Does your social media strategy include video, or do you think your social media strategy should include video? You’re in the right place.
Social media platforms have soon a huge boom in video content in recent years, with Facebook now reporting over 8 billion video views per day. Video usage is growing fast and isn’t showing any sign of slowing down anytime soon. An average adult in today’s world spends one hour and 16 minutes browsing through their newsfeed every day watching video on smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops and it takes just a split second for each person to decide whether or not your video is worth their time in those 76 minutes.
No idea where to start with this new social media strategy? Here are some of our best tips for creating a powerful video campaign via social media.
Decide on your target audience
Each social media platform has its recommended guidelines for defining an audience for maximum reach, and you can be forgiven for thinking that this is just for money-making purposes, but social targeting is something that can work really well if you know what you’re doing. This is about tailoring your video, it’s content and the ad campaign you put behind it to exactly the people you want it to reach.
You need to encourage people to stop and watch your video and not carry on scrolling through, so you will need to choose your target audience carefully and selectively; the more relevant your audience is to your brand and video, the more people will watch your content.
Set a budget
And stick to it. It can be easy to get swept away in creative enthusiasm when beginning a new marketing campaign, but it’s important to not going over budget, or you’ll be eating into any profits that your campaign makes!
If you find yourself in need of saving some money for your ad, you’ll need to cut back on some costs somewhere along the line. If a well-known song isn’t something you need for your video, but you only need some background noise, royalty free music from sites such as https://www.melodyloops.com/music-for/ads/, are a great place to get the noise you need for a fraction of the cost.
Know your goals
Before you begin your video marketing campaign, you will need to know the direction that you want to be moving in and what you want to achieve. Are you looking to improve your brand awareness or to drive people to your site? Of course, getting eyes on your video is one of the most important goals of this exercise, but don’t stop there. If one of your aims is to drive people to your site, you’ll want to create a call to action at the end of your video, but if you want to raise awareness of your brand, you’ll want to focus on the creativity of your video content.
Be mobile-friendly
Video adverts are available across all platforms and all devices, and with mobile traffic driving over 65% of video views on Facebook, you’d be a fool not to ensure your ad is visible on a mobile device. Mobile has become the core of Facebook’s business, with it growing 82% year-on-year and accounting for 80% of all of the network’s revenue. It is a booming part of the industry, which is only set to increase.
Sell without sound
As most people are secretly scrolling through their social channels when they should be at work, it’s no wonder that 85% of videos on Facebook are watched without the sound out. Be sure to put some attention-grabbing sound on at the beginning of your video, as well as subtitles if words are essential to your product and content. Don’t be afraid to get creative with your content in order to cater for the sneaky video-watcher in the corner of the office.
Monitor your progress and adjust
Make sure you test your video and test it again. Be sure to go over every different option you’ve had for your video, including text overlays, to see which works best for the final product. It’s also important to narrow down your target audience based on your key objectives – you can break down your audiences by location, demographics, interests and different behaviors. Once your ad is live, remember that you can run multiple campaigns of the same video so that each one specifically targets a different group. You will also be able to tweak your ads to target different people if something isn’t quite working for you.