Social media has quickly morphed from a text and image-based platform to one laden with embedded videos. Incorporate video content into your social media page, gear those videos toward your target audience and the engaging content will make a meaningful impact.
The majority of marketing professionals insist video ads provide a better return on investment than regular images. However, if you’re like most business owners, managers and marketers, you aren’t exactly sure where to begin.
Start by Developing a Strategy
It is a mistake to use your smartphone to create a video featuring your value offering and immediately upload it to your social media accounts. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you always should. Take some time to develop a social media video marketing strategy. Determine the optimal length for the video, the target audience, the product or service to highlight, and the best time to upload the content.
Your unique social media video marketing strategy is unlikely to be exactly the same as that of another business. Some businesses find providing target customers with a look behind the curtain of their production facility or office is most effective. Other businesses find featuring a specific product or service in the video optimal. Carefully select the people as well as the value offering to feature in your social media videos based on your target audience’s needs and desires and your videos will make the intended impact.
Brevity is Essential to Social Media Video Marketing Success
It is no secret that attention spans continue to shrink as our culture of instant gratification takes shape. The average person will not sit through a video greater than a minute and a half in length. Ideally, the videos featured on your social media will be between 30 seconds and a minute in length. If the videos are longer than a minute or 90 seconds, viewers will be inclined to continue scrolling through their social media feed for the next infusion of information or entertainment rather than invest nearly two minutes or more watching your video.
Focus on Communicating the Value Offering
Above all, your social media videos should highlight the specific value proposition your company provides. However, plenty of social media users has their phone or computer muted while scrolling through their feed, meaning they will view your video yet they might not hear it. Only a small percentage of social media users are willing to turn up their volume or pop in earbuds to hear the audio that accompanies video ads on social media.
Add captions to the video that present the dialogue or narration in text form and everyone who sees your video will understand the underlying message, regardless of whether their smartphone or computer volume is turned up.
Sweat the Small Stuff of Video Presentation
It is the subtleties of your videos that make a meaningful difference in terms of a potentially indelible impact and conversion. The presentation of the video is particularly important. Most people who scroll through social media do so on a smartphone, meaning the videos you make must be optimized for comparably diminutive computing devices. The video ratios and specs that are optimal for one platform might not be ideal for the next.
As an example, landscape mode is optimal for YouTube videos. However, businesses that add videos to Instagram and Facebook find the vertical video format optimal. Video trends on social media reveal about three-quarters of all video views occur on mobile devices. Be sure to play the video on smartphones, tablets, laptops, and traditional desktop computers on each respective social media platform before going live with them to guarantee they play to perfection.
Consider Promoting Your Videos
If you were to simply add a video to your Facebook page in a regular post, it might not receive many views. Alternatively, if you promote the video with social media platforms’ tools for promotions, the view count will jump quite considerably. As an example, Instagram Stories provides an opportunity to promote videos with teasers.
Video ads on social media have the lowest cost per click yet an extraordinarily high click-through rate. So don’t assume you have to strictly post regular videos to your social feed. Implement a mix of regular videos embedded in social media posts, promoted videos, and video ads on a wide variety of socials and you’ll cast a comparably wide net.
Encourage Viewers to Take Action
Plenty of viewers will view video content, understand the message and ultimately be that much more likely to recognize the company’s name, logo, and slogan in subsequent ads. However, there is also the risk that the video will make a meaningful impression without leading to conversion.
You can maximize conversions by steering viewers toward the bottom of the sales funnel with a compelling call to action at the end of the video. Encourage viewers to reach out to your business or drop in for more information and they just might heed your advice and convert from a prospect into paying customers.
Monitor Social Media Video Performance
Your social media videos might not perform nearly as well as you anticipated for a wide variety of reasons. Alternatively, there is also the potential for the videos to surpass expectations. Instead of assuming the content is performing as expected, gauge their success by monitoring performance through each individual social media platform’s analytics reporting system.
As an example, it is in your interest to read through Facebook Analytics feedback. This analytics reporting system provides an opportunity to understand how your videos perform on the platform. Facebook Analytics provides information pertaining to the number of views, the duration of views, audience retention, and more.
Embed videos onto your Instagram feed and you will have the opportunity to gauge their success with Instagram Insights. The Insights analytics reporting system empowers the platform’s users to view specific information pertaining to videos ranging from the number of Instagram users who transitioned from the video to your profile, the demographics of viewers, and additional information pertaining to followers who view your videos, and impressions of individual videos.