Element 26: 6 Ways to Get the Most Out Of Video on Social Media

Video is changing the way businesses use social media to market to their audience. In this exclusive guest blog, our partner Element 26 outlines how you can get the most out of video to increase leads, brand recognition and ultimately, improve your bottom line.

GUEST BLOG BY ELEMENT 26

All the major social media platforms are prioritising video as a means to both engage and empower users.

Regardless of whether your customers are on Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter or on any of the emerging platforms, business owners and marketing managers should be thinking video first in all their content plans through 2020 and beyond.

Don’t believe me, take a look at the content Linkedin are publishing on their own company page and you will get a sense of what i’m talking about. As you can see, their feed is made up almost entirely of video.

So, why are the social media giants prioritising video in this way and how does the end user benefit from this opportunity?

It’s pretty simple really, video keeps users active for longer and promotes deeper more meaningful engagement. According to Wordstream, ‘Social video gets shared 1200% more than text and images combined.’

Almost all of the social media platforms can divide their users down into two profiles:

• The general user (consumer of content): those who use the various platforms to share and engage in content they’re interested in.

• The business user (publisher of content): those who use social to further their mission, amplify their voice and find new customers.

In many cases the user can fit both of the profiles listed above, but the business user is perhaps the more intriguing because they will likely understand that social media can be many things.

There are three broad camps of video in social media:

Shared, Advertising & Live.

Shared Video

Shared video is everything you post either to your company page or your personal profile. This can come in the form of short to-camera pieces or more polished pieces of branded content.

Advertising Video

Advertising video is anything you put budget behind to reach more people.

Live Video

Live video is content which you broadcast in real time. Similar to a webinar, Live Video is fantastic for real time engagement. At Element 26, we often produce live videos either from the set of our latest shoot or to provide educational insight in lieu of webinars.

6 ways you can get the most out of video across social media

Storytelling

Video is a story based medium and humans are coded to respond to stories. Try to publish video content regularly and build a narrative your prospects can connect with. Ideally they should either see themselves in your videos (ie testimonials) or they should connect to a pain point you have identified.

Post Natively

All of the social media platforms support publishing video natively. Where possible, this means you should avoid taking YouTube links and then plonking them onto your Facebook page. Videos published without using the native tools receive secondary treatment from the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn, which limits their reach.

Don’t be afraid of producing different versions of your video for each social channel. We have produced a guide to do this which you can find on this link here.

Provide Subtitles

Users will watch video content on social media at various points throughout the day and it may not always be practical to watch your content with the sound on. You would also want to make sure your video content is accessible to as many individuals as possible such as those with hearing issues.

This is where adding subtitles is important. You have two options when embedding subtitles. You can burn them into the video so that they cannot be disabled or you can produce a SRT (Subtitle Subrip File) which can be uploaded alongside the video file itself.

Maximise Screen Real Estate

Each social media channel handles video differently and presents different opportunities for how your videos should be presented. For example, on Instagram it is usually a good idea to publish your video in a square frame size as this will mean your videos take up more space in the feed. This makes them more eye-catching for your target audience.

Snippets

When producing your video for social media best practice would be to publish snippets or extracts from your video instead of giving the whole thing away for free, especially if you’re providing valuable insight.

We recommend that you host the complete video on your website and use social media to attempt to direct the user there.

Whilst it is notoriously difficult to ask users to navigate away from social media to your website, the benefit of taking this approach is that the user is then closer to your calls to action and can be exposed to various related content which is aligned with your customer journey.

Personalisation

Targeting your video content to the end user is a really powerful way to get responses. All the popular social media platforms offer direct messaging functionality and we like to use this approach to put video messages in the inbox of the recipients we would like to speak with.

Do be careful with this approach though as there are matters of etiquette that should be observed, for example “sliding into someone’s DMs” on Instagram isn’t really the done thing whereas on Linkedin this is not only possible but encouraged.

Thanks guys, I hope you found this blog post useful and you feel ready to take on video in social media throughout 2020 and beyond.

If you found this blog useful, why don’t you share it with your network and connect with me on LinkedIn.

EDGE Creative

At EDGE Creative, we have over 14 years’ worth of experience in delivering excellent social media campaigns to a variety of clients across a broad spectrum of industries. With our solid and established social and content team, we have been able to develop and refine all the finer details in our process. In order to find out more about how EDGE Creative and our partner Element 26 can help you revolutionise your marketing, get in touch by calling 0121 355 8092.

This blog is a guest blog supplied by Nathan Haines of Element 26.