Your company may think it’s doing all it can to garner views through social media marketing, but it could be missing a major component of the digital marketing experience. Video marketing is more poplar than ever and utilized by a plethora of companies to expand their reach and attract new customer bases and demographics. Consumers love the interaction and engagement created by great videos and love the ease of watching and listening compared to text-based marketing.
Trends move quickly and your company should be on top of things at all times, studying and researching long term tastes so that you can run your social platforms effectively and create great videos every time. One of the greatest assets for your social media platforms are videos your company can create. Videos are oftentimes the most engaging form of content on social media platforms, but you have to know how to optimize them properly. Here are some tips to help you keep customers engaged with your video marketing efforts
- Native and short videos are great for increasing SEO capabilities
- Pay attention to the platform you’re using and take ques from popular uploaders
- Use your videos as an opportunity to enhance synergy and present a unified vision of your company
Always Go With Native Video
There are many ways to link videos across your platforms, but this is usually not the best method for using video to promote your company. You’ll want to create “native” video for your platforms, which means you upload your original content to each individual channel, rather than linking to your videos across all your platforms.
YouTube is a great platform which specifically deals with video, and you’ll want to upload every video you make to your channel, but you’ll also want to carry through and upload on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Native video is so important because algorithms are designed to find unique content and favor “homegrown” videos over those which are linked from other channels. By uploading videos to each channel, you’ll reach a larger audience and expand your company’s reach significantly.
Opt For Short Videos
Consumers today live fast paced lives. Many demographics who watch the most videos don’t want to wait around for the message and purpose of the video. Rather, they want to be told right up front what the video is for and see it serve its purpose within the first few minutes. You should aim to make short, fast paced, and highly engaging videos if you want your customer base to watch them and interact with your products and service in the desired manner.
To make effective, short videos, you’ll want to develop your lead to perfection. Know what the video is about and state its intention right off the bat. Your content will also need to be fast; employ speedy and active editing to keep eyes glued to the screen and make them shorter than four minutes on average. The perfect range for your videos’ length should be between about thirty seconds and four minutes.
Differentiate Your Video Per Platform
Social media platforms are like ecosystems unto themselves; each platform caters to a different demographic and customer bases of each have expectations about the content and style of video they’ll see every day. To use video most effectively on your social media platforms, you’ll want to cater your content for each customer base and each social media site.
For example, quick editing and humor are welcome on sites like TikTok and Twitter while more formal videos will be right at home on Facebook. YouTube is more diverse than most social platforms, so any video you make should be posted there first. You can upload your videos to every single platform as stated above or prioritize some platforms for some videos; if you have the time and energy, the latter strategy will often pay off.
Create Synergy
For how effective video marketing is for many businesses, it’s quite surprising how bland many companies intentionally make their video. Your video should speak to your company’s message and brand, creating synergy with the rest of your marketing strategy and general corporate outlook. Videos should be distinctive and invoke the unique qualities of your brand; you should build an identity through your video format which creates personalization and relatability with those who are watching.
A large part of this synergy package is using your brand’s aesthetic for every video you make and every social platform you use. You should always use your brand’s logo and colors when starting up a new social media page or even just uploading your video to those pages. Unify your brand’s image by keeping careful watch over your marketing efforts.
More Production Tips
Above are the general principles each company should execute, but there are additional, more specific practices you should abide by when creating videos meant for any platform. For example, you should film your videos to be highly visual, as many platforms are configured to start auto playing the moment the previous video ends.
You should also add closed captioning to increase the SEO capabilities of your videos and ensure your disabled customers can watch and enjoy your content. Your sitemap should be well written, including your description, title, and tags, and you should always create a compelling and visually engaging thumbnail. Your thumbnail is the first image of your video most will see, so it’s imperative to create one which people will want to click on.
Final Thoughts
Social media is a great way to market your videos and ensure you brand reaches new and exciting audiences, as well as specific demographics you want to target. Just make sure to optimize your video strategies by uploading short, native videos for every platform, pay close attention to which platforms you’re using, and enhance brand synergy in each one of your videos.