As Oprah Winfrey famously said, being a mom is the hardest job on earth. But it’s a lot easier when you’re part of a tight, supportive and loving community. And community can now help make Facebook video content.
Eastern Suburbs Mums is a fast-growing and vital community of hard-working, but also fun-loving mothers living in one of Sydney’s most beautiful districts, the Eastern Suburbs, which features the famous Bondi Beach, as well as Bronte, Coogee and many other beachside suburbs. It also includes historic neighbourhoods like Paddington and Woollahra, with sprawling parklands and endless cafés, bars, restaurants and shops.
And there’s lots of kids, and amazing things for kids to do too! With many places offering Kids Eat Free offers, vacation care centres and kids activities, there’s also plenty of advertisers keen to target its audience of close to 7,000 members, many of whom are also professional mums, living just east of the Sydney city and the headquarters of many of Australia’s most important companies.
The successful Facebook group needed to respond to changes in Facebook’s algorithm that prioritised video content over its written and image posts. Crucially, Facebook now encourages page admins to publish episodes within series of video content.
The challenge: How to create episodic video for a Facebook group with very little time and no editing tools
Eastern Suburbs Mums founder, Natalie Hudson, was a part-time site admin, full-time marketer for a fast food brand and full-time mum to two kids. Her group makes money from sponsors and had a ready supply of complementary product lined up from advertisers and sponsors wanting quality content around the theme of kids’ activities in eastern Sydney.
With no editing experience, very little time and no video software, Natalie didn’t know where to begin. She had a vision of a Facebook series called “Playground reviews” in which her group’s members each contribute reviews of local parks and softly areas. With over 7,000 group members, many of whom were really active contributors, it made sense to crowdsource.
Within a few weeks of putting out the initial call, she had enough video submissions to create the first four episodes of Playground Reviews, each filmed by Mummy Vloggers and assembled automatically by the Vloggi platform. The series has 15,000 followers (as of August 2020).
The solution: Incentivise community to create video content
Ms Hudson says while Eastern Suburbs Mums has a fast-growing community of mothers signed up to the group, they’re always looking for ways to further expand their reach and engagement, which is usually easier said than done.
“We’re talking about some of the busiest Mums in Australia, many of whom are trying to juggle motherhood with professional careers as well. So we were looking for a tool that enabled them to use video they’ve already shot of their kids at play.â€
Yet within the community there’s a wealth of information and knowledge so many mums were likely missing out on. Everything from safe places to play, kid-friendly cafes and restaurants, facts about school and day care facilities. The list goes on.
Eastern Suburbs Mums is also compiling a directory, in line with best practice for Facebook groups’ commercialisation. Through this contact with commercial entities, a steady revenue stream means all video content can be co-branded with local suppliers, venues and attractions.
Having read about the seismic shift towards video content on social media and within the marketing industry, Eastern Suburbs Mums went searching for easy and affordable way to have members collaborate in uploading short videos of their experiences to share information and experiences.
“To be honest, before we tried Vloggi, we thought we were on something of a fool’s errand: thinking we’d find a way to have people who aren’t professional videographers actually make their professional looking videos,â€
Natalie Hudson, Eastern Suburbs Mums
“And many of the options we found were either too clunky and difficult to use for amateur video makers, while also often being a bit on the expensive side.â€
But the fact most mums now have a high res video camera in their pockets or strollers was a good start. Eastern Suburbs Mums used the Vloggi uploader to quickly create a custom link for each playground to be reviewed. They also used complementary product, like vouchers for Hoyts cinemas, to incentivise the Mummy Vloggers.
Read more on how to incentivise your community to upload video to your user-generated video project.
Mummy Vlogger ready to upload video to Vloggi
The end result: 15,000 new followers for a Facebook video series
Vloggi is the world’s first and only truly collaborative video production platform allowing users to shoot and produce professional looking videos with minimal effort, skill and with little or zero cost.
Big brands have been using Vloggi to crowdsource videos from their customers. Read how JUCY built a free video library of authentic customer clips using Vloggi. As a marketer with a large fast food brand, Ms Hudson knew Vloggi could be used to build authentic videos for her online community too.
For community groups like Eastern Suburbs Mums, it was a real time-saver and revenue generator. Vloggi is a powerful tool for generating large volumes of consistent video content for sharing across major social media platforms such as Facebook.
The group was able to make a video template once, that included contributor name and captions. The video location was automatically detected from the source video file and displayed. For Natalie, the ability to drag and drop to make compilations was a real time saver.
Throughout a tough 2020, Eastern Suburbs Mum’s members have been able to use Vloggi to shoot high res videos of them with their children out and about, sharing cute and entertaining experiences, as well as stories helping to engage and inform the group.
The result has been a marked increase in the power and effectiveness of the Eastern Suburbs Mums platform.
Each video has approximately 5,000 views, with one on the brand new Inglis Park super slide receiving almost 7,500 views in a single week. This was a quadrupling of Eastern Suburbs Mums’ next best performing video.
And it’s not just about the group’s members shooting the uploading the sorts of simple videos we’re all bombarded with on social media all the time.
“There’s so much you can with Vloggi to make truly professional looking videos, like creating captions, highlight reels, mapping and much more,
“It’s really helped to strengthen the bonds and sense of belonging that is so important for mums doing one of the hardest jobs around, parenting
“And the fact Vloggi is so easy and fun for them to use means we are immediately generating vastly more fun, informative and engaging content for Facebook that we can also use on other social media channels to spread the word.â€
