If you are using media in your marketing, coaching, consulting, or other small business, you may notice that users report issues related to videos, audios, and podcasts. This can be very frustrating for your users, as well as you and your support team.
Embedded content from top sites like YouTube, Vimeo, or Soundcloud, can also present problems for your audience, especially if the files are long or the embedded player dimensions are too small. Another major irritant is when viewers can’t find what they are looking for. This is especially frustrating if there are no show notes. Your audience has no idea of what to expect and they just have to watch or listen to see if the information will be valuable.
Unless the show notes contain time stamps to tell your audience exactly where the information is, they will still have to wait it out until the end. If your audience isn’t interested enough or gets too frustrated, they will click away.
Time stamps aren’t the solve-all answer to creating a great experience for your viewers, however. Embedded players don’t make it easy to go to a timestamp, so your audience will still be hunting around for the data they want. But there is a solution — clickable time stamps.
Clickable Time Stamps
Clickable time stamps ( 01:22 ) will take your audience exactly where they want to go. Imagine that you have a very successful podcast. Creating show notes, with time stamps, will give your audience a preview of what to expect, and help them determine whether they want to listen. When they see something that interests them, they could click on the time stamp to take a quick peek and then decide to watch or listen to the whole message.
The WordPress plugin, Link Timestamp, allows you to create time stamps automatically in your WordPress posts and pages. This will add value for your audience and impress them with how organized you are. However, you can do a lot more than just create periodic time stamps with this plugin. Here are a few other types of time stamps you can add.
Speaker Time Stamps
Speaker time stamps ( 02:20 ) will take you to each person’s contributions to the discussion. This is useful for webinars, interviews, and courses with more than one contributor. It’s also great with roundtable discussions, where everyone gets to weigh in on a particular subject. Viewers and listeners, who follow particular speakers, will get great value out of this. Set it up in the show notes, with time stamps, or manually link in the plugin via the person’s name.
Paragraph Time Stamps
Show notes or transcripts can benefit from being time stamped so people can find the exact content they wish to access. Add the time stamp links using the plugin or manually. When you add them manually, you can also link to keywords and phrases. This is good for search engine optimization.
Answer Time Stamps
As you teach or coach online, you might ask questions and time stamp the answers ( 03:16 ). Your audience can go directly to the marked spot to discover whether they got it right and to learn more. This can make your content more interactive, which means more customer engagement and satisfaction. It creates a higher perceived value and shows that you care about your students’ successes.
If you aren’t already using clickable time stamps in your show notes, use the plugin to help you add them. Make sure you track click results so you can tell what works best and what topics interest viewers the most.
As you can see, the Link Timestamp plugin offers a range of options to turn your program notes from drab to fab. To make the most of your embedded media content, you may want to install it and give it a try.
