And why would you want to try interactive video?
- 89% of consumers want control over ads they view online
- 64% of consumers are more likely to spend more time watching video if they have more options to interact with it
- 68% want to be able to control offers and updates they receive from brands via email
- Videos with choice can triple viewing times and double conversions
This is comes from a recent survey by Rapt Media. It’s consumer research, not B2B. But don’t these numbers seem to seem in line with your experience watching videos online?
Pretty cheap interactive transcripts
The CaptionBox below the video contains social media buttons and acts as a navigation panel.
CaptionBox is a tool available from the inexpensive transcription service SpeakerText. SpeakerText does a good job of transcribing your video, which improves SEO as well as accessibility — and the first 5 minutes is free. Then, when you put the video into CaptionBox, your video becomes interactive – viewers can scan the content, and click to view the sections that interest them. It’s chapterization at a very granular level.
Quizzes and lists with video and potential virality
Have you ever clicked on one of those irresistible quizzes like “What City Should You Actually Live In?” Of course you have, and there’s a good chance it originated at PlayBuzz, the source of more Facebook shares than any other publisher. You can create all kinds of swipers, flip cards, personality tests, quizzes, polls, ranked lists and other stuff for free at PlayBuzz. Your interactive production can feature video clips, animated GIFs, graphics, photos — pretty much any attention-grabbing object the Internet can handle.
Try interactive videos in email
Viwomail is an interesting service that enables your videos to play inside an email instead of sending the reader off to YouTube or some other website. Of course, not all browsers will allow this. Outlook doesn’t, which is not great for B2B users. And not all email services providers (e.g., MailChimp) are supported. This information is available on the website.
Viwomail has a clever way of detecting the email client and serving whatever will work — video, animated GIF link, static image link. There is also a tool for automatically generating these formats. Worth a look.
Chapters, CTAs, quizzes and more
Chapterized YouTube webinar on the Hapyak platform.
I’ve mentioned Hapyak before. You can make your existing videos interactive, whether they are hosted at YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, Vidyard, etc., or your own servers. Call-to-action links, quizzes, choose-your-own-adventure, and other interactive types. First five videos are free.
YouTube cards
YouTube cards.
More mobile-friendly than the old YouTube annotations, YouTube cards pop up on top of your YouTube video to offer the viewer clickable links to other videos, links to your associated website, and a few other tricks. Cards are free, and pretty easy to add. They work on computers, Android devices running version 10.09 and up, and iOS versions 10.07 and higher.
Playbuzz Quiz
It costs nothing to create a quiz at Playbuzz. Most, like this one, are cute, fun, and designed for social sharing. But there’s no requirement for your quiz to be cute. You could construct quizzes around messages you want to put across — (“In the event of an WAN outage, how long before your replication data cache runs out?”). Or create a “choose your own adventure” story from use cases. You don’t get an awful lot of user data from PlayBuzz — mostly clicks and shares. But about their ability to produce engagement — free — there can be no doubt.
What are you waiting for?
You can use videos and other content that’s already available. Why not kick it up a notch and make it interactive?
