In today's world, social media videos are a crucial tool for marketers. Whether you're connecting with your audience on YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok, creating effective video content can increase engagement, build brand awareness, and drive conversions.
This guide explores strategies and social media video tips to help you harness the power of social media video marketing. We'll also take a look at a few social media video best practices for giving your audiovisual elements a helpful boost, as well as optimization tactics when posting videos that add to your overall social media strategy.
What is a Social Media Video?
Social media videos are videos published to your social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. Each platform offers different types, specifications, and requirements for its video formats but above all, they provide a quick, engaging, and compelling way to reach your existing and potential customers.
While short-form social media video appeases the attention spans of online users, social channel videos have since grown to encompass long-form videos and even live streams. Within each of these types of video, we often see sub-categories of videos, including:
- Explainer videos
- FAQs
- Product demos
And more.
What sets social media videos apart is brevity, accessibility, and optimization. Unlike a Netflix show or documentary, videos for social media are optimized for web and mobile users, formatted to fit screens regardless of orientation or size, are generally shorter, and consider the needs of viewers with impairments.
They also drive engagement by encouraging your customers to perform a certain task through a clear call-to-action. For example, signing up for your email list or newsletter, clicking through to your website, or simply interacting with your video.
Why Use Social Media Videos for Marketing Purposes?
Not only does a social video enable you to connect with previously untapped audience segments, but it also harnesses the creative and engaging power of video by connecting with your audience members no matter if they’re on a laptop or mobile device.
Below, we cover a few more reasons why you should consider using social media videos as part of your next marketing campaign.
Increases engagement: As your viewers continues to turn to social media videos as a means to educate themselves and interact with your brand, your social channel and videos are a great opportunity to boost engagement. In fact, social video, including video ads, are one of the most effective ways to captivate new audiences.
Taking your viewers behind the scenes of your company, sharing your brand story, evoke emotion through effective storytelling, all while educating your audience, makes social media videos a fantastic way to boost engagement.
Appeals to mobile users: A recent Statista study found 77% of surveyors use a smartphone or tablet to browse online social videos. When incorporating social media videos into your overall marketing strategy, you’re creating a balanced approach to tapping into not only your laptop audiences, but your mobile users, too. Consider the importance of optimizing your social media videos for mobile users across your social network, too.
How to Create Effective Video Content
If you’re creating social media videos that engage, impact, and entertain, you’ve come to the right place.
Regardless of if you’re a seasoned professional incorporating videos as part of your social media marketing efforts or you’re just getting started in your video content creation process, let’s look at the following steps and social media video tips.
1. Identify your target audience
As the adage goes, “when you appeal to all, you appeal to none.” Start by determining who you want to reach with your social media videos - this is your main audience, and is the “who” behind your video and your marketing strategy.
Your ideal viewer will have specific demographics that not only include their age, profession, family life, and friends circle, but also their buying habits, their consumer problems, their pain points, and their hobbies. The more accurately you paint this picture, the better idea you’re able to form of your ideal audience member. This is called your buyer persona - the ideal customer you want to consume your videos based on their lifestyle and demographics.
Piecing together your buyer persona doesn’t have to be hard work. Conducting pre-research on your existing customers and clients can provide valuable insights throughout your buyer persona development. Factor current trends into your research too, as this may shape not only your social media videos, including your decision to produce long-form explainer videos versus short-form teaser videos, but who is viewing them, too.
2. Decide your budget
Video content can be created on a wide range of budgets and costs. It's important to strike a balance between budget and quality, getting the most bang for your buck without exceeding the original cost you had in mind.
Decide how much you're willing to spend and discuss this with the various solutions or partners you're thinking of using to get the job done. What are you comfortable paying? What are non-negotiables in your video and what are you willing to pay to include them?
Because the range of costs involved with video, it's crucial to make this decision as soon as possible. For a more in depth guide on what influences costs and what to expect, check out our full guide to video editing costs.
