You’re looking at crafting your videos the wrong way. Clients hand me scripts pretty regularly for their videos with one glaring problem right from the first words.
They start their video with “Hi my name is…”.
This seems important, especially to those who haven’t written a lot of scripts, but there are several problems with it. The first problem I see with this is that it opens with information that is not about the viewer. Most of us, for better or worse, care about ourselves first and foremost. When we see a video we want to know what the value is to us in watching.
The second problem I see is that this information is not interesting or novel in any way. There may be occasional times where this rule doesn’t apply, for instance if your name is truly bizarre and attention getting, or if you’re some kind of minor celebrity that people have heard of but might not recognize immediately. In most cases though introducing yourself right off the bat is a pretty great way to get people to skip your video.
The last important issue that I’ll bring up (although I could write a novel on this topic) is that no one cares what your name is at the start of the video. They may not care by the end either, but they 100% do not care early on. I realize this sounds like the first problem, but there is a significant reason that I bring this up as its own issue. If you think about all the videos you’ve seen and all the products/services you’ve bought have you ever cared about the owner of the company? I’m guessing you have when they were a friend or family member. You may have cared if they were a celebrity or other high profile person. But if it’s just some guy that started a service business do you really care?
I’m a business owner, I like to think people care about me, but I know better. They want to know that I will make good videos for them. They want to know I’ll be honest and make them look good. They don’t care what my name is, where I’m from or why I started the business…at least not in first sentence of my video. They will care later, but just assume that they don’t care right away.
I hope this doesn’t feel mean, it’s not. I want it to be helpful and I hope it will empower you to write better scripts for your videos, social posts and presentations.
