Social media platforms have become a mainstay in today’s video marketing sphere. For many, they are the primary tool to reach out directly to their consumers and deliver their message under their own terms.
Their impact can be felt across all industries as leading companies promote their brand, business, and products through videos on platforms like Instagram and YouTube.
The key question, then, is why? The simple answer is because it works!
Just take a glance at any of the major social platforms' main feeds, and you'll see companies of all kinds sharing a variety of video styles. Helpful How-tos, in-depth whiteboard videos, commercial ads – most of which getting a resoundingly positive response from their audiences.
But using video content to establish your company’s social presence is easier said than done. If you want your marketing videos to perform well in that arena, you have to know what you are doing.
To help with that, we'll go over a handful of simple but very effective tips you can use to take your social media video content to the next level and have the impact you want!
You Can Also Read: 4 Strategies To Find More Friends On Instagram
Understand Your Target Audience
We all know that not everybody is looking for or even interested in the same types of products in real life. The same happens with social platforms!
The first thing you should ask yourself is, who am I trying to reach out to? What are they looking for on these platforms? How can I tie that to my brand and give it to them? Although seemingly simple, you can use the answers to these questions to inform your video content creation process.
Once you have those answers, start paying attention to the demographic information that most social media platforms make available. Is the audience you are catering to mostly male or female? What are their age ranges?
You won’t use the same type of content to appeal to a younger demographic as you would for one composed of middle-aged c-level people.
One would clearly favor snappy content, with brighter color palettes and a meme-filled conversational tone. The other would most likely prefer a more no-nonsense approach, with less flair, more substance, and shorter run times. Time is money, after all.
Grab all the data you can find on the type of audience you are trying to appeal to and build an “ideal buyer’s persona” Model your content in such a way that would appeal to that imaginary person the most.
Do it right, and you'll start seeing an uptick on views, shares, and engagement of your social media video content.
Tie Current Events to Your Content
Every social media platform has a degree of seasonality to them. More importantly, they are extremely responsive content that reflects the current events surrounding them and “the day’s conversation topic."
Involving these sorts of discourse into your videos can help you get the attention you need. For example, you can get the attention of new viewers who might not have found you otherwise, save for trying to see your take on this topic. Moreover, as long as you can keep finding effective ways to tie current content to your marketing content, you'll always have something new to talk about!
The benefits of having a constant source of ideas to generate content can’t be overstated.
Do it right, and you should start seeing a moderate influx of new visitors finding your social presence and engaging with your pieces. Do it wrong, however, and you run the risk of alienating a portion of your existing audience.
Strive to find a balance and roll out this type of "flavor-of-the-day” content progressively. If your current user base is used to getting two in-depth videos a week, and you suddenly start releasing daily videos covering the latest memes, it might start feeling like spam.
Engage Back
Plenty of brands and content creators on social media are quick to prompt their audiences to interact with their pieces. To like, share, and subscribe. However, they utterly neglect reciprocating!
It is one of the fundamentals of audience interaction that I see neglected the most by brands. Yes, past a certain point, hugely recognized brands can get away with little (if any) interaction in most of their social presence – But that does not apply to most of us!
The first step is to, as mentioned above, ask for user interaction on your video pieces – whether that's directly to the camera on informal pieces or through CTAs in your more corporate content, like explainer videos.
Then, make sure to be therefor a while and interact back.
Like some of the best comments on your YouTube videos, reply to some people on Instagram, or flat out answer questions on your Facebook publications. You don’t even have to dedicate too much time and resources to this, just a little bit so that the larger audience knows they aren’t shouting into the void. You can grow your audience by purchasing views. You can get 100,000 YouTube views if you hire a company that offers growth service.
Another great practice that many skilled video marketing companies advise is creating more interactive content on platforms that support them. Things like tests, polls and live broadcasts can do wonders for your social presence and quickly grow your audience.
Go Native
At this point, it is really no secret that each social media platform prioritizes content that's natively uploaded on their platforms. Sometimes to a baffling degree.
The reason is simple, social media sites are in the business of attention – well, actually, they are in the business of user data, but getting and keeping users' attention is how they get it! Meaning that they get the most out of their visitors the more time they spend scrolling through their feeds and browsing their galleries.
The more time users spend on a social media ecosystem, the more chances they'll interact with an advertisement or prefer their environment over others.
So, it's really not surprising that, say, Facebook tweaks their algorithms to display more prominently the videos uploaded natively than pieces that are merely linked (embedded) from the company’s YouTube portfolio. The former ensures people will watch it while on the platform; the latter runs the risk of them clicking through to watch on a different one.
A different platform that’s, more often than not, competing with them in the first place.
So, unless you have a really good reason to prioritize embedding – and, granted, some SEO strategies do call for it – always upload your video content natively to the social media platform you want to broadcast it on.
It will just give your piece a much better chance to be featured prominently there.
Brand Your Video
The amount of video content that gets uploaded to social media every day is staggering. More importantly, the amount that gets uploaded without proper branding is just plain sad.
After going through all the trouble to put a fantastic piece together, a lot of businesses forget to include effective branding elements in them! Ask any video company worth their salt about it, and they’ll all tell you the same: not only is this bad because it becomes harder to differentiate your content from the sea of videos out there – It also has you missing out on a lot of opportunities to generate conversions.
Your logo should be a permanent fixture in your videos and any other type of branded content you want people to directly and immediately relate to you. A jingle, a given color palette, even a particular call-sign or salutation; these things should always be in your videos in some manner.
Lastly, include information at the end that points people to your online presence – website, social media accounts, contact email… This way, even if your piece is being shared (or misappropriated) by others, viewers will be able to find you and keep interacting with your content.
In the end, branding your video might require a bit of extra time and effort on the editing floor, but find ways to brand your video. Always. It will pay off in the long run!
Wrapping Up
There’s no denying that using video content can be a great way to grow your social presence and get your brand the attention in needs. But effective video marketing approaches require a bit of strategy and work.
While not comprehensive, the list of tips we just discussed should give you a great starting point to refine your video content and benefit from the increased exposure that comes with it.
However, you don’t need to just take my word for it! Take your time and find some cool ways to incorporate these tips into your next video, then come back here and tell us in the comments below how it went.
I promise you won’t be disappointed.
Bio Victor Blasco:
Victor Blasco isan audiovisual designer, video marketing expert, and founder/CEO of the explainer video production company Yum Yum Videos. Besides running the business, he’s a lifelong student of Chinese philosophy and a passionate geek for all things sci-fi.