5 Ways We Use Video for Internal Communications at Wistia

Who said video was only meant for marketing and advertising? Certainly not us! At Wistia, we’re huge proponents of finding any opportunity to use video to effectively convey messages — and that includes times we need to communicate internally across the company.

In this post, we’ll give you five ideas of how we’ve used internal video for new employee introductions, project overviews, important messages from leadership, and more. We hope this will inspire you to start using video for internal communications at your own company!

1. New employee introductions

Getting to know new hires can be challenging — especially in remote environments. And for new employees, being themselves among a crowd of strangers at a company they’ve just started at is even more challenging! Video can help with this, on both counts.

To give new hires a chance to introduce themselves the way they’d like to be introduced, we ask folks to record a short video to share with the entire team via Slack. New employees can share fun facts about who they are and the things they love. This gives other Wistians an opportunity to react with emojis, give folks a warm welcome, and discuss mutual interests. It also lets the new person record their video in an environment they’re comfortable in, with relatively little to no pressure.

Check out this introduction from Ramyrge, Sales Solutions Associate, where he shared with us his alma mater and his love for Boston sports. Plus, we even got to see his adorable newly-adopted cat, Millie.

Video introductions like this can help everyone put a face (and a pet!) to a name and make new employees feel welcomed and connected with more members of your team.

2. Project overview

Is your team working on something super exciting? Showing off the project you’re working on with an overview video can open the door for more feedback and ideas from folks in other departments. Seeing all the different ways everyone’s contributing to the business’s overarching goals can help the team feel more connected to the big picture, too.

One thing we like to do at Wistia is host a monthly Show & Tell, which is a company meeting where Wistians have a chance to create a pre-recorded video or give a live presentation about the projects they’re working on. This gives the entire team insight into what’s happening in other areas of the company.

Here’s an example of a Show & Tell video presentation from Wistia’s designers, Erica and Danielle, where they shared the exciting plans for our website homepage takeover to support our new original cartoon series for marketers, Gear Squad vs. Dr. Boring. This got everyone super stoked about the series launch, whether people were directly involved or not. (Psst: Gear Squad is the only series like it out there and well worth a watch!)

Encourage your team to take pride in the projects they’re working on — and come up with a creative way to plug others in as well. Video project overviews provide a glimpse into all the moving parts of your business and can help align your team around your larger goals.

3. Leadership updates

Using video to communicate messages from company leadership is another excellent use for internal video. Email correspondence, the typical go-to for this situation, can feel impersonal at times. Using video instead adds a more personal touch.

For example, our Co-Founders Chris and Brendan sent out a video to the entire team announcing that Wistia would observe Election Day as a holiday from here on out. Take a look!

Whether your co-founders are announcing a new company-wide holiday or your head of human resources needs to deliver important information, sending out your messages via video is a great way to explain things in a more human way.

4. Quick reporting insights

Like we talked about earlier with project overviews, sharing info across the company can help inspire new ideas or allow people to understand the broader picture of what’s going on at your company. Using video to disseminate brief reporting insights works well for us. Understanding data is hard on paper, but we find the information is often easier to digest when someone breaks things down in a video.

In this video, our Growth Marketing Analyst Noah shared some high-level insight on email performance. This subject line report was chock-full of useful tidbits that writers on our marketing team found helpful as they put together future email sends and A/B tests.

If you’re doing research that you think might help improve the work of others on your team (or even other teams), give people a quick rundown of your findings with a video!

5. Snappy how-tos

In a similar vein, don’t be afraid to use video to spin up a quick how-to for explaining processes or systems to a teammate. Explaining multiple-step processes via Slack or email can get confusing quickly. Instead, opt for a video to give a step-by-step how-to.

Meisha, Wistia’s Content Marketing Manager, turned to video to give a super simple walkthrough of how to download a video thumbnail within the Wistia platform. See this neat hack for yourself!

Sending over a quick how-to can eliminate confusion and give people a resource that they can rewatch whenever they want a refresher. Give this use of video a try!

Get creative with video

We hope by now you agree that video isn’t just useful for external marketing and advertising purposes. We love using video internally, and we’re coming up with new ways all of the time — these are just a handful of ways you can try as you get started.

We hope you’re feeling inspired to incorporate more video in your business’s day-to-day activities. Do you have any ideas about how video could improve your company’s communication across teams or in one-on-one instances? We’d love to hear them in the comments below!