5 Simple Tips to Optimize Your Video Marketing Content for Social Media

By Lizzy Coplin and David Wittlin

The old adage ‘every company is a media company’ rings true. The powerful technologies of the Internet and the evolving evolution of media, has transformed nearly every business with how it publishes information. Big or small, every business now has advanced tools at its disposal to reach customers.

And one of the biggest tools is video. It’s a driving force for modern businesses to connect with audiences across social media channels, and an effective way to communicate big ideas in short digestible pieces that engages with your user base.

But we don’t have to look much further than facebook, LinkedIn or instagram to see the exponential growth of video. By 2021, video will represent 82% of all internet traffic. That’s no small feat. With these projections it’s crucial to develop a video content and marketing strategy to capitalize on the power of video.

So what’s next? Here’s a short guide to help optimize your video, get impact, and start a conversation with your users.

Keep it short.

Keeping your content short and sweet is the way to go. While medium and long form content has received resurgence with a lean in audience, short form still rules. In fact, “56% of all videos published in the last year are less than 2 minutes long” on social media platforms.

And according to Wistia.com, there’s a significant drop-off in engagement between 2 and 3 minutes. After 2 minutes, exponential decay kicks in and viewership drops by almost 30% while all those additional seconds keep ticking up. So, if your video is coming in at 2 minutes and 30 seconds, look to cut out that additional 30 to keep engagement high throughout.

If that’s not enough time, look to simplify your message or break up your content into multiple pieces. It’s better to have multiple videos that share your ideas than a single video that’s too long and doesn’t generate engagement.

Hit them early.

Researchers in Canada found that humans have an average attention span of 8 seconds; that’s less than a goldfish! Viewers need to be engaged within the first few seconds or they’ll move on to the next piece of content.

Overall Viewer Engagement research by Visible Measures

The quicker and better attention grabbing the video is, the more likely the viewer will stay with the content. But that’s only part of user attention. “If you have not fully engaged your audience after the first 30 seconds, you’ve likely lost 33% of viewers; and after one minute, 45% of viewers have stopped watching.”

And taken another way- making sure the most important information hits the audience early ensures your message gets heard.

Cater to the social feed.

You have your perfect video and now you want to share it across the socialverse- facebook, snapchat, instagram, twitter, youtube. But each platform has its own benefits and even target demographic. From maximum video length to preferred player format, there’s a lot to keep in mind while developing your strategy.

And while the plan might be to create a standard landscape video, did you know the square format outperforms it with “30-35% higher video views and an 80-100% increase in engagement.” That’s huge.

We love landscape video here at Rocketship. There’s a cinematic quality to it that’s missing from a square video. But if you plan ahead for multiple formats you can create content that works across various platforms – square, portrait, or landscape – with very little extra work and expense. And from a marketing perspective, the ROI for the proper format is an important consideration.

Embrace auto-mute.

It’s now common on social platforms to manually click volume to play sound. Maybe you forgot headphones on the crowded train, browsing facebook at work, or even trying not to wake your partner from their slumber while you should be sleeping; the auto-mute feature does come in handy. Do I really need my neighbor hearing me relive hockey highlights while at work? Probably not, but it does present an extra challenge to get eyes on content.

One way around the auto-mute feature is to include text at the top of your video or even a very quick title graphic. You’ll immediately inform your audience what they’re about to watch from the best chocolate cake recipes to the latest app testimonial.

Text motion graphics are another avenue to combat auto-mute. Sure it works better with music, but the message can still be delivered even without it. They’re great for building a story without relying only on shot video. And of course, subtitles and captions are always a smart idea.

Planning. Planning. Planning.

The underlining take away from all of this: Planning. Once you commit to a video it becomes more difficult to change it later without greater cost and effort. Start planning the video marking strategy during your brainstorming sessions and you’ll be ahead of the curve, giving you an edge on your user engagement.

There’s much more that goes into the creation of video but these tips will give you a head start in your process. Just remember, you already have great ideas, you just need the proper plan on how to best use your content.

Have any other thoughts and tips to include? Share them below.