So, You Want to See More Videos? [Survey Results]

Firstly, thank you to everyone who shared their thoughts of what they want to see on Great Big Scary World using the Survey Monkey survey that I recently posted. Is was very insightful to see why people read this site and what they are looking for. Also, as someone whose knowledge of social media is essentially limited to messaging friends on Facebook, it allowed me to see more of what social media people actually use. I will now be using this survey to help shape the future of this site and have outlined some of the results of this survey below.

Q1. Which of the following social media platforms do you use regularly?

Which social media platforms do you use regularly?

Not surprisingly, Facebook was the clear winner here. However, I share all of my content through Facebook, I asked for survey responses through Facebook and my email newsletter, and Facebook is the most used social network in the world. Due to changes in Facebook however, it is hard to reach a large audience without paying for promotion, something that I do not intend on doing. When sharing organically through the GBSW FB page, unsuccessful posts ‘Reach’ (appear in the newsfeed) of several hundred people while successful posts can reach over ten thousand news feeds. I will continue to share all content through Facebook.

What surprised me here is how few people who use this site use Twitter. I signed up for a Twitter account a long time ago, but I barely use it, with the exception of automatic post shares when one of my posts goes live. I don’t like Twitter because I don’t ‘get it’ and I don’t want to. It’s not visual enough for me and I don’t like being restricted to how many characters I can share. Nor do I like the endless feed of junk. I get very tiny amounts of interaction and as a result, I will continue to keep my Twitter account open for automatic shares of my content, but I will not be looking any further into it.

I find it interesting how few people use Vimeo. Most of my video content is shared through Vimeo, but I now see that this was a mistake. Youtube is far more popular and more in line with the level of content I will be making. Vimeo is for video professionals and I am not that.

Instagram was something I had never taken a look at. However, after seeing how many people use it, I took a look and found it to be very impressive. If you’ve never used it, it’s basically a feed of pretty photos that you can like or comment on and most importantly, it’s so very easy to use and there is an endless supply of beautiful images. I signed up for Instagram (follow me here) and will now be sharing images from upcoming journeys through this platform as it simply takes the click of a button which shouldn’t be too difficult.

Vine, Periscope, Reddit, Vkontakte, Tumbler, LinkedIn were all mentioned too, but having a limited amount of time and a certain niche, I will not be delving into these platforms.

More Videos?

Several people have emailed me to ask for more videos. Personally, I find videos easy to consume and often choose them over large blocks of text. My next few questions related to whether users would like to see more videos on this site. The results were overwhelming.

Q2. Over the past few years, I have recorded a fair bit of footage during my journeys, but rarely got around to sharing it due to lack of technology (a decent laptop) and being overwhelmed by too much footage at the end of a long journey. I have been thinking about producing shorter videos on Youtube, posted regularly (once a week or fortnight), sharing my journeys with viewers, thus allowing people to stay up to date on my progress and feel like they are involved in the journey. Please state how much you agree or disagree with the following statements.

I would be interested in watching this Youtube channel
59%
34%
6%
1%

I would find videos (vlogs) more interesting than blog posts

10%
38%
44%
8%

Over 90% of respondents said that they would be interested in watching video. This is extremely surprising as my site is almost exclusively text and images. Even more interesting, almost half of respondents indicated that videos would be more interesting that blog posts. I reiterate, this is a site built around blog posts and half of the people who pay it any attention would actually prefer videos. In a world with short attention spans, there must be many more people who would be interested in videos, but not the blog posts. As a result of these findings, I will (temporarily) commit to producing more video content on a regular basis and will soon release a new survey to find out exactly what sort of videos it is that you want to see.

I read each and every comment that I received very carefully and will consider (and am grateful) for each of them. When you post things on the internet, it’s sometimes like hitting a magic button that sends your ideas off into an imaginary place where you never see them again, so having this brief two way feedback system has been very helpful. There were strong arguments to share and not share video (confusing), but I aim to continue writing when I am in the mood for it.

Content Type

Q3. Please rank the following (in order of importance) about what you want to see from GBSW.

