Video accounted for 50% of all mobile traffic, and for 69% of all sales and marketing campaigns as of late 2015. Facebook alone has seen video overtake its platform, with video accounting for 75,000 shared content pieces in 2015. Your audience is using social media every day, so your business needs to be leveraging its social media channels in order to reach and grow your audience. But with so many social media channels available, you might find yourself trying to decide which one will suit your video marketing needs best.
While there are many things to consider when distributing video content via social media, the most important thing to consider (and often the most overlooked thing), is the way that each platform displays a video technically to its audience. The way that each of the major social media platforms handles video, and the way that that channel enables its audience to view and interact with said video, can provide several opportunities for optimizing each video.
For example, look at how Facebook presents videos to its users. Though it lacks search functionality, Facebook’s autoplay feature practically guarantees that the first five seconds of each video are played for users browsing their newsfeed. These five seconds, although without audio, are imperative for grabbing the attention of your audience. If your video’s first five seconds feature text, a black screen, or a talking head with no subtitles, than you may want to consider modifying it for your audience on Facebook. Rearrange your content, recreate the video without an opening fade up from black, and lose that corporate logo opener. Add some motion graphic text overlays and subtitles to any spoken audio; this will provide a casual viewer who is breezing through their news feed visual context about your video content. By re-editing the opening 20 seconds of your videos distributed through Facebook you will have a greater chance of grabbing attention and increasing the size of your audience.
Twitter is a different animal altogether. Content is limited, and therefore users are generally browsing with a shorter attention span. Twitter is a sea of digital noise comprised of links, news stories, pictures and hashtags, but video content has also earned its place on the platform. While sponsored/partnered twitter accounts are allowed videos of up to 10 minutes in length, the majority of user videos shared on Twitter are limited to 30 seconds of video. As Twitter users are generally on the hunt for quick and simple content, the latter is, by far, the more effective way to reach an audience. With this in mind, you can do one of two things with your existing video content; you can re-edit the original content to compress it into a 30-second segment, or you can create and post an original “teaser” or a taste of your content and provide a link to the full variation of that content elsewhere. This not only better qualifies your leads, but also gives you the chance to drive traffic to your web site.
Instagram has also added a video feature recently (June 2013) which allows users to add 15-second videos to their photo streams, with access to the same visual filters that are regularly used on traditional photo uploads. With Instagram already nested into facebook via app, it’s no surprise that a short video post every now and again will also play well with facebook. Instagram is a very artistic and personal platform, and its users do not like to be sold to; but this does not mean that your brand can’t have a video presence there! What it does mean, however, is that your content should not be “salesy”. If your video is product-heavy or technical, consider editing it to make it user-focused and personal. You have fifteen highly visual seconds; use them to connect with your audience and show them how they might use your product or service, rather than putting your product or your service front and center. This builds trust and brand awareness with potential clients.
Now, let’s turn our gaze to LinkedIn, the most business-to-business oriented of all the social networks. LinkedIn only began using video recently, but given the more ‘qualified’ nature of the platform, video is also used in a more qualified manner. Users do not seek memes or attention-grabbing articles on LinkedIn; instead, they seek professional development and networking opportunities. Video helps users achieve these goals by serving as an accelerant or an “add-on” to a written article, profile or company page. Videos do autoplay, like Facebook, when posted within the Impulse feed, and users must actively click on the button in order to hear sound with the video. LinkedIn sees video as a valuable asset for quick, non-verbal communication between user A and user B. As such, video content shared by your company, or hosted on your company’s page, adds credibility to your organization and communicates your values to your potential clients or employees. Optimizing video for LinkedIn is similar to Facebook wherein the first 10 – 20 seconds of your video need to communicate a message without sound. LinkedIn also provides the ability to tag your video content with up to 3 content categories.
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Social video is an unstoppable giant, when used properly; so don’t fall short at “one and done”…make sure that your video is optimized for every platform, and start expanding your audience today. Questions? Contact us at 410.853.7892 or email us via info@myrender.com to get us involved.
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