If You Create It, Don’t You Want Your Audience to Watch It?

Social media is about shared experiences. Video engages, sight and sound, relaying emotion and feeling more than images or words alone.

• Viewers are more likely to watch your entire video if you engage them within the first three seconds.
• YouTube video is more effective when you optimize posts by crafting captivating titles and metadata and embedding powerful CTAs.
• Our brains are hardwired to prefer video.

Do you really need any more statistics about the majestic performance of video for brands on social media? Okay, maybe it should have been a video. But you can quench your thirst for the numbers with this handy infographic that shows you that an astounding 78% of us watch videos online weekly.

Diving a bit deeper into this infographic, you’ll also see that social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn continue to blast through viewership and sharing records. The big takeaway is that users only skim through text but thoroughly consume videos.

Here’s what you need to know to harness the power of video and create awesome content for your social media marketing.

Timing is everything

How long is too long when it comes to video length on social media? We’ll get into some specific social media platform best practices in just a sec – but let’s start with an important observation.

People will watch your video no matter how long it is if you’ve captured their attention and continue to reward them through the experience.

Now, let’s get into some specifics, starting with the importance of nearly instant attraction. One Misssissippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. If you get a viewer to watch the first three seconds, they’re most likely to finish viewing it.

Meanwhile, HubSpot gathered data and observes that the optimal times for some of the most popular social networks are:

• 30 seconds for Instagram – Video posts getting the most comments on this platform averaged 26 seconds.
• 45 seconds for Twitter – A study of Twitter’s #VideoOfTheDay shows the average length to be 43 seconds.
• 1 minute for Facebook – Statistics show that video posts averaging about a minute in length garnered the most engagement.
• 2 minutes for YouTube – This is where people go to find and consume longer, in-depth content, so YouTube users generally engage more with videos spanning 120 seconds or more.

Playing up to preferences

Over time, we’ve come to discover that each social media network will reward us with a certain kind of video content. The audiences are diverse, but there’s still one unique “flavor.”

• People flock to Facebook to be entertained. Why else would a video of a woman gift wrapping her cat for Christmas get more than 842,000 likes and 1.5 million comments? Entertaining, emotionally charged videos have the highest engagements on Facebook.
  Give them a better chance at discovery by loading them directly, as native video tends to achieve better feed visibility. Remember that the video will likely be muted, so include a CTA on-screen at the end.
• YouTube is all about video. There you’ll find everything from full-length movies to actual video ads in the form of six-second bumpers.
  Even so, you’ll be underwhelmed by your content’s performance unless you’re diligent about optimizing it. That’s got nothing to do with production values. It has everything to do with crafting captivating titles and metadata and embedding powerful CTAs. Remember, YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine. It works on words.
• You can use them, but the most popular Instagram posts have no words. People turn to this social network for discovery. They don’t want in-depth anything from Instagram.
  Your video is the virtual breadcrumb that starts them on a new adventure. Videos that work best on Instagram don’t make you read, and they keep you focused on a single vivid element.

• Twitter video is twice as memorable than other social media platforms, and six times more likely to be retweeted than a tweet containing a photo. Twitter was one of the first platforms to allow us to create self-curated feeds. The social media platform says that the most successful video posts feature people and contain text.

Each social media platform offers an advantage depending on the type of video content you need to create for your brand. All these platforms offer you the ability to take advantage of why video is the king of marketing. We’re hardwired to prefer it. Our brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. Our eyes can register 36,000 visual messages per hour.

Consumers are hungry for the story of your brand, and their eyes are bigger than their stomachs. Feed them video by turning tour blogs into video content. It’s what whets their appetite when they head online to social media.

Learn more about how we can help you connect with your target audience using video on social media.