Effective use of video for Social Media Marketing

Social Media Thursday, 01 June, 2017

If you aren’t using video in your social media marketing yet, you should be. A third of all online activity is spent watching videos. And with 90% of users saying that they found product videos helpful when making buying decisions, you want to make sure your hat is in the social video ring. Follow a few tips to to help increase engagement, conversion rates, and brand promotion with just a few quick changes, improving both social video and social media marketing success. In this post, you’ll discover ways to use video to improve your social media marketing.

Length

When it comes to the ideal video duration, a lot depends on the type of video you want to share with your audience. Testing different video lengths will give you an idea of what works best for you.

Autoplay

Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram offer Autoplay as a feature. When users scroll through their news feeds, your video automatically plays as it passes over their screen. This encourages users to watch your video, because it’s already playing.

Live

Facebook Live video lets businesses and users broadcast videos to their audiences in real time from their smartphones. You can see the number of users watching and users can comment on the video in real time. You can also address comments directly as the video plays. One study found that viewers spend 3x more time watching live videos than videos that aren’t broadcasting in real time.

Attention 

It’s vital to grab your audience’s attention within the first few seconds of your video. You need to capture viewers’ interest within the first 10 seconds or they’ll stop watching and move on to something else. This forces you to be concise and get right to the point. Vine’s success with six-second videos proves it’s possible to catch a user’s interest in 10 seconds or less.

Teach

How-to videos are immensely popular across all social media platforms. Whether you’re teaching viewers how to make pancakes or demonstrating clever life hacks, these videos aren’t just for Pinterest. How-to videos should teach users about concepts, tricks, or lessons that are relatively straightforward and simple. How-to videos are a great opportunity to promote your product without being too heavy-handed

Emotion

Emotions can drive people to take action, and videos that appeal to users’ emotions can resonate and stick with the people who watch them. Appealing to viewers’ emotions also increases the likelihood that people will respond to your well-placed call to action. Showing uplifting or inspirational content is a great way to leave viewers with a positive association with your brand.

Optimize

Just about everything your business posts on social media should be optimized for search engines. Add key phrases to help users find your content on all platforms, and add relevant hashtags on Twitter and Instagram to boost search results.

Action

What is the goal of your video? Goals require some sort of user action, whether that’s getting people to visit your site, share your video, or purchase a product. While viewers should get the idea of what you want them to do just from the video, you should always have a clearly stated call to action.

Answers

Answering viewer questions offers instant value to them. After all, you’re providing content and information you know they want. This is a great way to engage with users, and establish your business’s expert credibility. It’s best to keep these types of videos short. Offer brief answers to a few questions.

Native

As social media videos boom in popularity, social platforms are increasingly offering native video uploads. Native videos are prioritized in Facebook’s algorithm, and seem to perform better on most other platforms than non-native videos. Y

Fine-tune

You can use video editing tools to improve the quality of your video or make it more interesting. Because the competition for video views is stiff, taking advantage of video editing tools can give you an advantage.

Trends

If there’s a relevant trending topic or hashtag, adding a video with your voice to the conversation can result in big view numbers and engagement. One of the main goals in social media marketing is to deliver relevant content to your audience.

Ads

You can share video ads with targeted audiences, including relevant users whom you haven’t already connected with on social media. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all have ad objectives that focus on increasing video views and engagement.

Headline

The video headline may be the first thing followers see. Ideally, write headlines that are specific while still making viewers curious enough to watch your videos.

Logo

Most businesses want to promote their brand every chance they get, and social videos are no exception. However, when users share a video from your page or profile, some of their followers may not realize the video is from you.You’ll want to add your logo to your video to provide instant brand recognition and make it easier for users to associate the content with you.

Focus

Focus on one message or story per video. This helps you keep it simple, and make the video brief enough to perform well on social media. There should be one point to every video, and one point only. You don’t want to clutter your video with too many stories, points of view, or messages. 

Sound

Video sound quality needs to be high for the viewers who do listen to the video with sound. Everyone has experienced watching videos where the sound fades in and out, or there’s too much distracting background noise. This takes away from the credibility of your video and your brand. Bad sound quality distracts from your message and usually results in users clicking away.

Engagement

Tracking video performance across platforms is essential, whether the posted videos are paid campaigns or regular posts. Facebook’s Insights has a screen devoted to video analytics, showing you the number of video views your page has had, and the number of 10-second views your video had. You can also see the reach, views, and average view completion rate for individual videos.

If you aren’t using video in your social media marketing yet, you should be. A third of all online activity is spent watching videos.