3. Choose the right social media platforms
Not every social media platform is created equal. That’s why it’s important to select the most effective social media channel for your videos. In fact, choosing the right platform to distribute your video is essential to the success of connecting with your target audience and your video ads.
Consider which platform your viewers are most likely to frequent and incorporate this into your research for your buyer persona. Researching your competitors to determine which platform their target audience is most active on and why, can help you apply similar tactics to your own approach when you create content.
Keep in mind the importance of asking yourself why your target audience is using that particular platform. Are they looking for short form videos or a specific answer to a specific question? For instance your Facebook live stream video content, Instagram stories, and long-form YouTube videos, all offer different formats, features, and creative components.
4. Craft compelling video concepts or scripts
Knowing what to say, how to say it, and when to say it throughout your social media platform, can mean the difference between converting a new customer and losing them to your competitors.
Having a blueprint in place so you know exactly what will take place in each scene of your social media video, not only ensures your messaging is relevant throughout your video, but that you have a guideline for the sequence of events, dialogues, and visuals throughout your video.
Part of creating videos is about crafting crisp, effective, and compelling scripts that accompany your video concepts, speak to your target audience’s problems, and offer solutions.
When your script is targeted and oriented towards tailored calls-to-action, it evokes emotion in your customer by connecting them to your product or services.
Types of Social Media Video Content
We’ve already touched on a few video types throughout this article. We’ll mostly look at the high level categories of video content commonly found across different social media platforms and note a few subcategories within each of these.
It’s likely you’re familiar with the four core types already and these can be utilized in a number of effective ways to make your video content shine while providing value-based messaging. Let’s learn more about Stories, short-form videos, long-form videos, and live streams.
Stories
First introduced by Snapchat, Stories were made popular once added to Instagram. Instagram stories take advantage of short attention spans and “blink and you miss it” mentality, by disappearing after 24 hours once posted. This fleeting format of social media videos have proven effective in connecting with potential viewers. In fact, 62% of users say they are more interested in a brand after seeing it in an Instagram Story.
These are ideal for video clips where you want to share behind the scenes shots with your viewers, without overwhelming them with regularly scheduled content across their feeds.
Stories can be used as a type of live video, where you’re engaging in off-the-cuff conversations with viewers in real-time, or serve as a teaser trailer to longer videos that are scripted and produced.
Short-form videos
Shorter videos can be equal to, or slightly longer in length than Stories and are usually permanently housed on your main social media platforms' profile. However, short-form video can serve a similar purpose to Stories, as they can tease parts of educational videos or explainer videos with strong calls-to-action that leave viewers wanting more.
Common short-form videos include Tiktok videos featuring user generated content that take audiences behind the scenes, event videos that highlight key aspects and of conferences, trade-shows or store pop-ups, and brief product demos that showcase the elements, functions, and features of your product or services. Check out our complete guide to short form video content for a deeper dive on this format.
Long-form videos
Long-form videos are lengthier than Stories and short-form videos and can be stretched out to explore complex topics through educational content, promote documentary-style videos, provide commentary on industry trends and news, or showcase interviews with thought leaders and industry professionals.
YouTube still reigns supreme with long-form content, and is actually considered the most widely used video marketing platform. Many influencers upload hours-long videos highlighting a wide spectrum of topics. From crocheting to hair styling, gaming to true crime, the possibilities are endless for long form videos, so long as it's high-quality, engaging, and provides solutions to your viewers’ pain points.
Live streams
Our last social media category is live streaming, a form of live videos where you reach your audience in real time. “Going live” invites viewers to join their favorite influencer, celebrity, or business owner’s stream to watch, actively comment, and engage.
Live streaming is available across a number of platforms, such as Facebook Live, and can be used to promote your brand or services. It’s an authentic, connective experience and is ideal for collecting insight right from the mouths of your viewers by asking questions and receiving responses.
