Do you have long videos you want clip and share effortlessly to promote your business?

In this episode of SPEAK|pr, I talk with entrepreneur Alex Redman of ClipShare which enables anyone to make short clips of long form videos and to share them on social media. This is going to save masses of time and unlock back catalogues of content which cost too much time and money to edit.

This service is easy to use and there is a free version too, with upgrades available and pioneer discounts for booking full 12 month packages.

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Jim James is the Founder and Managing Director of the EASTWEST Public Relations Group. He recently returned to the UK after 25 years in Asia where he was an entrepreneur. Whilst running EASTWEST PR, he was the Vice-Chairman of the British Chamber of Commerce in China, he also he introduced Morgan sports cars to China, WAKE Drinks, founded the British Business Awards, The British Motorsport Festival, EO Beijing, and was the interim CEO of Lotus cars

Transcript

Jim James: 0:11

Today, we're going to talk about video, and who better to talk about video than Alex Redman, the founder of ClipShare. ClipShare is designed to tackle a fundamental problem, which is if you're generating long-form video content, how do you drive traffic to that content? You can generate revenue off the back of it, whether through ads or by monetizing actual services or products, and one of the ways you can do that is by chopping up your video into little bits of clips. That's the pertinent point or the real takeaway using ClipShare. You can put a call to action on that, and then distribute it far and wide across social media. The challenge of video editing, Alex says, is it's often labor-intensive and repetitive, and there's a certain nuance for each platform you'd be posting your content to. And so, what ClipShare does is they take the pain out of that process and try to automate as much of it as possible. For just a few hours a week, you can set up all of your content sheduled for the week, and it's all based off content you've already produced. You're simply repurposing it to get more bang for your buck out of it. You want to get as much computer programming in finding those clips in your video as possible, and that's certainly something that ClipShare is developing. But in the shorter term, where they are right now, generally, the content creator knows the piece that they've lovingly edited, no doubt for hours and hours or even days, and they will pretty much have a handle on where the good bits are, determining which bit would be best on LinkedIn, on Twitter, etc. At the moment, we'd have to select the timestamps in a video manually, but Alex says it's really not that hard. He doesn't consider himself to be ClipShare currently operates completely in the cloud, and tech-savvy, so he believes that if he can do it, then so can we. that allows them to have the scalable architecture that they I asked Alex if these clips then become trailers for the need to give users the performance they require, because obviously, video rendering is quite computing power-intensive. Though they're still pretty early on in their business life cycle, they're aimed at early adopters and innovators. They're pitching to YouTubers, podcasters, videographers, and smaller social media managers with problem statements articulated at a higher volume, where a lot of their content's already hosted on YouTube. So, the first off way that they grab content is by directly linking to your YouTube account. This makes it super seamless. It literally long-form content from which it is based, and he says the call looks exactly as your channel tiles on your own YouTube page. There is also a URL fetcher, as they call it, where you can copy and paste a URL to access that video, and then the next step is to have an actual uploader from your desktop, because they've received requests from users regarding that. They're constantly working around their product innovation roadmap depending on the user feedback, and they're trying to make it as accessible as possible for what the user base is asking for. to action is essentially written in your description box. He provided an example by saying that if you look at how people might be posting on LinkedIn, they'll typically upload a video with a short description, and then say something like, "Link in comments," and then that link would then drive those LinkedIn views to whatever clip content you want. You can pretty much put whichever link you want in that description box and drive the traffic how you see fit. In their future iterations, Alex says there will be drop-down boxes and more features to make it even more seamless, because generally, people are driving traffic to only a few repositories, such as to their Youtube channel or website. This tells them their users are focusing on two or three destinations that they want to drive the traffic to, so they're trying to channel it in those With monolithic industrie like Adobe or iMovie plus your ocial media management tools an editing tools like La er, Buffer, Hootsuite, etc., when you look at their pa kages, those are becoming l rge, unwieldy products that enerally need quite a bit of kill set and investment in p rsonal learning to actually et up to speed with some of hem. While for ClipShare, their premise is to serve the huge und rserved part of the mar et where people just don't hav time to do that. They believe hat while not everyone is an ex ert on video editing, you can st ll get 80-90% of the value b just nailing the basics, an that's what ClipShare provides. They combine the best features f a video editor and the best fe tures of a social media manage ent tool in terms of sche directions. uling, and they bring thos together in a really neat ackage that tackles that underse ved part of the market. I then asked if they offer bra ding and subtitling like oth r software, and Alex says the r current software release does support branding upload, which eans you can upload your compan logo, and they've got a ittle ClipShare