Various marketing strategies help businesses reach their targeted audience in today’s generation, but only one method can consistently bring positive results from day one called social media marketing. But why social media?

Social media has contributed a vital purpose in how people in almost all walks of life communicate and become crucial in how work gets done from businesses to government. Many people will utilize social media to stay in touch and socialize with friends and family, while some others use it to interact with communities and groups. These businesses use social media as a system to market and advertise their products. Business to consumer (B2C) websites incorporate social components, such as comment fields for their users, helping them to immediately respond to positive and negative feedback, attend to customer queries, and manage, regain, or rebuild customer confidence.

The Rise Of Social Media Videos

Without a doubt, social media video has become an integral component of a successful, long-term content marketing strategy. Video content, after all, is what operating the Internet at present to a great extent. Almost everywhere, you’ll notice that more and more brands use video to connect to their targeted audience and develop relationships with them, which for sure, just wouldn’t have been attainable with traditional content.

What causes video even more critical for content marketers is its skyrocketing growth on social media. Video shares and views over social platforms have only risen over the years. Your business size doesn’t matter or what niche you are in; if you haven’t considered social media video seriously, it’s the perfect moment that you should do. Because if you’re not accommodating social media video marketing to improve your business, you will definitely leave money on the board.

Here are important statistics if you are uninformed about the impact of social media video’s fast growth. It would help if you took a serious review at the numbers, which exceptionally proceed to progress day in and day out.

  • Facebook has witnessed a massive 258% increase in branded video views from 2016 to 2017.
  • On Twitter, there are 93% of videos are viewed from mobile devices.
  • Views for video content from brads on YouTube have almost duplicated over the last 3 years.
  • When contrasted to a photo tweet, a video tweet has a 6x higher possibility of being retweeted.
  • Facebook Live videos receive 10x more comments than a regular or standard video.

However, social media marketing is not just postings and regular updates. It has guidelines to follow, especially on the application of the right sizes and orientations. Utilizing correctly sized videos in your social media posts can benefit to unique and attention-grabbing content.

Why do Social Media Videos Need To Be Properly Sized?

Think about a customer scrolling through their Facebook feed. They come across a video that your company posted about your product, and suddenly, they stop watching. You may be wondering why? The top and bottom parts of your video are cropped out; therefore, your video isn’t quite an attraction to watch. So the customer, confused and discouraged, moves on to other content.

This situation is a nightmare condition for video marketers. When presented correctly, social media videos are a powerful marketing agent to gain clients. 77% of buyers reported that a video convinced them to buy a product or service. With social media, 70% of people said they shared a brand’s video through these platforms.

Seize this engagement by designing an optimal viewing experience for your social media viewers with the correct aspects. You’ll see below the essential factors you need to consider before posting your video content:

  • The File size: This is the minimum and maximum file size of a video that can be uploaded.
  • Video orientation: The most often used aspect ratios are square, landscape, vertical on all social media platforms
  • Aspect ratio: The right ratio of width to height of your video.
  • Resolution: The number of pixels shown either horizontally and vertically.
  • Video length: The maximum duration or span of the video allowed to be posted.

Following the latest social media video specs, you’ll be ready to create videos that are engaging and watchable on all platforms and mobile devices.

Practical Tips For A Successful Social Media Video Marketing

Tip #1: Engaging The Right Video Type for Your Brand

The strategies you do should be in accordance with your overall brand approach. Building video content should fit into your multiple marketing channels’ messaging, advantages, and intentions.

Determining the appropriate varieties of videos will better create a structure for your content schedule. Some of the most popular video types comprise:

  • Tutorials: This video type informs your audience how to do something with your product or anticipate what you are offering. They’re educational and straightforward, delivering value to both prospective customers and retain customers.
  • Personalized Videos: This influential tool for closing sales incorporates customized content that involves a user by name.
  • Q&A: Live Q&A sessions provide prospects and customers an opportunity to ask questions and dismiss any limiting ideas in a live, personal perspective.
  • User-Generated Content (UGC): These videos are designed by users and shared by your brand to develop social proof and engagement.
  • Testimonials: These videos obtain reviews and feedback from happy customers, serving as a form of social proof, and promoting new sales.
  • Behind-the-scenes: These are videos showing your audience a behind-the-scenes peek at your company by introducing touring your office or presenting a production line.

When choosing the types of videos, think about what makes your overarching brand goals the most insight. You may decide to use specific videos for your main content calendar while creating one-offs in other categories as required.

Tip #2: Tell An Interesting Story

Many have always been opposed to hard-selling, and it doesn’t matter what product is being marketed; people commonly don’t want to get blasted with cold calls or see irrelevant television ads. Thus, hard selling is not as powerful as it used to be compared to decades ago.

Ideas are changing; people are changing. Now, it’s all about who can show the best stories that are engaging to their audience. Storytelling has twisted into a new and powerful sales pitch that is receiving real-world results. And videos are helping us tell more satisfying stories.

