Tag: video

  • 5 minute read: how to use Vine

    5 minute read: how to use Vine

    Vine is an app that allows you to create and share small bites of video. Many businesses are using ‘vines’ as a marketing vehicle. If you feel your marketing could do with a boost, why not take a look at creating and sharing vines?

    Step 1: Download the app

    On Apple you will need to download the app via the App Store or through Google Play for android. Once you have downloaded it you will need to create an account. Like all accounts set up for business, take care which email, password and mobile number you use.

    If you have a Twitter account, you can create an account through this social media platform. In fact, this is where you may have come across some short, bite size vines as Twitter acquired the app in October 2012.

    This move was greeted with much furore and thus, the use of short video clips have gathered pace in recent years as a result.

    Step 2: Your profile

    Don’t forget the old, old lesson that creating and completing your profile is essential. Add a few words about your business, using your tag line and logo if you can. Add your location (great for local businesses) and select a profile colour.

    You can also use your Twitter contacts on fine to ‘find friends’ in the app.

    Step 3: Explore trending vines

    Before you go plunging in and create mini-Hollywood blockbusters, take a moment to surf around the app to see what us trending.

    You will notice from clicking on ‘home’, and then ‘explore’ that there are different categories of posts and, you will also see that #hashtags can be used on Vine too – perfect for a #hashtag campaign.

    Step 4: Communicate

    Vine Messages is a way to have video conversation with friends and customers too. You can do this by pressing and holding the camera icon. Don’t forget that you only have a few seconds so it is worth planning on what you intending saying or communicating in a few short seconds.

    Top tip – before plunging into online marketing, why not make a few test videos and shares with trusted friends or colleagues?

    Step 5: Record and share your own vines!

    This is the exciting bit! Bearing in mind #hashtags, and your campaign goals, start creating your vines. Look online for examples created by other companies and how they utilised them. Once complete, don’t forget to share them.

    Step 6: Interact

    Vine is a social app, just like all those other mediums we use in everyday life. Not only should you be looking to interact with customers and ‘fans’, but take time to interact with other like-minded Vine users too. This way, you build a presence on a great app.

    Step 7: Review

    You can see how well your Vines are performing by examining your loop count. You can also use other analytics programs online to see how well people interact with Tweets and posts when they do, and when they do not have Vines are part of them.

    Step 8: Branch out

    Vine can be used on the web too, where you can ‘explore the beautiful world of looping videos’.

    Using graphics and visuals such as short pieces of video is proven to have a dramatic effect on engagement rates, as well as being a powerful marketing tool. Why not take a look?

    Have you used video, whether through Vine or maybe via YouTube? How did the experience impact on your business?

  • How to set up an Auto Reply or Out of the Office message with Usermin

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    Usermin is the interface we provide for managing email directly on the server.  There a couple of things that work well if done on the server, such as setting auto replies, this is because your PC or Laptop don’t need to be switched on to be able to send an automated email.

    The two most common forms of auto replies people use are

    1. a generic, thank you for your message we will get back to you shortly
    2. an out of the office message,normally set for a specific date range

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    The Usermin interface isn’t the most user friendly interface, but it is powerful and for the first option you would rarely change the reply message.  However, for out of the office messages, there is a little tip that can help.

    The key is understanding that all auto replies and auto forwarders are all, in fact, forms of message filters, and the filters section has far more options available that are not seen in the ‘Auto Reply’ tab.

    The following video demonstrates how to set up an out of the office for a date range.

    (note: whilst multisite.locally.uk enable filters, not all systems using UserMin will have these features turned on, so if you are reading this and can’t see these options, you wil need to talk to your systems administrator)

  • WordPress Custom Menus – Adding a top level menu item

    menu1WordPress moved from a blogging platform to a CMS and website building tool when it released its custom menu feature back in June 2010 with WordPress 3.0.

    Custom menus give easy control over the structure of page menus.  Over the releases since 3.0 WordPress have improved the usability of the Custom Menu administration screen, found in Appearances>Menus.

