Use Video to Boost Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
Video marketing is on a sharp rise. Videos are an excellent way to command the attention of the audience and convey the marketing message in a more interesting, engaging and productive way. In fact, more leading brands of today are taking the route of using videos to attract potential customers. Video content is certainly a great value addition to a business’s social media marketing initiatives. A highly compelling kind of video content can help build the brand awareness, generate more leads and enhance the brand visibility online. If you have decided to begin your video marketing strategy, you need to understand the best practices that will make the endeavor more successful. Here are the expert tips for adding video to your social media strategy.
Brevity matters
Long videos are often disengaging. Therefore always keep the content short and impressive. One of the toughest parts of creating a marketing video is editing. Know that viewers will not stay with the content for so long and therefore compress what you wish to share with the audience in a brief and interesting way. If an important call to action comes at the end, viewers might miss it out. Therefore it is important that the key message is displayed upfront within the first few frames. Working with an experienced editor always pays off in the long run by assuring the best results.
The first few seconds are always critical and must be highly engaging. There is no clear-cut answer to say what is the ideal duration, It will ultimately depend on the objectives as well as the media. However, a powerful video that can go viral on social media sharing will not usually last for more than 45 seconds. The duration advised for presenting a product or customer testimonial is not more than 2 to 4 minutes. Interestingly, the average length of all the videos on YouTube is just 2 minutes 50 seconds. Beyond 2 minutes it is very tough to engage the audience and the big challenge is to leave no time-outs. Also, the video production process must take into account that in most cases the video will be viewed on mobiles without sound and in a vertical manner. You have not more than just 10 seconds to convince the user view all the content.
Upload the videos directly to social media pages
Some campaigners post videos to some popular video sites like YouTube and only share a link on the social media networks. However, the right approach is to directly upload the videos to your social media pages, profiles, and groups. This is because every social media platform has its own inimitable ways of optimizing the videos for ensuring a better reach and results. Therefore, sharing only the links on the business website might not promise maximum results. You can take advantage of the capabilities of video streaming application like Showbox. Videos are great tools for running brand building campaigns. In a strategic corner of the screen embed the business logo and tagline eventually linking them to your business website. This process can be more successful in driving more traffic to your website and enhance the brand visibility in a concrete way.
A social media page with a video content is 10 times more likely to engage the viewers to participate and also share the video with others. Some of the leading platforms that originally provide video format are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat. All of these platforms have their own advantages and disadvantages. For producing effective videos that are also shareable, you need to create a separate mission statement for every platform so that your efforts are focused.
SEO and call to action
While posting the videos on the social media networks, choose some keywords that sum up the business theme and come up with captivating titles that can entice the readers to take interest in the video content. Optimize the videos for the targeted SEO keywords. This is an important step to ensure the video reaches the maximum number of potential customers. Also, it is very important not to leave out tags and descriptive content to let the viewers know what the video is all about. Make it a point to ask the viewers to take some action at the end of the video. To do this, you must bank on some catchy captions and question tags. This will let the viewers click on the call to action link.
Popular video platforms
Before you start creating your video content, you must know about the most popular video platforms since each of them is uniquely different in terms of audience, best practices and also time constraints. Therefore learning about these platforms is the key to producing successful videos that will suit the platform on which you post them.
YouTube
Viewed both on desktop and mobile, this is one of the most popular video platforms today that has more than a billion users across the globe. The demography is conveniently very wide covering 18 to 80 years old. Every day, the users around the world watch hundreds of millions of videos posted on this site. One can even say YouTube is a kind of library for your video content. The maximum length of a video posted on YouTube is 11 hours.
Facebook is accessed by the users via both desktops and mobiles. In an average, there are about 4 billion video views reported on Facebook. Over three-quarters of them happen on mobile devices. Facebook is one of the most popular platforms since over 70 percent of the adults going online use this platform. Uploaded videos are limited to twenty minutes. User experience says videos directly uploaded to Facebook enjoy an enhanced visibility in the newsfeed, rather than the links posted directly to videos on third-party sites.
Enjoying compatibility with the desktop as well as mobile interfaces, Twitter has limited the duration of video content to 30 seconds. Natively posted videos are able to engage the audience 216 percent times more than those that are posted on the third party sites. This site is integrated with Periscope and over 23 percent of the adult population going online makes use of Twitter.
Viewed only on mobile devices, the maximum length of videos posted on Instagram is 60 seconds. With just 2 taps, you can share your videos on Facebook and also Twitter. In a month, the site reports over 300 million active users. Over 28 percent of adult users going online visit Instagram.
Summing up
The way customers access product and company info and their shopping habits have phenomenally changed over time. In today’s digital world, most marketing campaigns are run online than offline. While marketing can receive a definite thrust forward by routing through social media networks, adding a well-planned video content can give a big momentum to your product and brand promotion initiatives.
