ReelSEO ► Videos ► How To Let Viewers Choose an Ending to Your Interactive Video [Creator's Tip #80]

How To Let Viewers Choose an Ending to Your Interactive Video [Creator's Tip #80]

Tim Schmoyer | 2 months ago |

Giving viewers interactivity can enhance your videos if you have a particular story you want to tell that has multiple possibilities. Allowing viewers to go from one video to the next can increase engagement, as long as the story is something worth "following down the rabbit hole." In our continuing coverage of interactive annotations, we discuss how to create a multi-video universe that is easy to navigate and hopefully will be a lot of fun for your viewers. If you're late to the party, take a look at this post about annotations that let you "skip ahead" within videos to play catch-up.

Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-Style Videos

Here's our Creator's Tip video on the subject:

Tips for creating an interactive video:

Shoot all of your videos separately.
1 video will be public. The others will be unlisted but accessible through annotations.
When uploading the main video, make sure it is private so that you can add the annotations to the other videos and the incomplete video won't show up in your subscribers' boxes.
Set up annotations on all the videos so that they connect to each other and cross-promote each other.
Go to the annotations editor, scrub through the timeline to the place where you want the annotation, customize all the different features, and read here if you need further instructions.
Go to "Link" and select the video in which you want the annotation to link. Copy the URL, and paste it in the link box. If you need the link to take the viewer to a specific time in the video, you have a time code field you can play with to get to that exact point.
When you're done, be sure the linked videos are "unlisted." (you don't want your linked videos to show up all by themselves in the subscriber boxes)
For mobile, you might want to have links in the descriptions since annotations won't show up on mobile devices.

Does it work? It all comes down to how compelling a story you want to tell. Interactive videos are just like any other video on the Internet: you must make compelling content in order for them to succeed.

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View The Full Video Transcript:

For this week’s Creator’s Tip I am going to show you guys how to do an interactive video that lets your audience choose their own ending. That’s coming up.

Hey guys my name in Tim Schmoyer and welcome to another week of Creator’s Tip where every week, we here at ReelSEO just do our best to help you guys to make online video content know how to make that stuff perform the best on the web.

One thing you see people doing here on YouTube from time to time is making these interactive videos where basically you get to the end of the video and they have 2 options you can either click here and go watch this ending or you can click here and go see a different ending.

Mystery guitar man has done several of these that actually have several options you can click and they all lead down different paths and there is like 14 different options that you can end up at. We are not going to get that complicated here today. I just want to show you guy basically how it works and how to set this up in case you ever want to do something interactive with your audience then you will know how.

So let’s get started. If you feel like this is information that you already know and you don’t think you are going to learn to much from here well you can click right here on this window to go see this video or if you feel like man Tim I have no idea how this works then you can click on this one over here. So pick one and I will see you at whichever one you choose. So go ahead. I’ll just wait right here until you do. I know a lot of you are not going to click just so you can see what I am going to say, right? Even though I am not going to say anything valuable, I am just going to talk. But you are curious so you will wait and see. But really you should just click one of the two options right now. You should. Go ahead. Nothing else is going to happen from here on out in this video. You have got to go to one of these. So if you are still watching this, click or go to your desktop computer because watching this on mobile obviously that is not going to work.

Okay, well if you are still here I am just going to end this for you. If you haven’t clicked by now you are a very indecisive person and you should probably just pick one and click.

Alright I am leaving if you don’t want to follow me don’t worry about it. But I am going to go do these videos right now.

About the Author - Tim Schmoyer

Tim Schmoyer is the host of ReelSEO's Creator's Tip. He's also the Creative Strategist at Epipheo Studios (http://www.epipheo.com/). You can see some of his personal videos on his Family Vlog Channel and his Video Creators Channel. View All Posts By - Tim Schmoyer

Follow @http://www.twitter.com/timschmoyer

What do you think? ▼

http://twitter.com/brandgineering Carl Hartman
I was producing interactive feature films 20 years ago. While hyperlinking to another video is great in theory, it really is poor structure. I wrote the guidelines that one major tv broadcaster is using as their model for the future of interactive TV. Research shows, that breaking the flow by clicking actually looses the attention of the viewer (in general) and it takes about 7-10 minutes to regain focus. Yes, 7-10 minutes. So, we developed structural models to keep the viewer engaged and participating. - Creating hyperlinks in video begs the question "I can do it, the technology exists to do it, but should I do it?"
However, this linking technique (listed above) works well if you have multiple videos that promote your site. Keep watching your video for when people tend to jump off and place a link to another video in your library that may be of more interest at that time marker. - Also, take that data as a hint. If you are doing marketing/information videos keep watching that data. If people are leaving early their is an issue wit the video. Recut the video to test for better results.
Additionally, we tend not to use talking heads or animated explainer videos for attracting business. A well produced mini-documentary or informational video may be more expensive to produce, but get us much better results. Talking heads are cheap to produce but everyone has it and it is really boring. Video is best used for a "field trip" to engage with people and your product. In the past we've produced as many as 400-500 videos in a month for one client.
justinfoster
Here is an awesome example : http://www.morrisonscellar.com/shop/taste-test?msg=&intv_id=0&catalogId=11802&mpe_id=92406&langId=-1&evtype=CpgnClick&storeId=10701&ddkey=http:ClickInfo
http://twitter.com/WrongGuys Wrong Guys
We actually developed an interactive comedy web series called The Wrong Guys for the Job, which you can find at http://youtube.com/wrongguysforthejob and honestly, I'd say it's not worth it. We have a major drop off from the main video to each ending and it also rules out mobile devices. We have to shoot 4 sections of video for each episode and 3 of them are unlisted, which means now YouTube doesn't use those view counts in your Channel's view number and we lose the ability for people to search for those videos. If we do a season two, we've not going to use the interactive format again. Just too much work and not worth it to grow an audience and to engage people.