had shared with me coming in. Is it cool if you go ahead and share that right now?

Kaegan: Sure!

Stephanie: Sorry one second. Let's go ahead and get this cued up and play. Wait, that was with Starbucks?

Kaegan: Yeah. I mean, some big brands have used Lumen 5 for sure. It's um, and I think the thing that you see in that in a video example like that is it's a very simple message. They're not trying to sell the whole story of Starbucks or talking about a very specific thing. Uh, and I think those videos tend to do best too often. People want to tell their whole brand story, their whole personal story in a single video, but that, uh, that usually doesn't work too well.

Stephanie: Very cool. And so what are some, what are some ways that you could go ahead and automate your content flow process?

Kaegan: Got It. So you alluded to it earlier. We have something called instant videos. So if you have a blog or a website that gets regular updates, you can add the rss fee to Lumen 5 at any time. There's a new article will generate using our AI and machine learning technology of video. You and you just have to jump in, see what we've done, maybe make a couple of tweaks, change a couple of things and export it and put that on instagram or facebook.

Stephanie: That's so brilliant. Like, okay, so I did this for one of my clients. I have to tell you because I'm just like this. Okay, so you know, one of my clients has an amazing pr team and we're constantly always getting coverage and they do a fantastic job sending out these press releases. Well, as I asked the webmaster, can you just create an rss feed Because whenever this press release goes out, I then want to have an automated video that I could go ahead and push out, swap the photos, sent a client, get approval, and then push it out on social and it makes you, as a marketer, you guys, it makes you look freaking brilliant.

Kaegan: Yeah, exactly. I've heard a lot of people who say, I love Lumen 5 and I'll be like, great. Can you tell your friends And they say, no, I want to keep this to myself.

Stephanie: It's the best kept secret. I mean, it is true, right, because if you think about like how much people probably charged for like a one minute video and then once they realize, oh my goodness, this is the Lumen 5 template, I could just do this myself. And they're like, Ooh, can you. So here's the question for him that I got from Kelly and the rest of the crew is, can you customize your comments or your text overlays The color is like, how far can you push Lumen 5 to make it look like your own.

Kaegan: Well, you saw that example, the Starbucks video was using kind of the Starbucks green and it had his logo there, so you can absolutely do that. Our free plan comes with a number of themes that you can choose from, but if you want to customize the brand colors or the fonts match a very specific identity that's available on our premium plans.

Stephanie: Got It. And Iikim welcome to the show. I've never seen you before, but welcome, welcome, welcome. Welcome. Yeah, so she's asking "Does it support multi-language ?" That's a,that's a fantastic question because you know English, but what about like Spanish?

Kaegan: So the machine learning component works best with English. It'll work okay in other languages, what we recommend is if you do know English and you're searching our media library, you'll probably have better results doing your searches in English than if you do in other languages.

Kaegan: Right?

Stephanie: Got It.

Kaegan: ...that's kind of, there's tons of like ... Lumen 5 is used all over the world, but it's usually folks are getting crafty with it and they're doing their searches in English.

Stephanie: Very cool. And Mary Fain Brandt said, great tip on the article teasers, right! He's so smart to Mary. This is super cool. So what I'm going to go ahead and do this. I'm going to go ahead and put the. Put the website behind you because you know, for those of you who don't know, right You go in here, you guys have like a bunch of different brands that are using it. You talked about the automated video creation with AI, but I mean you could drop, you can drag and drop your own videos in here, right?

Kaegan: Yeah, absolutely. So using our AI will recommend media that comes from our library. We have a number of repositories that we draw from and it's all available for commercial use, so you can use this in a Facebook ad. If you're doing an ad campaign that's totally fine, but if you have your own images in your own videos, you can upload those and drag them into your project as well. So often people will mix and match a little bit. Right They use some of their own content and some of the stuff from our library.

Stephanie: Yeah. And where are you pulling your stock images from?

Kaegan: We, uh, I don't know all of the sources. One of the big ones is videoblocks you may be familiar with. They're a big repository. Uh, and then on our business plan we actually integrate with Getty. Oh yeah, it is new. It's new in the past few months. Yeah. Oh, okay. That's cool. I'll set you up with a trial later on so you can try it out. So that's really great because Getty has really high quality assets, but they also have stuff that's like a very, like current event driven. So you can look up like politicians and celebrities. You could look up, uh, event. Uh, so yeah, you type in Lady Gaga, you're going to get a bunch of results. You can type in Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister and you can see results for them. So if you're trying to make videos about things that are happening very like right now, get, he's a great resource for that.