To assuredly make your audience consider your video content and take action that you desire them to understand, you need to produce subjective mood swings that carry out their passions and get them to click. Here are three necessary measures that you should consider to achieve storytelling through social media video:

  • Include the right kind of characters to build a bond or a connection with the spectator.
  • Put an edge that supports you seize and direct the attention of the viewer to your video.
  • Have the resolution to help viewers learn what you want to communicate with the story.

You add significance to your social media video content if you converge on storytelling the right way. It also presents a fitting message that not only addresses them transparency but also hits their emotional chord. The purpose is to design social media video content that showcases your product or service positively.

Tip #3: Make Your First 10 Seconds Count

When you design your video’s content, put in mind that your audience’s particular division may drop watching almost instantly in the first few seconds. That is why you require to write a script that has the desire to watch till the end. The main objective is to do whatever you can to grasp your viewer’s attention within your video’s first 10 seconds or less.

According to a study by Vidyard, there is the tendency that you lose most of your audience in the first 30 seconds or less. The introduction of your video should entice your viewers’ attention so that you can convey the real potential of your video. Whether you explain something exciting in the beginning or pass extensive value right away, it’s your preference. The intention is to hold social media users from scrolling and keep them engaged in your content. If you cannot attract your viewers’ attention in the first 10 seconds, you can quickly miss many viewers as they watch their feed, searching for another video. If your video disappoints to engage your audience in the first few seconds, the chances are that one-third of viewers may slip away.

Also, do not skip and forget adding subtitles in your videos. You can either add it manually or learn how to add video subtitles automatically using an auto video subtitle generator. It would be best to remember that almost 85% of the videos being auto-played on social media are watched without sound. It is expected that most users open their social media accounts in public; they certainly wouldn’t want to bring attention to what they are viewing. So, always ensure the subtitles in your social media videos are clear and accurate.

Tip #4: Create Short and Value-Oriented Video Content

Creating short and useful videos can impact more engagement from your social media video. When correctly done, these videos can improve your brand interest the right kind of attention, increase brand awareness, and even advance your organic influence.

Short-form social media videos are being widely used. You’ll see from those enticing 60-second videos on Instagram to the educational 2-minute videos on Facebook; short videos are recommended because they work.

Here are the most suggested time frames for social media video according to Hubspot research to get the best results:

  • Facebook videos: 1 minute
  • YouTube videos: 2 minutes
  • Instagram videos: 26 seconds
  • Twitter videos: 45 seconds

Short videos are ideal for those looking for useful information but are too busy to consume a lot of time. They desire to finish it on the move, while they are on their mobile gadgets. That is why no surprise that 80% of the social media content is watched via mobile devices. Social media users today usually want:

  • Being informed of the latest happenings around them.
  • Be notified of trending topics that might interest them.
  • Watch content without consuming much time.
  • Become entertained there and then before watching the next content.

The bottom line here is to create and share original video content that can be less annoying, more entertaining, and even more productive when you concentrate on choosing the shorter course.

Tip #5: Always Add A Call to Action

It’s essential to have the right strategy when marketing on social media. Social media video may not be the single only tool in your social media marketing box, but it is unquestionably a vital one. It means you need to put in earnest effort to design video content worth watching and worth sharing. But, to receive a significant ROI from your social media video marketing works, you need to have a strong and straightforward call to action embedded in your content. If you are not favoring your audience to act, then what’s the value of producing social media video content for your brand?

To make a compelling call to action, you must first identify the objective or goal you are aspiring to achieve. Once you are sure and clear on it, it will be simpler to capture your targeted audience to take action.

For example, if you’re planning social media video content for Facebook, then you’ll see it more straightforward to add a proper call-to-action within your video content. Facebook understands the value of having a CTA, and it helps businesses that want to reach their target audience to take action.

The entire process of adding a CTA to your Facebook page has been simplified. As soon as you add your video to Facebook, you’ll see an option to add a call to action. Facebook offers you several CTA options such as the following:

  • Sign Up Now
  • Shop Now
  • Learn More
  • Book Now

If you desire your target users to see more of your videos on your website, you can encourage them using the “Watch More” call-to-action link.

Be Ready And Start Your Social Media Video Campaign

So if you didn’t already include social media video into your digital marketing battle, now you understand that you should. Suppose you are worrying that you are not a video editing genius. In that case, you can hire a video editor or a social media management company to assist you create and promote your video content. But if you are just a startup and want to do it easily, use tools that already have templates for you to use and automated.

Below are just some recommended tools for your social media video content creation that can be used by newbies and to those who are not technically knowledgeable:

Canva: For images, videos, and now gif, with templates that you can use, and a drag-and-drop feature. Also, it already has the correct sizes for all major social media types of posts.

SubtitleBee: We all know the importance of subtitles and captions to every video, may it be for marketing or personal submissions. Subtitlebee is an auto video subtitle generator that provides almost a hundred percent accuracy rate from video speeches to text, plus you can customize your font styles according to your theme, and a lot more features.

LimeDew: This is a new exciting tool that automatically resizes your video content based on your preference. Social media platform you’d like to use it for better optimization and quality.

Following this guide will help your videos to be optimally viewed across all channels. With the best presentation, your brand earns credibility points, and your targeted audience can wholly enjoy your content.