I’m running another “Making Business Videos with your smartphone” course this week, and one of the things I cover is how to edit videos on your phone. Someone asked me the other day “Why do you teach editing using your phone? It’s much better editing on the computer.”

Well, yes editing on the computer is more flexible but here are 3 very good reasons why learning to edit on your phone is a useful skill to have:

1. It’s quicker than editing on the computer

If you’re using your phone to record your video, then the footage is already on there, so you don’t have to spend time uploading it to the computer – you can edit it straightaway.

2. Phone video editing apps are usually easier to use than computer-based ones

Computer-based video editing software can be complicated as it offers you so many options,  most of which you’ll never need if you’re just recording video blogs, customer testimonials, etc.  Unless you want to take up video editing as a career, the simpler functionality of phone apps like iMovie mean they’re quicker to learn and harder to get lost in. And they still allow you to chop out the bits of footage you don’t want, and add voiceovers, music, stills and text to produce a professional looking end result.

3. You can edit while you’re away from the office

This is the strongest reason of all.  Why?  Because if you’ve just recorded a video about a topic that’s in the news, getting your video out to the world as quickly as possible can make the difference between people paying attention to what you say and getting lost in lots of other pieces of content on the same topic days later.

Here’s an example that convinced me that phone editing was the way to go for simple videos.

A couple of years ago my husband and son took part in a Guinness World Record Taekwon Do attempt in Coventry.  It was a cold wet Sunday morning and I couldn’t be bothered to lug my professional camera gear across town, especially as I’d got my daughter to look after too.  So I decided it would be a great opportunity to demo to my iPhone video students what was possible using just your phone.  I recorded a few clips from the session and edited them together on the phone in the car afterwards.  As soon as I got a good wifi signal, I uploaded the finished video to YouTube, shared it with friends on Facebook and forgot about it.

Later that evening, I was checking my YouTube stats ready to update my video course notes, and noticed I’d got 500+ views on the video and the number of views were still increasing.  When the detailed stats were available a couple of days later, I discovered why – Guinness had found my video on YouTube and embedded into their blog post on the new World Record.  Because of that I got lots of views in the first 24 hours of my video being available.  And that’s one of the factors that contributes to how well your video ranks when you search on Google and YouTube.

Now, even two years later, if you search for “taekwondo coventry” on YouTube, my video pops up first, and it’s high on the rankings if you do a Google search too.  If I’d waited till I got home to edit it on my computer it would have been too late for Guinness to use it and I would have missed all those views.

So did it bring me any new business? The honest answer is no because it wasn’t on my professional YouTube channel and I hadn’t put any branding on it – I thought the only people that would watch it would be friends and family and a few local Taekwon Do folks!

But it’s a great example of how being first is going to get you more exposure than if you delay to do it “properly” on the computer. So if, for example, you’re a financial adviser and you want to comment on something in the Budget, or you’re an HR professional and you want to talk about the impact of a new court ruling for your clients or potential clients, get a quick video uploaded to YouTube on the same day and you’ll be more likely to do well in the search rankings for a long time afterwards.

I’d love to know about your experiences of editing videos on your phone so do leave a comment below.  And if you want to learn how to create, edit and upload videos using just your iPhone or Android phone, my latest smartphone video course information is here.