The following chart is produced as a weighted average of the data collected.

Screen Shot 2015-10-28 at 11.43.03

25% of respondents ranked short videos as the most desirable type of content. Sadly books (something I would love to do more) was way down there. Blog posts with lots of photos ranked second, followed by blog posts with lots of text. It seems people don’t read so much in the modern world – although many of you expressed a desire for more written content in the comments – as these results are taken from the audience of a site based primarily around written content.

Closing Remarks

Again, thank you to all of you who responded – I read everything. I would now like to highlight a couple of sentences from different respondents. All of these highlighted points were echoed by multiple people.

“What I think is most important for you and anyone else, is to continue doing or trying to do what genuinely interests you the most at whatever cost and I truly believe sole act of doing so will automatically bring about the content your particular fans want to see.”

I wholeheartedly agree. I made this site for sharing with my family and it just so happened that a few other people took an interest. If I don’t enjoy what I’m doing, I won’t do it. That’s why I don’t blog regularly – I write only when I feel like it (which hasn’t been very often recently).

“More travel how-to’s, your knowledge is valuable.”

Many of you requested more advice based content. I will aim to produce more of this as I can see how helpful it can be and I go to the internet for advice when I need it. I will be asking more from you in future to let me know what it is that you want to see.

“I think it’s really important to keep the GBSW website – it speaks louder to me than a youtube post or a general site. Your identity and uniqueness come through the site. I guess it depends what audience you want – maybe vlogs will interest younger people more as I still love the written word more.”

Many comments advised against a transition away from writing as respondents indicated that they visit the site for the written word. I do not want to stop writing, but I hope to also produce new content in the form of videos. I hope these can work together and when I have more time to work on the site, hopefully there will be more of both.

“I love your journey. I like to see videos and pictures from your journey, along with the story of your journey. Not only your journey, but your life as well, even if it’s boring. I figured that you were on Australia, but you never shared anything about what happened there. How was your work life, and all.”

I understand this and others echoed these thoughts, but I have found my time in Australia to be very difficult as I have not been happy with what I have been doing – I have been working to allow myself more opportunities in the future. When I am not happy, I don’t like to share content, but I hope that this sacrifice will be worth it at the end. If it is, I aim to share more content, not just about journeys, because life itself is a journey and we are not constantly on ‘big’ adventures. In these I will share more about day-to-day occurrences.

“As a filmmaking professional, I can tell you that making a ‘long piece’ that doesn’t suck takes a lot of footage and a lot of time.”

It’s madness what people go through to make high quality video. And it is important to realise what we are and what we are not – I have no knowledge of the filmmaking industry and will try to concentrate only on shorter, Youtube videos that offer either advice or an insight into my journeys.

“I would be really sad if it somewhat drifted into a thing you do to make money. it’s kinda hard to explain, and i think its really justified that you get some money out of it… but it shouldnt be the reason you are doing this. just…. keep having fun and keep inspiring us!”

I appreciate this sentiment. I never started this site to make money and money is not a primary driving influence in my life, but it is useful. If I can make enough to support my lifestyle, I would be able to skip out on working jobs I don’t enjoy to do what I love and produce more content. Also, after living outside of the UK for the past six years, I miss having the opportunity to go and see my family on a regular basis. Flights are expensive, so if I can cover them and get to see my family more often, I will be happy. Ultimately though, yes, I will do it because I enjoy it and I will focus on making things that make me happy. I tried the whole ‘travel writing’ thing and started making some money from it, but I didn’t really enjoy it, so I stopped. That’s just not me.

“Yes, team up with that sexy naked mountain guy, the tall sexy one? Yeah, do some crazy shit with that guy, like a bike ride across Europe nude, or dress up like Superheroes and interview people on the streets for their thoughts about life, death & being scared of both. Also, could you work a little more cleavage in there somewhere?” 

I’m not really sure what this means, but I like it, so here it is. I’m going to dress up as Batman.

Videos coming soon.

By | 2015-10-28T02:55:34+00:00 October 28th, 2015|Advice|0 Comments

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