Social media marketing is more important than ever – especially with the growth of social video marketing. With consumer phone sales growing in demand year on year, building branded content for consumption has never been more critical. To understand the importance of social video marketing and how it works, we first must delve into some of the social media platforms relevant to today’s generations.
YouTube, Facebook, WeChat, Twitch, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn and Twitter are just some of the growing networks available. Each platform is unique and offers many different forms of media sharing, with video being the highest engagement across all of them. With this in mind, we highly recommend you lead with a video for your next marketing campaign.
Importance of Strategy for Effective Social Video Marketing
Once you have your social media marketing strategy or content idea you need to determine where to reach your audience. This is where social analytics of your audience can help. Social media companies have made it very easy to understand the behaviour, interests, demographics and time your audience spends looking at your content. It’s from this data that you can form your social video marketing strategy.
Typically, traditional platforms such as YouTube or Facebook will outweigh others for video engagement and reach. This reach should be seen as a key to your success. As a marketer if you are not on social media capitalising the gigantic reach then you are missing out. On the other hand, while video is all the rage, photos on platforms such as Instagram also can reach a vast audience.
Social Video Marketing: Creating Engaging Videos
Now that you understand the importance of video, how do you go about creating a video? Well, to begin with, there are two options. You can either create the video in-house or use a professional team to produce the content. While the self-help option saves you money, you may find disadvantages such as access to equipment or lack of knowledge of how to operate the video equipment. At Visionair we encourage you to use a professional team. Skilled teams not only bring vast experience, but they can also save a company a lot of time in pre and post video production.
Adding Value to Drive Higher Engagement
By focusing on a diverse visual approach to your next marketing campaign you gain better traction with your audience. For example, while some of your audience might be on YouTube, a vast majority of them won’t be on Instagram. The same goes for Facebook and Twitter. Therefore creating content, and more specifically, video content that is suitable for each platform is essential.
With this in mind, we recommend you add value to your social video marketing campaign through diversification and on brand messaging. Forming different video lengths with screenshots which compliment videos and audio with music that helps tell the story can all form part of your greater marketing message.
Don’t Stop with One Video Campaign
To become great at social video marketing, it takes time and effort. More importantly though, if you want to become the most effective marketer don’t stop with one video. Instead, edit different versions of the same video and distribute them to audiences on multiple social media channels. For instance, if you are posting a video to Instagram consider limiting the footage less than thirty seconds, whereas for Facebook anything more than ten seconds can be detrimental.
While timing is going to be different on the majority of social networks, we recommend you don’t create videos any longer than the times listed below.
- YouTube: 10-minute videos
- Facebook: 2-minute videos
- Instagram: 30 second videos
- Twitter: 10-second videos
In summary for your next social video marketing campaign, we encourage you to consider a strategy to go-to-market. Think about the style and length of the video and remember the story you tell is key to great branding.
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