3 Simple Techniques To Engage Your Audience On Camera
Welcome to another Video Tip of the Week – “3 Simple Techniques To Engage Your Audience On Camera“
In a world full of noise and distraction, you NEED to engage with your audience in order to connect with them to maximise your video marketing efforts.
In this video tip I show you 3 Simple Techniques To Engage Your Audience On Camera, and how to get the most out of the time you have in from of the camera
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Video Transcription
3 Simple Techniques To Engage Your Audience On Camera
Hello there. I’m John McLauchlan and welcome to another one of my video tips of the week and in this week’s video tip, I want to give you a couple of really useful techniques of how you can increase engagement with your audience.
Now for those of you that know me, I’ve been doing video for some time. I went to film school for four years and the majority of my film work has been in documentaries and over the years, I’ve interviewed hundreds if not thousands, which we have thousands of people in different situations.
One of the important things is when you’re interviewing somebody on camera, in order for them to engage with the audience, you need to get them into a certain state of being happy to talk on camera and you will know this when you see different videos on the internet and you will see different barriers that people put in place. If those barriers are broken down, then you’re going to be able to engage more with your audience. Remember, everything online as a business owner, as an online business owner, is all about the know, like and trust factor and the tips I’m going to give you in a minute are all going to enhance that very thing.
Now what I’m going to be talking about is the eyes. OK? Where do you put your eyes? I see a lot of people making kind of the same mistakes over and over. If only they just adhere to one or two of the principles, one or two of the tips I’m going to give you in this video, and especially the video with the tip at the end, then they’re going to increase the engagement with people.
So let me give you the first tip. Here's a typical video camera with the flip-out lens. Now one of the mistakes I see people making, let me just set you back. If I was to start the video again and do it from looking at the flip, so now I’m looking at me. I’m looking at myself. Hello there. I’m John McLauchlan. Welcome to another one of my video tips for the week.
If I was somebody watching this, I’m going to be saying, well, I’m not there. I’m over here. OK? So instantly, I’m now disengaged from my audience and now I’m engaged. Hello. How are you doing? OK?
So disengaged, engaged and this is really important because what happens is when you don’t give people eye contact, people draw up their own conclusions as to why you’re not looking at them even though we’re just talking to a camera.
So if I’m looking at you right now, right into the lens, I’m engaged and I can keep your attention with what I’m saying. This way, slightly more disengaged and you wonder why they’re talking to somebody just to your left instead of right at you. So that’s the first tip.
The second tip, we may look very cool – you can see my lights. You can see my lights in the lenses. So we may look very cool when we’ve got sunglasses on and a lot of the time, we do blogs outside. We do blogs in sunlight and I’ve tried to do blogs in sunlight where the sun is coming down and all you do is a big squint. But to be fair, a big squint is better than covering your eyes up because nobody can see your eyes. OK?
So now I’m saying something to you and you can’t see the finer movements and those subconscious tells, they’re not going to you. So I’m disengaged. As soon as I do this, pull back. Pull back. OK? Now we’re engaged. OK?
So I’m engaging more. The other thing is a lot of people tend to use auto cues. They in itself, to use an auto cue, is quite an art in itself. If you look at the news readers, they can do it very easily. But to a novice, reading from an auto cue is very difficult and also it provides another barrier, another layer. If you don’t get it right, and if you present in a way that sounds like you’re reading from something, then automatically your audience or your sceptical audience will say, “He’s reading that. Why is he reading that? Does he not know what he’s talking about?” Yeah.
So they draw their own conclusions as to why you’re reading it. The other thing, the final point is little pointers and I used to do this on the first step of doing video many years ago. I actually put five or six pointers. What I tried to do was I tried to sort of – tried to seamlessly kind of have a little bit of a glance over to my – oh, point three. OK, and then carry on talking.
For me, it was impossible because you’re kind of always looking over and you’re going, “OK. Now point number three is …” and move back. So it’s difficult to do that. So what I tend to do and one of the things I do in my boot camp is if I’ve got five or six or seven points I need to get across, I will put them on the computer. When I face the audience, I go, “So right, I’ve got seven points on the computer. I’m going to refer into those because if I don’t, I’m going to go off on a big tangent and the video will be too long.”
So point number one, right, point number one is this. Straight into the lens and to point number one and conclude it and then point number two, point number two. It’s just all about being transparent and telling people what you’re going to be doing instead of trying to come up with something slightly different. So remember, eye contact is the first thing you want to be thinking of. Don’t look over here because this is disengaged. Remember, don’t put the glasses on even though you think they’re looking very cool. You’re going to disengage from your audience. So it’s all about engaging with your audience and you’re steering that.
The main point of what I’m going to say here is go back to my mantra which is learn, do and teach. You have to have done something in order to teach it and because people in a subconscious way – all this training about eye contact is all about talking to people’s subconscious because people are always looking at you.
So if I’m not telling the truth, then you can tell. You can tell straight away I’m not telling the truth because the eyes have it. The eyes will tell you and this is what we do. This is what human beings are all about, all about looking at people and assessing whether they’re a natural threat to us or not or whether we can trust them or not, so all about engaging the eyes.
OK. So I think I don’t have anything else I’m going to say. I want to keep this video kind of nice and short. Again there are hundreds if not thousands of different techniques in order to engage with your audience and as a video blogger, to be able to engage with people. But certainly one of the main ones that I found over the years is to get people to talk from here. That’s what I’m going to say. That’s the final point and I almost forgot. You’re talking from here. You’re talking from your experience to there. If you talk from theory – so you’ve got input coming in and then it goes back out, then people can tell, the people can tell the brain processes. People know what’s happening. OK.
So always talk from the mind and this is my final point. If you think that you’re no good on video, if you think, and you look at somebody else who’s really good, really polished, just do it. This is one of the things I want to go over. It does not matter how you present to your audience because the audience a lot of the times doesn’t really listen to what you’re saying. They’re just looking at your mannerisms, your facial expressions, your non-verbal communication and also the eyes.
What are the eyes doing? What are the eyes saying? And a lot of people who are very polished but they’re too polished and they don’t really engage with their audience because it’s just kind of too much. It’s too kind of read. They’re doing it from an auto cue and they don’t really engage. The people who are engaged with their audience are people that go, “OK, whatever. I’m just going to do it. I’m just going to do this video. I’m just going to get it out of the way and get it done,” and they muck through it but it comes from here and it comes from the heart as well. OK? And that is what engages people, not being slick on camera, not having all the best fancy lighting. It’s just about having a good intention.
So I’m going to leave you with those two things to think about – eye contact and think about just delivering your video as you just do it as you. OK? And you will have some good success. OK. If you like this video, just – if you want to give a like on it, if you want to make a comment, then do so and I will be looking forward to speaking with you soon.
If you want to see more videos like this, you can visit my website at JohnMcLauchlan.com. Until then, we will speak soon. I’m John McLauchlan. Speak soon.
Category: Home Business, Internet Marketing, Video Tips of the Week
