Video Outlet Options Abound
One day you’re scrolling your Facebook feed, and there’s the usual: birthday reminders, “on this day” memories, updates from friends sharing vacation pics and back-to-school photos.
Amid it all a video popped up on the feed, began auto-playing, and it caught your attention. At that point it dawned on you – why isn’t your company posting a video that grabs your target audience’s attention?
Yes, you’re busy all day – your customers and clients need your attention, and you can’t fathom where to even begin when it comes to putting together a video. But each day that you’re not leveraging video as a marketing tool is a day where your competitors are getting that much further ahead of you.
The time to act is now, and the great thing about video is you can make it as ubiquitous as you want. There was a time when producing a commercial meant cutting it down to exactly 30 seconds, and then buying costly spots on television at times of day that fit your budget.
It harkens back to a legendary moment on The Simpsons, when Homer bought a snowplow and self-produced a commercial he could only afford to run in the middle of the night. He kept the family up all night waiting for it to run, leading to this exchange:
Lisa: “Dad, who’s watching TV at 3:17 a.m.?”
Homer: “Alcoholics, the unemployable, angry loners.”
Your video doesn’t need to be relegated to the middle of the night on channel 432. And even better, you don’t necessarily have to keep it to 30 seconds. That may be the optimal length for a television commercial, but when you’re putting videos on social platforms each one will have its own best practices.
To begin with, each social media feed has different optimal running times for their video, and this breakdown from Hubspot is a great look at each one:
Beyond each outlet’s recommended running times, there are other best practices for maximizing your video work:
Facebook: It’s 2019 — so you probably don’t need us to tell you that your company’s Facebook presence is a vital component to your marketing. In that vein, video is becoming an increasingly important element of your success on the platform. The key is grabbing attention quickly to get people to stop scrolling long enough to give it a chance. And by that we mean literally a matter of seconds – there’s a reason a lot of pre-roll ads on videos last only five seconds before the “Skip Ad” button shows up.
From there, you’ll also want subtitles. When people are at work, or at school, or just have their phone out in public, they don’t want an autoplay video blaring from their phone. As such, Digiday has reported that 85% of Facebook videos are watched with the sound off.
Beyond the subtitles, the statistics presented by the website Small Business Trends surrounding Facebook videos are staggering:
- Video posts on Facebook have 135% greater organic reach than photo posts
- 44% of Facebook users watch at least five videos per day on the site, with six percent saying they watch “too many to count”
- 71% of Facebook users say that sponsored videos are relevant to them
Instagram/Twitter: Facebook is a vital tool regardless of your industry, but if your company is B2C then the other big social networks can be valuable tools as well. Instagram videos and stories have taken social media by storm, and the introduction of IGTV is a topic we’ll be covering soon.
Meanwhile, Twitter is still a hot spot for viral content and a platform you need to be leveraging. Your videos need to be optimized differently for these platforms to maximize their impact, but it’s an investment worth making.
LinkedIn: You might not think of LinkedIn as a hub for video, but it’s getting there. As your company goes about its marketing efforts, you need to think of LinkedIn as more than a recruiting site. Its use as a social network continues to grow and it’s in your best interests to keep it top of mind.
With respect to video, LinkedIn has ramped up their adoption and the usability of video among the site’s user, efforts you can read about both here and here.
Because of the nature of LinkedIn, its user base is older than Facebook and Instagram, but the upside is that it gives you a clearer path to decision-makers in other businesses.
YouTube: Video on social media is great, but you need to have a YouTube presence as well. You can link directly to YouTube in outgoing communications in a way that you can’t with other platforms. YouTube’s interface also makes it easy to embed your video on your website in a way that isn’t possible with Facebook. While Facebook gets you likes and engagement on that platform, YouTube allows your video to be easily sent to others in a wide variety of ways. Forbes has a breakdown of the way you should differ your approach on the two platforms, including this piece of wisdom:
“When people visit YouTube, I’ve found that they are going on the website with the specific intent to watch videos (well duh, right?). What this really means is that your viewer is already primed for a video watching experience. They likely already have time to sit and watch. They are also probably looking at the proper screen for quality video viewing and have access to decent audio via speakers or headphones.”
It’s vital to make sure YouTube is part of your strategy, as the site is quickly supplanting television as the go-to medium for advertisers, particularly those going after the coveted millennial generation.
Vimeo: YouTube is the most popular video sharing website, but it’s far from the only one. While Vimeo has a smaller user base than YouTube, there are several advantages. For one: the Vimeo user base tends to be more professional than YouTube, and thus comments and interactions are usually easier to monitor and manage than YouTube’s wild west environment.
Further, Vimeo offers a major technical advantage over YouTube: if you notice a mistake in your video, or something you need to edit, you can make the change and replace the video without losing stats like views. With YouTube, once you pull a video down from the site you lose the views and you go back to starting from zero.
Vimeo is also ad-free and has options to embed videos into web pages just like YouTube does. It’s worth strongly considering Vimeo for hosting your company’s video.
Wistia: YouTube is ubiquitous, and you might have heard of Vimeo, but Wistia is another tool in the video marketing toolbox. It provides software and video hosting for business owners, but on a more advanced system than YouTube and Vimeo.
They boast an advanced video player with customization options, SEO, and plenty of analytics beyond views and likes (heat maps!).
Newsletters & Websites: When we talked above about easily embedding YouTube videos, your newsletters and websites are perfect examples of places to do so. You can have your videos easily accessible to your customers without them having to leave your site or newsletter. If you can bring video directly to peoples’ screens with little work needed on their end, you’re bound to see a much higher number of views.
With newsletters, it’s reported that using video within an email marketing campaign leads to a 200%-300% increase in click-through rates, and Constant Contact offers the ability to see how many people viewed a video within the email,
As a business owner you might read this and wonder how you even get started on video marketing – and that’s where Flowerpot comes in. Our video experts will meet with you to determine what your goals are for your video marketing, and then we work with you to create high-quality content that best suits your business and the platforms you’re looking to use.
Flowerpot is a team of expert storytellers who can bring the story of your brand and your company to life. We work with companies ranging from corporate coaches to lifestyle websites, and we tailor the videos to suit the particular needs of each client. Below are just a few examples of what we have done for our clients:
You can visit our Vimeo page to see more samples of our work, and contact us today to get started.