If you are using social media to market your company, which in this day in age is almost a necessity, it makes sense to tailor your training videos to make the most of the strengths and weaknesses of each platform. Here are a few things you should know when utilising video for social media:
YouTube
YouTube is the biggest video sharing site online by far, with an estimated 300 hours of video content being uploaded every minute. There are “channels” on YouTube with over 50 million subscribers, and viewing audiences TV networks would kill for.
If you want to make the most of this, you need to know a few tips that will increase your viewership and hold their attention. The first thing to understand is that if you haven’t grabbed the attention of the viewer within the first few seconds, they won’t bother watching the rest. So you need to start off with the hook of your video right away.
This doesn’t just mean the first few seconds of your video, this means everything involved in the video hosting. From thumbnails, video description, metadata and Autoplay playlists all have to be managed and tailored to fit your business. If the viewer likes the first video they see from you, and you haven’t set up a playlist to AutoPlay another video you created, you have just lost a viewer. So make the most of Youtube’s features to make sure your video is getting the views it deserves.
Facebook has emerged from a simple site for university students to a global media behemoth. Facebook has slowly introduced more video into news feeds, but this however means that you have about one second to hook in a viewer before they scroll on to something else.
Firstly you must consider that Facebook videos, by default play on mute, the user has to actively unmute it. So videos that have bold titles, subtitles will perform better on Facebook. As with YouTube, you need to select an appropriate custom thumbnail that will give the viewer a fair idea of why the video is about.
So the key adjustments to make to your video for the Facebook audience is to make sure you can still get your point across without sound, make captions available and keep it short.
Twitter itself can play videos natively, but often it relies on links to YouTube or other full-time video hosting services. As with Facebook and Instagram, Twitter also plays videos silently unless viewers choose to unmute. Large, easily readable text is again a key to getting attention, as is having an option to have a video in a vertical orientation, as the majority of twitter users will be on a smartphone. Twitter videos can be up to 140 seconds long, although as is the case with all social media videos, the shorter the better. Twitter is used most commonly for its up to the second posting, so make sure your presence is fresh and don’t recycle the same videos over and over, compile enough content to edit a few versions of your video, this will give you more traction without becoming stale.
Instagram began its life as a photo sharing app for smartphones with some vintage style filters but has now spread into a complete social platform itself. As with Facebook, Instagram videos will Autoplay as the user scrolls down their feed, giving you just a few seconds to capture their attention. Instagram originally had a 15 second limit to it’s video length, but this was recently extended to 60 seconds. However, we would recommend staying closer to the original 15 second limit as shorter is usually better at keeping eyeballs on your video, especially with instagram as most people won’t stick around for long. Instagram is primarily a smartphone app, so in your videos make sure that text is large enough to read on a small screen and close-ups will work better if you’re video features a presenter or actors.
Social Media Customisation
When utilising video in your social media presence, it is really worth making several versions with the same message, but uniquely tailored to each social media platform’s strengths and weaknesses. You also have to be aware of the weaknesses of each . Each have their own target demographics as well, so the content might need to be tweaked slightly for each different video.
If you are looking to improve your social media presence, get in touch today.