Stephanie: Okay. And I don't know if you guys see this right now. Well, I'm sure you can. Hi Dana and Mike! but if you take a look here, what I have on this screen is you type in Latte and then like all the coffee photos up and it's you type in ocean and it pops up. And I'm assuming that the automated AI , it's basically it's reading your, your videos, your script, right And then it's just taking the best images from it.

Kaegan: Exactly. And we'll do really cool thing. So if we select an image for you and you change it for something else, our system will learn from that automatically. What you have to say that again. So, so, okay. So imagine which we choose an image for you and we say we think this matches and you override that by dragging in a different image. We will learn from that and the next time we may have a better suggestion for you. So it's a constantly learning system. It's crazy. I know. I don't know how they do it. The smart guys over that way in our office.

Stephanie: I thought you were gonna say skynet is over there.

Kaegan: Furminator is on his way and it. It's kind of crazy when you think about it, but so many applications are doing that now. I don't know if you've had that experience where you get to capture with Google and it says Click on the squares that have a car in them. It's really what you're doing when you do that is your training, their self driving cars, which is nuts. Right? That's how that all ties in.

Stephanie: Know what I'm talking about right now. But like I would, I had learned when Alice at the gamification Senate was that those little pictures, squares were to help. It was like to train at their computers on how to read the images.

Kaegan: Yeah. So when it asks you where are the cars, you're telling the system how to find cars in the image

Stephanie: Mm. Yeah. So when they launched like their self-driving cars. Do I get a cat because I did my homework. Exactly.

Kaegan: Exactly. You're, you're a researcher. You're a contributor to that. Where's our, where's our google money?

Stephanie : So here's the question for you. Um, some people you know, like Brad Freeman who's watching right now, he does a lot of like podcasting the Lumen 5 eventually do audiograms or did I miss that?

Kaegan: So we don't currently, but we're looking at a few ways that we can help podcasters. Because again, you know, with trying to have that Omni channel approach, if you do a podcast, do you want to be able to repurpose that content One way that people will do that right now is they'll go to rev, they'll get a transcript and they'll paste that into Lumen 5 and they'll generate a video. Yeah. Maybe in the future you'll be able to skip a step and you just upload the audio file and we do all that work for you will see. That would be kind of cool. It would be pretty cool. Right. There's a lot of stuff that we're working on and by the way, if anybody in the audience has questions about things that we're working on, let me know.

Stephanie: Yeah. Well, okay. So I wanted to go back to um, if I swapped out the photo for something that worked with my brand, that computer will learn it. Right Like for example, um, a lot of my audience is diverse, right So I'm always looking for multicultural photos, not just of me, but I'll say that men and like different ethnicities is that stages and. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Um, is, will the AI take that into consideration as well?

Kaegan: I don't know if it's that smart yet, but maybe. I know one problem people have had is that a lot of stock photo is not very diverse. So hopefully the, you know, the stock photo photo companies will start improving in that regard. We noticed that when you search like cafe, it doesn't look like a very diverse group of people in that cafe in some cases a little better in that regard. I've noticed they definitely have a bigger, uh, amount of images to work. So.

Stephanie: So, I mean, the next time I'm at Starbucks drinking my coffee, if you want to come over and you can just like take a photo of my hand?

Kaegan: You could have your own stock set. "Stephanie.stock photos.com" Book it!

Stephanie: And so what about um, so Lumen5 , we'll go ahead and connect with, let's say your rss feed. You can have your templates, you could customize it any which way that you want, um, with the photos and the videos. What about music How much... how much music do you guys have right now?

Kaegan: We have 30,000 tracks and it's all copyright free. It's for your use, so you can upload these things to facebook and youtube. You're not going to worry about getting any copyright notices or anything like that. I'm on our higher tier plans. You can also upload your own music. Got To be careful there. I've had people get themselves in trouble because they'll upload something copyright in the posted on facebook and I don't know, you'll get in trouble for that these days so well, but all the stuff that we provide is free to use and even for ads and those sorts of things.

