12 Things I Learned from A Buzzfeed Video Editor

We’re pretty lucky at HubSpot to learn from fascinating, knowledgeable people — many of them still in the field. Yesterday we had the opportunity to hear from Buzzfeed video editor Rachel Zarrell — and you can bet we asked her a lot of questions.

Here are the no-frills, completely excellent and totally meaningful pieces of advice I got from her talk distilled into soundbites.

Think about your content — if this is going to be a dialogue, this will be something that’s shared
When you see something you want to test, try it out — you have nothing to lose (of course brands should use good judgement on this one)
“Don’t write a story if you can’t think of a headline”. If you can’t figure out a way to frame it, it’s probably not that interesting
An effectve test as to whether a video will be good — ask yourself if I see this, will I want to share it with 5 people
Think of a twist, on your content something we’ve never heard before
Most people think hashtags are antiquated (author’s note: myself included in this one), unless it’s around a specific event
If you have something good happening, you can always do more of it — if it starts to have diminishing returns you can dial it back a little bit
Provide people content that is valuable to their life/enhances their lives
“News never exhausts itself, news is a constant”
It used to be “some” things are distributed, now everything is distributed
A good Youtube video takes about 1 week to full potential, a good Facebook post takes 2 days
Solve for the audience you have, not the audience you’re trying to get — making your current audience happy solves for growth