    Whilst being easy to use in many ways with drag and drop positioning, there are one or two tricks that are not obvious.

    This short video demonstrates how to create a menu item, with sub menu items, where the top level menu is not actually a page.

    Transcript:

    “On this demo WordPress website, I have a fairly typical menu structure, with a Home page, About page, Services and Contact.

    Under Services I have a couple of pages, one called First Services and Second Service.

    But this is not actually how I want the site to look, because I don’t want the top menu item to link to a page at all, I just want it to be a holding menu item. So to achieve that, we need to go into the menu editor, and you will see here the typical setup with each item, Home , About, Services all pointing to page.

    What we need to do is create a dummy menu item called Services, and we use the LINKS for this.

    Now it is important that we put in the hash (#) or gate (#) symbol into the URL otherwise there will be problems on touch screen devices if you just leave this blank. And then we put in the text that we want to have for the menu item, and we add that to the menu. You will see that we have a custom menu item at the bottom here for Services.

    We no longer need the page Services one, so we click on the little arrow there and then we remove Services.

    Drag into the right position, drag these across into the correct place, and we save the menu.

    With that done, we return back to the main site, we can see that the menus work as we expect, but if we click on Services nothing happens, but click on First Services we go to a page.

    Obviously you can go and tidy up and remove your unneeded page, Services, leaving you with the menu structure as you need it to be.”

  • Adding Text and Image Links to WordPress Posts and Pages

    A question often asked is can I add links to sites other than my own?  With WordPress this is very easy and like everything, it is even easier if someone shows you how.

    I have created a short video demonstrating adding a text link and also a image link to a page or post within WordPress 3.6.

    It shows how the link can be created and also how to set it so the link opens in a new browser tab. It is always recommended that when send a visitor of yours to another site that a new tab is opened, that way the visitor can find your site again more easily.

    Take a look at the video.

    Wordpress adding links to pages and posts video

  • Adding YouTube Videos to your Posts and Pages

    Adding an embedded YouTube video to your WordPress pages and posts on a Locally site is nearly as simple as adding an image.

    The first step is to get the image you want to display for the user to click on, this could be a still from the video or anything else you fancy. You may want to embellish the image with a ‘play now’ type of button, using your favorite image editor.

    Here are a couple of play buttons you could use.  Right click and select ‘save image as’ on one if you want to download it.

    media_play play

    Then use your favorite image editor  (we like paint.NET, it is free and well supported, you should be able to find the download here )

    You can see it all in action on a video we put together using the techniques described below.

    So first you need to prepare the image that you will use  as the still from the video. you could use a screen grab of the actual video or anything else that is relevant, and then overlay your ‘play button’.

    Then using the standard WordPress ‘add media’ button, upload your image and put it in your post or page where you want it to be, just like any other image.

    Next you need to find your YouTube video and its ’embed’ code, you can find this under the video, if you click on the ‘share’ link and the ’embed’ link. We don’t want the whole ifra

    finished-capturescreenme code, just the URL, copy that and go back to your WordPress image editor and replace the link. What you are looking for is  something like ‘www.youtube.com/embed/CbtGMqLZUdA’ and you put an ‘https://’ at the front to give you ‘https://www.youtube.com/embed/CbtGMqLZUdA’

    There is one more thing that needs to be done to the link, essentially to ensure the video plays when it opens up and runs in HD. We need to add “?rel=0&wmode=transparent&autoplay=1&hd=1” to the end of the URL.

    So the final link you will have is along the lines of  ‘https://www.youtube.com/embed/CbtGMqLZUdA?rel=0&wmode=transparent&autoplay=1&hd=1‘ except that string in the middle will be different and should be your video’s id.

    The last step is to go to the ‘advanced settings’ tab of the image editor and scroll down to the ‘advanced link settings’ and give the ‘CSS class a value of ‘youtube’.

    Save the image and update your post and page, then view it and check it all works, if you got it right the video should pop up and run when you click on the image.

    (note to WordPress user that are not using Locally, this won’t work for you without a couple of technical changes to your WordPress theme)