Audiovisual Best Practices
Part of producing engaging yet compelling social media videos is the visual and audio tactics. To create videos that inspire, inform, and entertain, while driving your viewers to take action, is about ensuring your video’s music, visual appeal, presentation quality, and accessibility is of high quality.
Below are a few social media video tips and best practices to get you started with enhancing your video’s audio-visual elements.
Enhance video aesthetics
Interactive elements like high quality visuals, graphics, and an enticing video title, grab your audience’s attention.
By incorporating graphic effects and utilizing visual storytelling throughout your social media videos, you create fun ways to attract viewers. What’s more, making entertaining videos with added fun visuals, leaves a lasting impression on your audience, showcases your brand voice (yes - even through images!) and increases the likelihood of their engagement with your brand and services.
Implement optimal setup
Lights, camera, action! Creating engaging videos that leave a lasting impression on your audience with clear calls-to-action, not only extends to the content of your video, but the production of your videos, too.
Elements like proper lighting (both artificial and natural light) and camera equipment add to your video’s visual appeal while mics and tripods lend a hand to producing a clear audio experience.
Not only will these tactics help your video perform better across different platforms (a crucial component of a successful social video strategy), but it also makes post production of your videos that much easier thanks to your optimal set-up and accompanying equipment.
Add music and subtitles
Tap into the emotional state of your audience members by incorporating audio when creating video content. Music can shape the tone, mood, and messaging as part of your video marketing strategy and appeal to your audience’s interests.
It’s equally important to consider viewers with hearing concerns, or audience members who might be watching your videos without sound, too. By adding subtitles to accompany your visuals, you create an engaging video for all audiences. While many video marketing platforms will auto-generate subtitles and captions, adding your own ensures accuracy.
Video Optimization Strategies
To produce engaging social media videos, it takes more than snappy audio, enticing video aesthetics, and the right video format. It’s also about optimizing your video to appeal to search engines, mobile devices, and your audiences’ primary viewing hours. Let’s look at a few social media video tips for optimization across your social platform videos.
Optimize videos for search
Meet your viewers no matter wherever they sit within the marketing funnel by optimizing your social channels’ videos for search engine optimization. When viewers are actively scouring the internet for answers to their questions, it’s imperative your video is easy to consume and easily searchable. This is achievable by incorporating relevant keywords, optimized tags, meta-data, and descriptions in your video.
Currently, YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine, as consumers across the globe scroll their feeds for quick tutorials, DIY, explanation videos, and more. Incorporate optimization tactics into your current and future videos so your audience can easily find and and consume your content, while increasing viewer engagement in the process.
Optimize videos for mobile
You’ve likely found yourself at some point mindlessly scrolling through your social video feed on your phone. It can be relaxing to shut off your brain for a short while and let the algorithm do the work for you, as video after video automatically plays.
This is a relatable (and even relaxing) experience for many social media users who use their mobile devices to watch engaging videos, making it more important than ever your video content strategy accounts for mobile optimization.
When creating content, keep in mind the screen ratio for mobile video experiences, ensure captions and subtitles are fitted to smaller device screens, and are optimized alongside desktop videos for search engines.
Analyze video insights
By measuring your video’s performance, whether it's live videos or native videos, you shed light on if you're choosing the right video for your social platform, as well as if you’re creating a compelling story that’s enough to hook your viewers in.
It’s also helpful to determine the effectiveness of your video topic, your videos’ calls-to-action, and whether your viewer performed a task upon viewing your actual video.
The video metrics you’ll want to measure all depend on the initial goals of your social media video and the desired action you encourage your viewers to take. This can include video views, engagement, device types, video trends, and audience demographics.
Maximize your Social Media Video Impact
Understanding your audience, choosing the right platform, and optimizing both content and visuals, can elevate your social media video marketing efforts. With the social media video tips captured within this guide, you're well underway to maximizing the impact of your social media videos.
