David Perdew of NAMS (Novice to Advanced Marketing System) recently shared these statistics on using video for marketing:
1) Social video generates 1,200% more shares than text
and images combined. – Brightcove
2) Video on a landing page can increase conversions by 80%
or more. – Visually
3) 90% of video views from Twitter happen on a mobile device. – Twitter
4) 40% of consumers state that video increases the chance they’ll
purchase a product on their mobile device. – Adobe
Let’s dig into these numbers…
Whether your social media platform of choice is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, or another social media platform, video will grow your audience and your business. We live in a visual world and moving images are the most powerful way to engage audiences today. The hottest trend in social marketing media is video. The stats featured above tell you why.
What’s the power of video beyond the numbers? Think about a movie trailer. Movie trailers have been around since 1913, but you know that today, if you arrive early to see a movie, you’re going to see a bunch of them for upcoming films. In fact, if you’re on time, you’re still going to see at least a few movie trailers. The motion picture industry knows the power of video and they use it mightily to sell tickets.
In 2013, the first movie trailer was seen on Instagram. It was for a biopic starring Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs and it was 15 seconds long. As you can see by the numbers above, short videos are very powerful on social media. Anywhere from 6 seconds to 2 minutes is the right length for many videos, but you can stretch it to four minutes or more in some situations.
According to Wistia, length does matter. 59 seconds or less is ideal since 50% more people will watch a video to the end if it is a minute or less. The longer the video, the more viewer drop-off there is.
Whether your use of video is to demonstrate how to do something, to show off your skills (which may be related to your demonstration of doing something), promote an event, launch a new product, or many other uses that are only limited by your imagination, video can work for you to produce massive sign-ups, sales, and other business goals.
Here are my 12 tips for using video in your social media marketing:
1. It always starts with your headline. Unless your video is on autoplay, you’ve got to get people to click to start your video. Your headline needs to stop them in their tracks and get them to hit play.
2. Use autoplay. I know; people get annoyed at autoplay, some even hate it, but Jenny Schauer, associate media director at digital marketing agency Digitas says, “While autoplay in general is still not the most premium or impactful video ad format, if done well it can amplify a video campaign at a scale that user-initiated video could never compete with.”
3. Your headline is crucial, but particularly with autoplay, the first 3-7 seconds is when you either win them or lost them. Since as much as 85% of videos on Facebook are seen with the sound turned off, may sure that your images sell.
4. Provide valuable and relevant content delivered in a professional way. The key is always content. If your content is excellent and it’s presented in an engaging way, you are way ahead of most marketers.
5. Always include a call to action at the end of your videos. You don’t want to leave your viewers with nothing to do – give them an idea about what action you would like them to take and some of them will take the action that you recommend.
6. Engage with your viewers. Just as it’s best for you to engage with your blog readers, if you’re doing a blog, engaging with your viewers is just as important. It’s really pretty simple: social media is about relationships and engagement builds relationships; relationships build businesses.
7. Help people find your videos through good SEO. If people can’t find your video, what’s the sense of doing it, right? Did you know that YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine? It is, and that illustrates the power of video. Jon Rognerud lists the 10 Commandments to rank high in YouTube searches here.
8. Put your videos on your website. Video is great on YouTube and other social media platforms, but the more time that people spend on your website, the better chance there will be that they are connecting with your and your business.
9. Publish your videos on all the social media platforms that you are using. If you’re on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others, share your stuff on all of them to get the maximum exposure for your business.
10. Because of viewer drop-offs after 59 seconds (see above), the rule is less is more. Don’t try to say too much, keep it short and simple for best results.
11. Pay attention to metrics and analytics. Some of the metrics that you can look at are view count, play rate, engagement, and site metrics. I will do a full post on video metrics and analytics, but let’s focus on two that are extremely important – engagement and play rate. Engagement for video measures how long your viewers watch your video. Play rate measures how many visitors on a page click on the video on that page. I’ll give you more on these two and others in a future post.
12. Pay for play does work. Paid content does get more views, so if you are willing to pay for views, get your targeting as specific as possible to keep your costs as low as possible.
Those are my 12 best tips, and I’ll add one more – make sure your video is optimized for mobile. What would you add? What questions do you have? As always, I welcome your comments and questions, your likes and shares.
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