Everyone should include video in their content strategy. This is true for personal as well as corporate social media channels. Why? Because while 63% of businesses used video as a marketing tool in 2017, that jumped to 85% this year according to Hubspot. You simply cannot ignore video as a critical marketing strategy tool.
If 4 out of every 5 of your potential customers come to your door because they watched your video, it makes sense for you to invest the time and pay attention to what and how you produce those videos.
Regardless of the path you choose, here are five best practices to adopt for your videos. These will get your videos to be more impactful, cultivate engagement and increase your followers across the social media landscape:
- Produce for mobile: more than half of the videos on the internet are now watched on a mobile device. Failing to optimise your video for mobile screens is fatal. If you simply take a horizontal video and upload it to your Instagram account, people might just skip it. Ensuring that it’s square or vertical will give your message a better chance for it to be seen and engaged with. And remember, that different platforms prefer different aspect ratios, so customise your videos to particular destinations. It’s not one size fits all unfortunately.
- Watch in silence: 85% of videos on social media are watched without sound. If your video contains dialogue or voice-over, then you need to subtitle them. Hardly anyone will stop what they’re doing, plug in their headphones to listen to your message – unless your video is extraordinarily interesting.
- Provide a hook. You have just three seconds to capture the attention of your viewers. In those three seconds they need to know what your video is about and why they should carry on watching it. And how long are they likely to stick around to watch? Research from Hubspot suggests that Instagram videos averaging 26 seconds generate the most comments.
- Have fun! People resort to Instagram and other social media channels to smile, have a laugh and connect with the subject they’re watching. You will turn them off by offering them a video that’s only about you and your marketing messages. You need to be more subtle in your approach and integrate the principles of storytelling. This requires extra work and attention to make sure that the video “talks” to your audience and be more relevant to them. But the results will be worth it.
- Track your results. The social media scene is evolving and new platforms are introduced frequently. Make sure that you remain flexible, experiment, test, iterate and measure what you publish to learn from the experience and improve your offerings over time.
There you have it. Follow the best practices above and you’ll have a better chance of success for your videos on social media.I’d love to hear your own experiences. What kind of success have you had producing content for social media? What worked for you? What didn’t? Please share your experience in a comment here, contact me via WhatsApp or simply give me a call on 33668811. I’d love to hear from you.
