Optimizing a Marketing Video to Accommodate News Feeds on Social Media

A strong way to engage with your target market on social media is to use video content. It’s an impactful approach to articulating a lot of content in a brief amount of time. A lot of users interact with video when using social networks, particularly on mobile devices.

Today, videos are being used as part of social strategies quite competitively. Users of Facebook have 1.7 seconds before a user scrolls past to the next post. Having your content be seen on a feed is just part of the process. Videos are useless if audiences aren’t compelled to interact with them, regardless if they are customer testimonials or explainer videos. Don’t forget – having a video optimized for a social network’s feed starts at the conception stage. Keep the following practices in mind to slow down a user’s scroll on a news feed (for the sake of stimulating engagement with video content on social media).

Auto-Mute Adaptation

On many social networks, video content tends to be muted until users adjust volume settings manually. This feature is quite convenient at times. After all, the last thing you want is for people to know that you’ve been watching sports highlights when you should be working! However, when it comes to branded content, the mute button can work against you. You need to find a way to convince audiences to view your video regardless of whether or not they can hear it. Some people handle the auto-mute challenge by posting a title within the first initial frames of a video. In doing so, audiences know what to expect, regardless of whether the sound is on or not.

Message Simplifying

Your brand surely has a vast variety of stories under its belt. However, with regards to video content development on social media, you must ensure that it conveys a strategic but singular story. Our attention spans are quite short. You’re in competition with sponsored videos produced by other brands. What you don’t want is have numerous messages in competition with each other.

Determine your company’s value proposition. Ideally, it should be conveyed within the initial five seconds or so of your video. Is there a problem you’re trying to solve? What benefits are you providing to people? The way you articulate such benefits comes down to the way your creativity is used.

Formatting Strength

You have some options with regard to the format of your video. The format chosen dictates the way users interact with the content you post. Landscape videos provide you with more room to articulate a story, but a video with a 1:1 ratio uses up 78% more space in a mobile newsfeed in contrast to landscape. Buffer Social conducted a study revealing that a video format of 1:1 performs better than landscape videos, as far as views, completion rate, and average interactions went. That is very impressive.

Hopefully, some of the practices described in this article can help you. Don’t forget that having an interactive video developed for social media begins when you are creatively brainstorming (as opposed to when you are uploading videos to a social network). The targeting capabilities of Facebook are quite strong, but having a video positioned in a key spot within a user’s feed doesn’t guarantee viewership.

 

If you are interested in having a content agency make an animated marketing video for you, reach out to us.