Stephanie: Cool. And you know what I also appreciate about the Lumen 5 videos is that the first time I created a video and I turned it into a facebook ad, I didn't have to worry about the 20 percent text rule. It's like, I don't know if you guys already knew that you were in line with the 20 percent text rule, but you were right because there's nothing worse than spending $10,000 on a video with text overlays and then as soon as you try to boost it, Facebook's like, no, no, no. That's not happening. You're like...

Kaegan: They were just thinking about the algorithm for a bit, right? There were making like still images that were videos, trying to get more views. Yeah. That was such a crazy thing. So the algorithm that we use, so our machine learning understand sentences and knows where to break sentences into a new scene so we do that automatically so we'll find a good stopping point and we'll bump that to a, the next scene. So there's never too much text on a scene at any one time.

Stephanie: Yeah, I remember that because I think I was like in the Lumen 5 community and I was like I have a really long sentence, can I put that in there And one of the support guys was like, well best practices, you should break it up. And I was like, I don't want to. And I was like, oh you're right. You're right. So like it, it's nice that you also get that support because they feel like whenever I have a question you guys have like the little pop-up chat, right. Like you still have that there.

Kaegan: Everybody's got, it's called drift, right The little chat bubble. We have that. It's usually me who replies, but we have a couple of other people who were in there too.

Stephanie: Hm. Cool. So I'm thinking through like the content creation process and how to automate it. So so far you have it. So connecting rss feed, create Lumen 5 video, you publish it. Can you schedule it. That's like the next step.

Kaegan: Yeah, we were actually, I was just in a meeting earlier and we were talking about were not great in that regard. That is definitely a huge opportunity for us in 2019 because I hear this all the time. They get there. People get their video and there's just a download link and then you've got to figure out how to get it onto instagram or get it into buffer, get it into hoot suite and it's just not that easy. So one of the things we're going to work on over the next few months is more ways to share your video with fewer clicks. We want to handle that whole journey that people are going on from idea to creation to sharing and make that really seamless. Stephanie: And you know, what'd be really cool, this is like me actually geeking out with you now.

Kaegan: Ideas I want! I'l l make sure you get a cut. Unlike the Google thing....

Stephanie: Yeah, so like let's say I publish my videos and I schedule it out, right. That would be cool. But then if I had it because I'm all about like bulk editing content and then just having like something like a goruck just push it out constantly without ever having to worry about like, oh no, what am I going to post out today... So if they could connect to, you know, my, my scheduling tool, I think that a would be really amazing. Or if it was built into the platform that would be really cool. It also be really interesting to know like if I, once I created it, can then remix it for me. Like oh Stephanie, like maybe you should test out this title instead or maybe you know, like split AB test. Have you heard that suggestion before?

Kaegan: Yeah, we've thought about some things around that one idea we had to say you make a one minute video, we might follow up with you the next day with hey, here's like a 15 second vertical video version of that. Take it and posted on your stories. Right. So that's one idea that we've been exploring. I think that'd be really cool. Let's put the work in and then we do the extra work to reuse that content once again. Right.

Stephanie: That would be freaking brilliant. You don't even see it. Well maybe you can, but I just got goosebumps as soon as you said that. Yeah!

Kaegan: It's like " I do the work once and I get three pieces of content!"

Stephanie: L like you take my, you take my video and then you turn it into a square and then you turn it into portrait and then you're giving me suggestions as I'm, hey, what's the mood for this? Should it be happy? Should it be like cinematic ? And then it just builds it the way that I want to build it. That would be brilliant.

Kaegan: That would be very, very cool. In terms of scheduling and stuff, we probably won't build our own scheduling tools because I know most marketers have one that they love and that, you know, they're really committed to. Uh, so I think what we want to do is build integrations with as many of those as possible. So you can do one click, go to hoot suite one, click, donate what a Agora Pulse said another one, go to whatever you want, but it really comes down to those companies, let other companies integrate with them and some do and some don't.

Stephanie: I'm looking at our options there. Well, I'm really excited about that feature or just like Then that would really take my whole video content creation process so much easier. Um, there's this one app, I don't know, I forget the name of it, which sucks, but what they would do is as soon as the video was published on my Facebook page, it would automatically take that video, download it, put it into like a dropbox and then automatically uploaded over to youtube. So I think if, um, if, if I could have it like Napier the heck out of it, right Like next year. Yeah, I think it like Ninja the heck out of it. Then that'd be really cool. Like, okay, live video is done. Um, now it uploads over here and then Lumen 5, we'll go ahead and do something. Is The lumen five Are you limited by how long your video is?

