Tips For Using Video in Social Media

The internet can be a hard place to tame. Face it: we live in a fast-paced society. It is hard to get people to read or watch anything unless they are already looking for that information. And video is no exception.

Understanding the online community

You have to remember that you are on the internet. If your goal was simply to collect ‘likes’, then you could post a cat picture/video and be guaranteed to have over 200 likes in about 15 minutes. But as a business, you want to share content that is relevant to your brand and interesting and useful to your customers. So a cat picture isn’t going to cut it (unless you’re an Animal Shelter or Grumpy Cat). You’ve got to spend some time planning your video content and crafting a strategy for sharing.

Grabbing people’s attention

There is a benefit of sharing your video on social media outlets. Need proof? According to socialnomics.net, when Ford Explorer launched its ad on Facebook recently, it was more effective than a Super Bowl ad.

So, the reward is there, but how do you get people to view your video? First, keep in mind that the description you put with a video makes a big difference in getting views. Make the idea of viewing that video appealing in just a few short sentences.

Most importantly, those first 5-10 seconds of the video has to grab the viewers’ attention. If the first 20-30 seconds is an intro or is filmed poorly, then people are not even going to finish the video. Your job is to make sure that you’re getting your message across quickly and efficiently.

Quality of the video

The video quality does not need to equal that of a cinematic trailer. If a video of a cat getting its head stuck in a box filmed on a shaky camcorder can do well, so can yours. Sure, you want your video to look nice and to some extent, that is a big part of why people will watch your video. But you do not want just a nice HD video with boring, poorly planned content. You want both.

And again, your video should be short and to-the-point. A study performed in December 2011 indicated that the average video view length is up from 5 minutes to 5.8 minutes from December 2010, showing an increasing willingness to watch longer form content, according to Techcrunch. But still, long videos have the potential to turn people away. So when in doubt, make that video shorter, not longer.

What other tips do you have to share about video content on social media? Let’s discuss in the comments.