By Jules White
The Last Hurdle
USING video on social media sites has become an increasingly popular way of marketing for businesses of all sizes. With online video editing services and the power of smartphone cameras, there’s plenty of scope for producing engaging and imaginative content that appeals to your contacts. You can upload engaging video snippets to social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter as well as to your Youtube channel. Enabling you to share your content with your connections and followers in just a matter of seconds.
According to Facebook, nearly three quarters of us will be accessing video on our mobile devices by the end of the decade, however, getting your video content right is not as easy as it first seems.
Here are some quick tips for using video on social media:
Keep It Short: if you want video that works across a wide range of social media platforms, then the best approach is to keep it as short as possible. Of course, this is going to depend on what you are trying to say but lengthy videos are not necessarily the most impactful.
Grab Attention: as with written content, you need to grab the viewer’s attention from the moment your video opens. Mobile access to video has made viewers a lot more impatient. We’re likely to click on the back button or carrying on scrolling down the page if our personal whims are not entertained within the first few seconds. Start your video with the most attractive elements and get your branding in as early as possible.
Keep It Simple: when you’re creating video content it can be tempting to throw several ideas or concepts in there, especially if you are investing in professional production and want to get more bang for your bucks. Try to avoid this and keep your short video focused on one aspect, whether that’s promoting a particular product or sharing a singular piece of advice, keep your content micro.
Sound Is Important: there’s a key principle here that many businesses don’t realise – many people will view your video with the sound off. That can happen on social sites like Facebook where the sound doesn’t engage until someone clicks on the video even though it plays automatically. You need to take this into account and that might mean adding in captions or subtitles to get your message across.
Stand Out From the Crowd: there is a lot of video on social media so there’s plenty of stiff competition. If you want to stand out from the crowd you need to make your content visually appealing. You also might want to play around with different crops or 3D framing effects to catch that initial attention.
Video Options: getting together the content for your video can be challenging, especially for smaller businesses. Be open to what you use. You can repurpose old images into slideshows and create stop motion content with the range of video production tools that are available. You can even create video through PowerPoint!
It Pays to Plan: for those with larger budgets and more scope, make sure you plan out your content. Know what you want to say, how you want it to be said and script it – but please don’t stand in front of the camera and read from a script. You are looking to create a short snippet, ideally 20 seconds long, you can rehearse and remember 20 seconds of content.
Be Creative: finally, there are plenty of options to be creative, even if you only have a mobile phone camera as your production tool. Facebook has a list of their top 10 favourite apps for getting more creative and there are plenty of other programmes available that can add value to your online content. Don’t be afraid to play around with these and see how they work for your business.