watermark. One of their next releases will opefully include subtitling, bu he says it can be challenging from a technical point of view, because, for example, in th s kind of natural flowing conver ation we had, you get a lot of m's and ah's, and the subtitl s can sometimes be nonsens cal, so they need to make su e that when they release their p oduct into the market, we can asily edit out the natural language to make it more readabl. That's what they're working on at the moment. My next question was who comprises their use base, and Alex says they're getting a really good response from YouTubers, so it's mainly YouTube content creators, and Tw Alex says that if you can use LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, tch streamers, since streaming has gone through the roof in the last couple months for obvious reasons. They're getting some good response and traction on that side, and also from the smaller social media managers that are looking to find an edge. They found that smaller social media managers are much more open to tools that can really give them that edge, such as ClipShare, even if they're a relatively young company. Alex hared that he had a discussion ith a social media management irm up in Manchester recently, nd their feedback to Alex was, This is the tool we've been aiting for. This will allow us o bring social media management ack in-house," because it allow them to restore their ma gins on that piece of work, b cause it takes so much of the l bor element out of it from their side, so that's what that client found compelling. If w can add another line ite to what we're offering from ou existing resources using tool like Clipshare, then hat's really, really powerful. Instagram, or Facebook, you can use ClipShare. That's how easy it is to use. It is pitched at the same level of intuitiveness as those platforms, if not easier, according to Alex because, again, a key premise of their tool is people just do not have time to learn these products. They have to just work. And so, part of their offering is to just stay as simple as they can in terms of that user interface. While you may be intimidated at the start, such as with every new product or gadget that we begin to use, ClipShare has onboarding videos on their website to run you through from start to finish on what their process looks like, and he highly encourages us to In terms of pricing, they're currently running their Early Adopter Program, which has a 50% discount across the board for every plan. There's a free plan in perpetuity that has the ClipShare watermark. That's how they monetize it from their side try it out. and give you value for free. They also have the monthly paid plan which is 9 on their Early Adopter Program. Their annual plan is simply the exact same thing but paid upfront with a 20% discount. That's equivalent to a tank of petrol in the UK, so that's really nothing. That's what they like to say anyway. But going forward, they will continue collaborating with their users to find out what the right price point is, because the sooner they can build up a revenue from the business side, the more value they can create in terms of launching earlier software iterations. ClipShare's user interface is in English, but in terms of the They're only integrated to Youtube as of the moment, but output and files being inputted, and linking those up to your You ube channel, that can be in any language you want. In t they're currently working on integrating to other platforms rms of what files you can then create and then post and sche ule to your various platforms, t at can also be in whatever like Vimeo, and Alex says it will be there soon. They're anguage you choose to post it Alex says. In the futur, they will be doing a m re slick language rollout, but ike all these things, they're s ill strategizing as to when th right time to do it is and which market they should go after first. They will get there eventually, but certainly, o matter where you are in he world, as long as you can trying to be considerate in terms of how they do the various peak English, you can use t e product. There's no problem t ere. platform API integrations, the reason being that over the last few months, there's been a lot of major moves in the social media market, like with the big announcement of Joe Rogan's podcast moving over to Spotify, what's happening with TikTok in the US. So, as a third party provider in this space, they've got to be very targeted for which platforms they invest in hooking up to, because from their side, if they put a significant investment in terms of software development, and then they're not allowed to access a market because Donald Trump has done something, that's a key risk. That's why at the moment, it's YouTube only or a URL link, and then the desktop file uploader. That package allows them to access majority of users. And then for areas where they're getting more requests, they'll look to prioritize those accounts. If enough people request for Vimeo, they'll bump it up their product innovation roadmap, and they'll get that linked up soon as they can. In case you were wondering, the"share" function of ClipShare is their take on distribution. Once you've selected the clips you want to share, you click Schedule It, and then you've got a scheduling dashboard, and that tees up those clips. Then, you write your descriptions, you select the platforms you want to distribute them to, you select the time and the date, and then you simply post or schedule it. If you want to get in touch with Alex, you can reach him on LinkedIn, or email him at alex@clipshare.com. You can also check out their website. His contact details are also all there. In summary, ClipShare is a tool you can use to make fragments and little trailers from your long-form video and upload and distribute them. This is part of our five-stage SPEAK|pr methodology, which is Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and Know, and ClipShare falls under Amplification because it helps you not only repurpose your content but distribute it to all your social media platforms as well.