Videos on Facebook have arrived with a bang and according to the social media giant they’re here to stay.
In November 2015, Facebook announced an average of 8 billion views daily from its 500 million users – it had doubled since April. Thousands of people are consuming video on Facebook and you might be missing out on new customers and sales. It’s also a great opportunity for your brand or business to connect with existing customers where and when it matters.
Video ads on Facebook can be targeted to a specific audience, down to interests such as ‘arts and culture’. Your video appears in your target market’s news feed and plays automatically without audio. Users visit Facebook up to 14 times daily, providing your brand, product or service with multiple exposure in views.
Before your business creates a Facebook video ad, here are some tips to make your Facebook videos a success.
Tailor your video content
Facebook provides two fantastic data-driven tools to help your videos reach the right people, a 90-second tutorial on how to create a video ad and Facebook insights tool which gives you in-depth information on your audience like whether more men than women visit your page, age and their interests.
Segment your audience
Decide which audiences you’ll target so you can make unique videos for each audience/segment tailored to their interests. Content that interests your target market will lead to higher engagement, more views and sharing across platforms gaining you more followers and likely exposure to your audience’s friends and family networks.
While it’s tempting to make an ad instead of catering to your audience’s interests, they won’t work as well if you don’t show the audience what’s in it for them and users will simply scroll past or stop watching, or unfollow you.
Visual storytelling in videos
Choosing the right visuals for your video is important because it allows you to tell a story and show emotions as the user is scrolling through their news feed and needs to make sense without audio (Facebook videos currently play without audio unless user clicks on it).
Visuals make videos more effective because 90% of information the brain receives is visual and they connect to the viewer’s emotions leading to more engagement and clicks.
Videos that provide practical tips, recipe or skill demonstrations, how-tos, funny insights or news to your audience get high engagement. According to Yours Socially, short behind-the-scenes videos, longer testimonials, educational and funny videos perform extremely well on Facebook.
The video should provide content that engages the audience and relates to your brand. For example, if you sell whipped cream, make a visual storytelling video showing how to create a beautiful dessert using your products then drive them to a site full of recipes.
The video ad should be eye-catching preferably with text so that the user stops and clicks on it. Bright, attractive colours and text in video ads is a good way to catch your audience’s attention.
What length of video works best?
The short answer is: as much time it takes you to provide interesting content to your audience. Ideally, you should keep them short about 30 seconds but don’t be afraid to go longer if needed. If the video delivers content that interests your audience and is engaging, length is not a big issue.
Using sound in videos
Presently, Facebook plays videos based on the user’s interests. Use striking, visual images to tell a story then enhance it with audio for when they click play. Add subtitles or text to your entire Facebook video called open captions which are embedded into the video file. It helps to catch their attention straight away.
The best thing about open captions is they’re always on and if the viewer happens to be in a noisy environment, they can watch the whole video without turning on the sound. It’s not easy to lose the viewer.
Call to action in a Facebook video ad
The call to action is one of the most important elements of a Facebook video ad. If a CTA is not included, the viewer will simply watch the video and click away. Your business could lose the opportunity to develop a further relationship with the viewer if there’s no follow-up action included.
Have a soft rather than a hard sell. It could be something simple as ‘Subscribe to email’ to receive notifications of new videos.
As more businesses realise the value of using video to promote their products or services and are getting online, it’s important to create out-of-the-box videos to capture your customer’s attention and get them to engage with your brand.
Here are some fantastic examples of video ads on Facebook:
Elise Strachan creator of My Cupcake Addiction posted a video on making an M&M cake in August. It has been viewed over 26M times, liked by over 11K people and received over 600 comments. She also includes a CTA to get viewers to purchase her new cookbook. https://www.facebook.com/cupcakeaddiction/videos/10154410215098555/
This video ad from Rue La La had strong visuals and used their products to promote festive shopping picks for December 2015. https://www.facebook.com/RueLaLa/videos/10153433327728957/
This Nike video used the words ‘Snow Day’ to get people exercising in winter and received over 201k likes and 8.7M views. https://www.facebook.com/nike/videos/10153408844503445/
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