Kaegan: No, you can have as many as 40 scenes, so that's the only limitation, but each scene can be anywhere from one second up to 10 or 15 seconds depending on the content of it. Um, that being said though, the Lumen 5 style of video, which is very text forward, we find the sweet spot to be about a minute. Right Because there's no talking head. There's not as much motion. People just don't have the attention span for that kind of video beyond a minute or so. Right. Whereas, you know, when you and I talking to one another on Facebook live, it's just, it's much more engaging and we can go for much longer.

Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah. I'm just thinking of other ways that I would love to hack Lumen 5 like, okay, here's my, here's my portrait video now and when I want it to be published into my instagram stories. Right. Like if that would be really cool.

Kaegan: Stories are so tricky because Instagram doesn't let third parties post to it yet. Right. So we can't schedule stories or anything. Yeah. One day. Which is good. It keeps the platform very like right now, right, because you can't schedule it. You have to, you know, post it when you want it to go out.

Stephanie: Very true. Okay. So what are some other things that you want people to know about Lumen 5, because I could have the site floating up behind you and just scroll around.

Kaegan: The main thing I want to get across is that we have a really amazing free version, so we know a lot of products and tools out there. They have a free version, but that free version is borderline useless in some cases or you know, you really get pushed to upgrade to be able to do things. We have a really great free product. Tons of users just stick with that. So if you're hesitant, there's really no risk and just giving, giving it a try.

Stephanie: Love it, love it. And honestly, if you guys are using Lumen 5 right now, go ahead and drop them in the comments. I'm Kaegan will go ahead and take a look at it. I actually just want to go back to my Facebook business page because I know that Kelly was going bananas with all of these suggestions.

Kaegan Oh yeah. I saw that she had feature requests. I'm like, I need this. I need this. I need this. Which is great.

Stephanie: It was brilliant. Yeah. Um, let's see here. So Stephanie, definitely I pick and choose my images that we actually had to go. Oh, oh yeah. She had a mini video of hers go viral. Did I tell you that I probably forgot to tell you that. Yeah. So yeah. So she, um, she created this for one of her clients and then it went viral with like 18,000 views and it was about like nursing and public and how you could get over the fear of it and like the moms shared it because it's just a strong community. I thought it was absolutely brilliant.

Kaegan: Yeah. The model communities are amazing actually. So when I first started at Lumen 5, one of my really good friends tried out the product. She runs a business where she teaches new moms and new parents a first aid and she made a video all about, I think it was like some first aid tips for young ends or whatever, and it got like 100,000 views in the first 24 hours. Think she ever made up until that point, had more than like five likes and it just blew up. And that was my first, you know, I just started the company that was like, that was me seeing firsthand the power of telling video with story because my own, like one of my really good friends found success within a couple of days. So.

Stephanie: Oh yeah, like I actually had one client who was very shy on being on camera and so she had downloaded some stock photos, some stock videos, and then she just did the text overlays and it was brilliant. It just, um, it got her out there and she started to see that her audience loved it. Right. So this, this kind of goes back to like testing ideas that would really resonate with your audience because then she's like, all right, well that seemed to work so now I'm going to insert a photo of me and then she just slowly started to build her confidence in terms of getting in front of the camera, like stock and then she would insert a photo of, you know, like let's say Mary Faint Brand, one of our viewers. It shows her, you know, presenting or she has like people listening in all that cool stuff. Um, yeah, there's so much you can do with lumen five, you guys. Absolutely.

Kaegan: I think a lot of people when they see like I need to make the jump into video and they see somebody like yourself who's constantly on Facebook live and as well spoken or used to be in front of the camera and they think, how am I ever going to get there. Right? Like, how do I, how do I get from here I'm not doing any video to that point. And I think making a video with Lumen 5 where you don't have to put yourself in front of the camera, you don't have to film your own footage is like a really good way to kind of step into that world and a little confidence and then take it further and then take it further. And Yeah, before you have your own Facebook live show, right?

