Lumen5 for Content Publishers and News Organizations

Table of contents

What are the benefits of publishers using video?

How can publishers use video?

Examples of publisher’s Lumen5 videos

How to create a news or magazine article video on Lumen5

Top tips

Conclusion

Introduction

Publishers need eyes on their content in order to succeed. One way to do this is by investing in modern, authentic ways to reach an audience. This is where video comes in. Switching to digital methods of gaining readership can offer the opportunity to remain relevant and compete with digital platform giants such as Facebook and Google.



Lumen5 fits into the busy and often hectic schedule of a publishing house by providing a fast, cost-effective way to produce video content at scale.

What are the benefits of publishers using video?

There are many advantages and uses for video in the world of publishing. Here, we’ve outlined a few key points:

Loyalty in traditional and original publications is declining. Varying your digital communication methods will enable your audience to engage more with your business online.
There’s an ongoing battle for audience attention. Cut through the noise and generate engagement with videos for social media — remember that 78% of people watch online videos every week, signaling a massive opportunity for your brand to be seen.
Different demographics use different social media channels. For example, 57% of LinkedIn users are male, with one in every three users aged between 30-49 vs TikTok, which has a 41% user base between 16-24. Video provides the opportunity to target these diverse audiences.
Using a fast, effective tool like Lumen5 enables you to diversify the format you can share content in — all without having to recreate new content.
Video allows publishers to be more agile, for example, addressing a breaking news story and creating a reactionary video in under ten minutes.

How can publishers use video?

For breaking news stories
If a big story breaks and there are still limited facts, video is a great way to powerfully capture the information you have to hand and share this quickly to reach wider audiences.



To recycle and increase readership of existing content

Forbes has published this same St Patrick’s Day video created on Lumen5 for the past two years. When they shared it on Facebook in 2019, the post received just under 250 views, but when they shared it a year later on LinkedIn, it received nearly 49,000 views — for the exact same content!



For partnerships
Brands are often looking to sponsor video content to reach their target demographic, and publisher brands offer the perfect medium for this, as they own the audience relationship.

Examples of publisher’s Lumen5 videos

Many of our publisher Enterprise customers have created great news and content videos using Lumen5.

Mondadori, an Italian publishing powerhouse with over 16 million readers, created straightforward visual travel content for their Zingarate brand. Here’s an example from their Instagram account, which garnered 10,000+ views. You can also read our in-depth case study with Mondadori to learn more.
The Economist’s Intelligence Unit create a short summary of their comprehensive Global Business Barometer for their more business-minded followers on LinkedIn here.
Local news outlet The Press of Atlantic City, part of the Lee Enterprises Publishing Group, used Lumen5 to quickly create a video in response to a local news story using all of the core facts and media from the scene. You can find the video on their article here.

How to create a news or magazine article video on Lumen5

You can start with any of the three create video workflows - but publishers tend to use the URL option or Upload.
The URL option is excellent if you have a mostly text-based article which you’ve published and want to convert directly into a video. Uploads work best for gallery style articles as the AI doesn’t always capture all of the images, so if you want to use the images as the foundation for your video, it’s better to upload them directly & then you can copy and paste the article copy in the video editor.
The title is important and should reflect the original article headline for consistency and to grab attention. Try using a title layout to make the headline stand out on social media feeds.
Use any owned or editorial media to make the video as relevant to the original story as possible.
Keep text minimal, focus on the core facts/points - there is intense competition for attention as people scroll through their social feeds.
Ensure your branding is clear and strong throughout - make sure your brand preset includes your brand watermark, font and colours, to increase brand association and awareness when your content appears off-platform.
Strictly adhere to Lumen5’s timing recommendations for each social format - anything more than 1 minute is likely to lose viewer attention/interest.

Top tips

Include a clear CTA
Video can be used as a vehicle to direct readers to the original content, your website or social page. To make sure you achieve your desired objective, be sure to include a clear CTA to direct your readers where you want them to go.



Create a content calendar
Create a content calendar with staple dates/events and then fill the gaps in between with evergreen content to ensure you have a continual pipeline of content for video.



Use Instant Videos
Instant videos are a great way to generate videos from your website or blog quickly and to ensure you have a constant stream of video content ready for your social channels. You can easily set up your Instant Video feed in your account dashboard by entering the URL(s) for any of the sites you want Lumen5 to pull content from. We will then regularly pull the most recent content from this RSS feed source and generate a video that you can download straight away or make some further edits to yourself.





Brand your content
Adding in a watermark is an easy way to ensure that your video is recognizable as your brand’s. Without a watermark, brand recognition can be missed, and the impact of your video lessened.



Size matters
Make sure you’re using the correct size and format for your social channel. For example, an Instagram newsfeed post will be a different size video to a Facebook News Feed post. In Lumen5, we have an Auto Resize feature that automatically resizes your video content into your desired size. This means you don’t need to create a handful of individual videos for each channel — simply create one and resize it for different platforms.

Conclusion

We hope you found this guide useful! We’re always open to feedback and if you want to get in touch to chat about this guide, or anything else Lumen5, contact your dedicated Customer Success Manager or email [email protected].

Updated on: 28/05/2022