A growing trend across the Palmetto State is the use of well-crafted and detailed video segments to further initiatives as part of municipalities’ greater communications strategy.
Video is proving to be an effective tool to reach constituents in a unique way that provides high-quality imagery with newsroom quality storytelling. The cities of Greer and Florence, as well as the Town of Mount Pleasant, are among those municipalities leading this trend.
In the Upstate, the City of Greer produces a vast amount of video content, according to Director of Communications & Strategic Initiatives Michelle Willis. A former television news journalist in Greenville, Willis took over as the communications manager for Greer in 2025. She now leads a team of four, including a videographer drone pilot, a communications specialist and a communications and public information coordinator.
“I think that what all of us former journalists want to do in communications roles is tell stories and provide more transparency,” she said. “We realize that we can form our own little, miniature newsrooms basically within our departments and tell great stories about the people in our community and the good work that our city is doing to serve our community.”
One such way to reach the community is through a video series initiated before Willis’ time called “GreerView,” hosted by Anna-Elyse Lewis. The videos, along with other video content such as council meetings and “Tall Tuesdays,” another video series, live on the city’s YouTube channel and are shared in various outlets and across social media platforms.
“’GreerView’ is a weekly segment [that we put] out on Mondays, and it’s kind of an amalgamation of what happened the week before and what’s coming up this week,” Willis said. “We have experimented with a lot of different ways of doing it and we are continuing to tweak it,” she said.
In addition to the video content produced, Willis explained that she is seeing the need for more still photography.
“A really great photo of an actual human doing human things is very effective at stopping people from scrolling when they are in their beds, or eating lunch, so we are experimenting with all of it,” she said.
Across the state in the City of Florence, a variety of video content appears on its official YouTube channel, which according to Marketing, Communications & Municipal Services Director Amanda Pope, is to “educate the public and promote city services.”
This includes council meetings and other board meetings, as well as two video series, “Florence in Focus” and “In the Limelight.” The “Florence in Focus” series which covers happenings around the city has gained traction within the community since its inception last year. With the arrival of Maggie Moya-Mendez, communications and public relations specialist for Florence, who now hosts the show, its popularity continues to grow.
“Maggie’s been here two years now, and probably in that year prior, we were recognizing that a new trend in social media is video — people wanting snippets of information [and] quick information,” said Pope. “We came up with a theme and she took it and ran with it and made ‘Florence in Focus’ come to life for us, and I think it has been well received in the community. It is a great way for us to share what is happening in the community with upcoming events, or even just educational-type [information].”
Moya-Mendez said she still uses graphics and still photography, but she has noticed greater engagement with video.
“With social media, it is very easy for people to get into mindless scrolling, so a lot of times we see this with our graphics, but with video content, we are able to capture the eye a little bit more,” she said. “For best practices, we keep [the videos] under three minutes; keep them fast paced — it can be as simple as grabbing your phone and colleague.”
New city purchases to improve video quality have included microphones and a drone, which Moya-Mendez became licensed to fly last year.
“I’d say the drone has really enhanced our video by capturing people’s attention of giving them a different viewpoint then what they are used to seeing on the day-to-day, whenever they are scrolling,” she said.
In the Town of Mount Pleasant, the town-produced video series “Mount Pleasant Minute” bridges the gap between town hall and its residents,
“It is a short, digestible video series that highlights updates on upcoming projects, community initiatives, [and] presents town projects in a way that is approachable and conversational,” Communications Manager Eric LaFontaine said.
LaFontaine, who started with the town in 2020, launched the series two years ago. He now manages a team of three, of which two positions were created when he took the helm. One of those additions is Multimedia Production Coordinator Noah Krueger.
“He is our film guru [and does] all things film and editing. He is incredible — we are really lucky to have him,” LaFontaine said.
The department also features Social Media & Marketing Manager John Greenberg and Community Engagement Strategist Autumn Klein, now the host of “Mount Pleasant Minute,” who previously worked in television news.
“[Autumn’s] position was created as a way to tell the good stories about what we are doing at the town,” LaFontaine said. “A lot of what we were doing previously was reactive, and we needed to start telling some proactive stories so that the community knows about all the great stuff that we are working on.”
He highlighted that prioritizing authenticity is another best practice for video creation.
“We find that people respond best to more genuine staff voices and community faces than overly scripted messaging. We always look at our analytics and try to find other ways to improve … [We] try to refine our future videos by making small tweaks, like adding subtitles or refining our thumbnails – things that seem kind of small, but they tend to make a bigger impact and a difference in what we are seeing in engagement,” he said.
Posted across social media platforms, including YouTube, and used in a variety of ways, the video content generated by the Mount Pleasant Communications team is also distributed in both internal and external newsletters.
“We are seeing huge engagement. Previously, we have always had a large following, but we did not see a whole lot of engagement or likes or shares on our posts,” LaFontaine said. “Now that we’re using video more, we’re seeing people commenting, engaging, sharing and talking about their experiences with the projects that we’re talking about.”
The trend for short, informational video can serve as a great enhancement to any strategic communications program for a municipality, whether it be to share previous news, to promote upcoming events, or to highlight city personnel and other community happenings.