With social media sites like Instagram increasingly pushing their algorithms to favour video content, and the ever-growing popularity of platforms like YouTube and TikTok, it’s important to produce regular, quality video content to promote your brand’s visibility.
86% of video marketers say video has increased traffic to their website, and 78% of video marketers say video has directly helped increase sales. So, how do you make this engaging video content and take advantage of its statistically proven value? Here’s 4 tips for producing and posting engaging video content.
Know Your Platform’s Preferred Video Lengths
As Vimeo reported, each social media platform has a preferred video length, for which view count, algorithm favouring and general engagement is optimal. Here are the stats:
Facebook: 15 secs – 3 mins
Instagram (grid): 60 secs or less
Instagram (story): 1-7 slides of 15 secs
Instagram (IGTV): 2-5 mins
LinkedIn: 30 secs or less
TikTok: 9-15 secs
Twitter: 45 secs
Youtube: 15 mins
Depending on the nature of your content, you might choose a platform based on the suitability of your content’s length, but remember you can always edit your existing content to suit the optimal lengths of each platform.
Knowing these optimal video lengths for each platform will enable you to capture and hold the attention of your target audience, wherever you post!
Know Your Platform’s Peak Times
As well as optimal video lengths, each social media platform has optimal times to post, at which engagement is reported to be at its highest. These times aren’t always when you might expect! Here’s a breakdown as reported on SproutSocial:
Facebook: Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, 9am – 1pm
Instagram: Monday – Friday, 11am
LinkedIn: Tuesday – Thursday, 9am – 12 noon
Twitter: Tuesday & Thursday, 9-11am; Wednesday, 9am – 3pm
YouTube and TikTok are more level in their engagement/time patterns, and so it’s more important to focus on putting out content regularly at similar times of the day and week. Establishing a schedule with any social platform is conducive to raising engagement; you appear consistent, organised and reliable to your viewers.
Make the most of known peak times for each social platform – posting at times of highest traffic will help in getting your content seen – but also remember to put your content regularly, according to a consistent schedule.
Open Strongly
The attention span of a person scrolling through social media has dropped to just 8 seconds. This means you need, more than ever, to grab the viewer’s attention at the immediate start of your video content.
Don’t waste time with introduction sequences or a slow fade in, especially on the shorter-form video platforms. Addressing the viewer directly can very effectively command attention. A question aimed at the audience can serve as an effective opener, an immediate call for engagement and a set-up for your product pitch.
Your whole video should aim to engage, but the first five or so seconds are imperative in capturing your audience, before they continue their scrolling.
Call to Action
Even if your content performs incredibly well, your video needs a call to action in order to… call your viewers to action. If your viewers enjoy your content but aren’t directed to your product listing or a landing page of some kind, their positive engagement won’t result in any traffic or sales for your brand, and the engagement will be essentially wasted.
Utilise each platform’s unique product linking features, include links in the video descriptions wherever possible and make sure to end your video with an encouragement to follow those links, to interact with your brand further in some way.
The point of creating your video content is to increase traffic and sales; remembering to include a call to action and further links within your video will enable this.
Summary
Being familiar with the social media platform on which you are posting videos will enable you to make the most of your content. Posting during peak times of traffic and trimming your videos to optimal lengths will push your content to be favoured by the platforms, algorithmically, and its viewers.
Make sure to capture your audience’s attention in the video immediately with a direct address or the posing of a question. Then, at the video’s closing, include a call to action, so that the attention it gets can be translated into traffic and sales increases for your brand!
For more help and advice regarding your content marketing strategy, visit Floodmaker.
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