How to Make Videos Like Gary Vee

If you hang around on social media for very long, you’re bound to see Gary Vee pop up. Dubbed as “a master of producing highly engaging and inspirational bite-sized content on social media” by Medium, Gary Vaynerchuk is one of the most recognizable and enduring faces in the ever-changing world of social media. And there’s a lot to learn from him when it comes to creating video content.

With more than 2.5 million subscribers on YouTube (and almost 8 million followers on Instagram), Gary Vee’s formula for videos clearly works. His video content is simple but attention-grabbing. And most of his videos include a few basic components that you can use as a guidepost when making your own video content. So let’s take a crash course in how to make videos like Gary Vee (and how you can use Zubtitle to make it even easier).

How to Make Videos Like Gary Vee

1. Resize your video to square or vertical

If you look at Gary’s social videos, you’ll see that they’re always resized to a format that will give him the most visibility, optimizing even videos filmed in widescreen to a square or vertical size. Although some social platforms (like Twitter and Facebook) allow for horizontal videos, you have to consider the way people actually watch social videos. Studies have shown that less than 30% of users will turn their phones sideways to watch a video, and users who do turn their phones sideways only watch about 14% of the video.

Making this simple change typically adds those top and bottom borders we’re now used to seeing. At Zubtitle, we’ve made it easy to resize your video for social media. For a deeper look at the optimal sizing for every platform and instructions on how to resize with Zubtitle, check out this post.

2. Use a snappy headline on the top border of the video

If you look through some of Gary Vee’s social videos, you’ll see that they all have headlines. That’s because a punchy title is one of the best ways to stop someone in their quick-scrolling path on social media. Take a lesson from Gary Vee and try to source your headline from within your video. Find a short statement from your video that fits the theme or purpose of the content, and use that as your headline.

When you edit your video with Zubtitle, it’s easy to add an eye-catching headline! Just sign into your Zubtitle account (or create a new one), upload your video, navigate to the Text Editor to add your headline, and then select the Text Styles menu option to change your headline's font, color, positioning, etc. For a detailed walkthrough on adding a headline to your video with Zubtitle, click here.

3. Add captions to the bottom border of your video

Did you know that 80% of social videos are watched on mute? That’s why all of Gary Vee’s videos that you’ll find on social media always include captions. In this day and age, adding captions is no longer an option… it’s a necessity.

Oftentimes, video creators try to avoid the caption-adding step because they don’t want to take the time to transcribe all of the audio themselves or learn complicated software that assists with captioning. If that sounds like you, then try Zubtitle! With our state-of-the-art software, the speech in your video will be automatically transcribed and converted into captions in minutes. For a complete walkthrough on adding captions with Zubtitle, click here.

4. Start with a “hook”

Instead of grabbing his audience’s attention with flashy visuals, Gary Vee always starts his videos with a “hook”. According to the man himself, a hook is “the first few seconds of any video you make” and serves to intrigue your viewers enough that they’ll keep watching the video past those first few seconds. So rather than sinking a ton of time into producing a highly-polished video, try coming up with a compelling hook.

5. Focus on quantity over quality 

Now, make no mistake: quality is important. Nobody likes to watch a grainy video with poor audio, even if it contains good content... 

...but Gary has proven time and time again that you don’t need to produce extremely polished, studio-quality video content to be successful. In fact, part of his success is founded on this. Because he doesn’t put a huge emphasis on video quality or spend a ton of time carefully shooting each video, his team is able to produce more content on a faster timeline. If you want to not only produce videos that look like Gary Vee’s and crank them out as fast as he does, you’ll need to be willing to sacrifice some of the quality!

Are you ready to make videos like Gary Vee using Zubtitle?

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