Stephanie: Yeah. That's the goal there. It's like a little baby steps and it's. This is like the perfect timing because I just did a training on how to do lifestyle videos with your smartphone in another group. And we were talking a lot about, um, why it's important to get b - roll footage, right So like, let's say you're an entrepreneur, you're doing a presentation, just have some, uh, do b - roll of you, you know, organizing your index cards or your presentation, you standing behind the podium. And then that could be a part of your Lumen 5 video. Yes. I love the stock stuff. But really, if you want to go ahead and grow your business and increase your impact and your influence, then for sure start to insert those photos and you get comfortable little videos of you. And then who knows, maybe you'll do live streaming too.

Kaegan: Yeah. And don't think you need crazy equipment to do that kind of thing. I know a lot of people will say, I need to start taking pictures and they'll go out and they'll spend thousands of dollars on a dslr. Your phone is a very good camera. Start with that.

Stephanie: Yeah. That's so true. Wow. This has been fun. And I am excited to hear like, what is next for Lumen 5 And you've got to, you've got a facebook community for the lumen five community. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Kaegan: Yeah. We have an amazing community of people on facebook. I think we're about 5,000 members strong now. Uh, and it's really encouraging. People will post their videos and they'll get, they'll ask like, can I get feedback And people will give them tips and tricks. I've probably become a better video maker just by being in that community and learning from the people who who make videos. Uh, so yeah, so really, really great community. Hopefully some of the people from there, we'll are either watching right now on the live stream and we'll or we'll see it later.

Stephanie: Very cool. And Kaegan. So where can people see you Are you going to be at any of the conferences Social Media Marketing World, maybe?

Kaegan: Yeah. So I'm going to Social Media Marketing world for my first time this year. I'm really excited. I'm scared. I'm a little nervous. I don't know what to expect. I've only ever been to conferences locally. This is my first like travel to a conference experience. So I know you're going to be there. I'd like. Do you have any tips for me? Like what should I do? or what do I bring?

Stephanie: Okay. So it's going to be March. Um, bring some shorts, brings some sandals, bring some sunglasses and just have a big smile on your face because you are just going to be bombarded with like some of the happiest people. It's like the superbowl, like everyone's just like, oh my God, I want to meet you and once they hear that you're from Lumen 5, they're like, I want to talk to you, I want to learn this and I want to learn that. It's just such a good experience and you'll be happy to know that like Thinkific is going to be there too. So maybe you guys could like plan something together.

Kaegan: You'd have like a little Canadian meetup or Canadian contingent. We'll get like some maple syrup and you know, play a little game of street hockey or something. Try to make ourselves feel at home.

Stephanie: I think Jen Herman and Amanda Robinson from the 360 marketing's squad would love that because they're both from Canada. I'm pretty sure

Kaegan: I'll be with my people.

Stephanie: Yeah. But I mean, you know when you go to the conference, I know it's like a three day conference, but usually like the meetups are the day before. Right So people will just meet in the lobby, they'll concrete and whatnot. But you know, definitely stay a little bit longer too. So that way you could enjoy San Diego. Have you ever been, have you ever been to San Diego

Kaegan: I have been. Yeah. It's such a beautiful city. It's never too hot or too cold. It's just like temperate beautiful ocean. I'm very jealous of somebody who lives in the cold north. I, I envy San Diego quite a bit. We get two months of age. We get two months of the year of like San Diego weather and that's it.

Stephanie: So no way. That actually just makes me sad.

Kaegan: I know, I know.

Stephanie: Okay. Alright, well if you guys have any other questions about Lumen 5, go ahead and drop them in the comments right now because we're about to wrap up and I want to make sure that you get your questions answered and if we don't have time to answer them on the area, you could definitely take a look at the Lumen 5 community on facebook. I just kicking you out.

Kaegan: Kelly mentions that she sees only 1200 fans, so that's true. We actually have way more people in the facebook group page. I think she's page. Yeah. We only have 1,200 likes on the page. What We have 5,000 people in the group.

Stephanie: Oh, okay.

Kaegan: I didn't know how that happened.

Stephanie: No I think that she was talking about the viral video that she had for her client, that she, that the, it was a small page, um, for like the nursing stuff and they have so many views afterwards. So that was pretty cool.

Kaegan: Oh, that's awesome.

Stephanie: Oh, George is just......

Kaegan: George Is like "I made it"!

Stephanie: Like he just slid to home plate!

Kaegan: Exactly.

Stephanie: Okay. So you guys check out the lumen 5 community on the Facebook group or are you just constantly, always in there?

