After my last post, author Carrie Pearson invited me to take a tour of her website to see what I thought about her school visit pages. A brave soul!

The first thing I saw — and clicked on – was a video posted prominently at the top of her school visit page. In the next 2:16 minutes, I enjoyed images backed with pleasant music. From that brief encounter, here’s what I learned about Carrie:

1) She’s fun
2) She’s published science-related children’s books
3) She’s willing to travel
4) She’s presented programs for kids in Pre-K to 7
5) She’s done Family Night events
6) She conducts writing workshops
7) She has great testimonials from adults and kids
8) She is easy to reach (website address is posted at the end)

Carrie created this “video calling card” via Animoto, using a template. I’ve also seen them done through Vimeo as well.

While I think the sweet spot for this kind of promotion (including book trailers) is between 1 minute and 1.5 minutes, I think this works really well to introduce Carrie to potential hosts. Personally, I liked that it wasn’t a hard-sell, but I might have added a tag line that expressed what action I want the viewer to take:  “Invite Carrie to your school! www.CarriePearsonBooks.com”

According to a recent article by Teymour Shahabion Digital Book World, as of August 2014, Facebook has been delivering more video views than YouTube—by about one billion views. A video posted on Facebook is far likelier to be seen than is any other type of post. So, when you do make that school visit video, be sure to post it to Facebook as well as YouTube.

Do you have a link to a school visit promotional video you’d like to share here? Send it to me and I’ll post it for others to enjoy.