How To Create Video For Facebook From Text [With Example Videos]

Videos have taken the online world by storm & if you are not creating videos, you are missing out on a lot.

Be it Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram (to name a few), your brand needs to have video content available.

Creating videos typically takes a lot of time and requires you to at least know a little bit about editing.

It’s too difficult and time-consuming for a solo blogger to create videos for every single blog post.

• Or at least it was…

With the tool I’m sharing with you today, it may not be so difficult anymore.

I’m going to look at Content Samurai; a new, entirely web-based tool that allows you to quickly and easily create slide-based videos.

All you have to do is:

1. Paste in your blog post.
2. Choose the slide design.
3. Record a voice narration (if you want).
4. Publish your video.

• No editing tools or programs – it’s all web-based and takes very little time.

This tool is recommended for all bloggers, digital marketers & social media agencies to quickly create likable videos for your social media properties.

Bloggers can convert their blog posts into videos using Content Samurai.

Because of how easy it makes creating videos, you don’t need any special knowledge and most importantly, it’s fast.

Video marketing is an increasingly important marketing method, so I think all bloggers should try to incorporate at least some video into their content strategy.

How To Use Content Samurai & create your first Video

Content Samurai videos aren’t all-purpose.

Remember:

• They’re slide-based videos.

You’re not creating a vlog where you’re showing your face or interviewing people, so you can’t expect to use Content Samurai videos in the same way.

But Content Samurai videos definitely have some good uses:

• Because the videos are text-based, they could do amazingly well on Facebook with autoplay. You’ve probably seen the trend of using text on Facebook videos. There’s a good reason – it works great to get a lot of shares.
• Content Samurai is so quick that you can easily create a YouTube video for every post you make. Because it can be easier to rank YouTube videos in searches, this can be a great way to get access to more search traffic. I can see the potential for Content Samurai videos to drive a lot of YouTube traffic.
• Simple videos like these can do great on mobile. And given that video viewing accounts for 50% of all mobile traffic, a lot of people watch video on mobile.

I think the sky’s the limit here!

It can’t replace more well-produced videos, but it’s a great tool to have.

Getting Started with Content Samurai

When you sign in, you’re greeted by a really helpful tutorial video. It’s about 6 minutes long, but it does a really good job of taking you through every step of using Content Samurai:

After I watched the video, I knew exactly what I needed to do.

I think Content Samurai did a great job of onboarding here.

So now that I know what to do, I want to create my first video. I click “My Videos” to go to my dashboard:

Now, you can see I’ve already created some test videos. But I’ll take you through what it’s like to create a video from nothing.

So I click “Create A New Video” and see this screen:

All I need to do is give the video a name and then copy and paste my article into the text field.

• Content Samurai uses a script to automatically divide up the article into individual slides.

I’ll use my list of the best managed WordPress hosts as an example. I’ll paste in the list of features the best-managed hosts should offer.

Then I hit the “Create Slides For Your Video” button.

Content Samurai automatically divided up the article into 63 different slides.

Each slide is about one or two lines, so they’re very easy to read:

Designing Your Slides

On this screen, I can also customize the layouts for all of my slides.

Just for fun, I’ll pick the Travel Theme:

You can see it updated all my slides.

It’s also easy to add your own background image by clicking the “Image” tab.

You can add images in two ways:

1. Search Content Samurai’s database of Creative Commons images to find free, legal images to use.
2. Upload your own images.

I searched the Creative Commons images for WordPress and found an image to use as the background for my title slide:

• All I have to do is click the button to automatically make it my slide’s background.

The last tab lets me change the layout for my slides:

You can change the text location or combine multiple backgrounds into one layout.

And of course, you can always format the individual text on any of the slides if you want to emphasize anything.

• It’s a good idea to use bold on the words you want to emphasize.

This will make the video pop, especially when shared on Facebook.

Once you’re done designing the slides, you can record a voice narration if you want.(The voice narration is not mandatory, though it helps).

Recording Voice Narration

I really like how Content Samurai handles the voice narration.

You can do everything inside their website – there’s no need to download separate audio recording software. All you need to do is give Content Samurai permission to use your microphone and then hit the “Record” button.

Content Samurai breaks up the script into easy segments. So you only have to recordone small thing at a time.

This is a great way to do it:

Imagine reading a big, long script only to make a mistake near the end.

Without Content Samurai, you’d have to either:

• Record everything again.
• Manually cut out the error and start recording again from that spot.

But Content Samurai’s method means that if you ever make a mistake, you only have to re-record that one sentence.

That’s a lot easier.

As easy as recording voice narration is, because this is just a quick example video, I won’t record a voice for this one. I’ll just choose “No Voice Track” and move on to previewing my video:

Previewing and Adjusting Your Video

When you hit “Preview Your Video”, Content Samurai will automatically sync everything up and make sure the timing works:

Here you can choose royalty-free background music if you want.

You can then preview your video.

If everything looks good, you can proceed to downloading your video.

If you want to change some of the timing, though, Content Samurai lets you manually adjust things until you’re happy:

That’s it!

Now you’re ready to download your video and upload it wherever you want.