Kaegan: Oh yeah. People will just like app mention me to bring me into conversations. It'd be like, what is Kaegan thinking about this And they'll bring me into it. I love it. It's, it's such a way to start day too. I usually go in there and get all pumped up because everybody in there so excited and then they'll go on with my day. So

Stephanie: Love it. And then, and take a. do you have any, do you do any trainings in the group Like what's the next.

Kaegan: Not In the group. Would you host a weekly Webinar there on Thursdays as well So if you, uh, what's the easiest way to get to it Uh, if you want to attend a lumen five Webinar, send me an email, Kegan@lumenfive.com and I'll get you the link for it. It's a long url so I'll send you

Stephanie: Okay... This is absolutely amazing. I appreciate you so much. Um, I love what you guys are doing with lumen f. It's obviously changed my life in terms of my clients. Um, and so many of our viewers love it to you and for those of you who haven't tried it yet, you will and you'll find out about it and you're just like, where has this been my whole entire life

Kaegan: so much for having me. I'm excited to meet you in person in San Diego. I'm, you're, you're, you're speaking there. So I'll definitely be at your talk and maybe I'll bring you a lumen. Five t shirt as well. We have some of those, so

Stephanie: yes, please lumen five swag for the wind.

Kaegan: Got Good Swag. I'll make some along.

Stephanie: well well say bye.

Kaegan: Bye everyone. George... Mike, Elizabeth, thank you so much.

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Listen, you don’t need to spend hours producing video content with expensive equipment when you already have existing content.

What if I told you that you can repurpose your existing blog posts into videos with a click of a button? Yes really!

Kaegan Donnelly from Lumen5 joined Lights, Camera, Live to share how you can create a video forward marketing strategy in 2019.

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN

Video Marketing Stats Every Marketer Should Know
What Makes a Great Video
Automated Workflows for Content Creation

ABOUT KAEGAN DONNELLY

Kaegan Donnelly is the Head of Growth and Community at Lumen5. As an experienced brand builder with a background in customer success, his customer-first mentality allows him to make customer acquisition about how they can be successful by using our product. He enjoys connecting with marketers and anyone eager to grow their audience through video. https://lumen5.com

Below are a few key take aways from Kaegan’s interview.

What should entrepreneurs keep in mind when creating social media videos?

“Videos are a way to distill your message and make it very simple and easy to get”, Donnelly says, “you don’t want to include too much information, take your story and the most important pieces of it, and try not to overcomplicate things too much.”

He went on to emphasize that video is an interactive way to tell your story as opposed to having your subscribers sift through an intimidating amount of text .

What are the benefits of Lumen 5?

Ohhhh, get ready for this…

#1 Royalty-Free Music

Music is what can make your video memorable.

Music can help create a vibe that invites your viewers in but sometimes finding the right track is hard.

You know what’s even harder?

Trying to find songs that won’t flag you for copyright when posted on social. Thankfully with Lumen 5, you don’t have to worry about this!

As Donnelly explained, “We have 30,000 tracks and it’s all copyright free! It’s for your use, so you can upload these things to Facebook and YouTube. You can also upload your own music!”

#2 Instant Videos from your RSS feed

Say goodbye to difficult editing programs like Final Cut or Adobe Premiere, Lumen 5 has got you covered.

“We have something called instant videos. If you have a blog or a website that gets regular updates, you can add the RSS feed to Lumen 5 any time,” Donnelly shared. “When there’s a new article, it will generate a video using our AI.”

Lumen 5 is a timesaver. Plus, it also makes you look like a brilliant, fast-paced video editor!

What’s the 20% Text Rule and why should you care?

When publishing a video on Facebook, you’re limited to 20% text as an overlay otherwise the platform will hide your content from the news feed.

“Our machine learning understands sentences and knows where to break sentences into a new scene,” explained Donnelly. “We’ll find a good stopping point and we’ll bump that to the next scene. So there’s never too much text on a scene at one time.”

“What if I told you that you can repurpose your existing blog posts into videos with a click of a button? Yes really!”

— Stephanie Liu

RESOURCES:
▸ Stephanie's Live Streaming Gear: https://bit.ly/2J523hL
▸ Join the Social Media Strategist Group: https://facebook.com/groups/smstrategist

UPCOMING EVENTS:
▸ Social Media Marketing World 2019: https://bit.ly/2MRY8Ko

MUSIC:
▸ No Worries featuring Dyalla by Joakim Karud