Four Tips for Adding Video to Your Social Media

Four best practices for adding video your social media marketing.

Videos have taken over social media and many parts of our lives. It's not even a question of whether video is a trend your business should adopt: Every business needs to incorporate videos into the marketing mix.

Though video has fully infiltrated all aspects of marketing today, it has truly become entrenched in social media. Even the platforms that once only featured text-only content, such as Twitter, have long enabled visual content, including video.

When adding video to your social media marketing, keep these four tips top of mind:

1) Get Authentic

Gone are the days of companies exclusively needing professional, polished corporate video. While professional videos are still very important, mixing in less-staged videos will lend your marketing the authenticity that people want to see in brands today. When you pair authentic, less polished videos with a professional product video or service outline, the combination can be fantastic.

Today’s market seeks relatable products and services developed and delivered by people who feel real to them.

Take your clients behind the scenes. Show them how the work is done, let them meet your staff, show them a different side of your company. Let your customers get to know you; doing so will increase their loyalty. Putting a real face forward will bring in new customers, too.

2. Keep it Accessible (for Everyone)

Make sure your videos are accessible according to American Disabilities Act standards. It’s critical that your business ensure it operates in a way that includes people of all abilities.

In fact, accessibility compliance makes videos more user friendly for all users—and search engines prefer it.

The two main ways to make your videos ADA compliant is to add subtitles and include transcriptions:

• Subtitles make your videos accessible to the heard of hearing and to people who have the sound turned off on their devices. A study by Verizon Media and Publicis Media found that 69 percent of all people view video without sound in public places and 25 percent view video without sound even in private places.
• Transcribing your videos and adding the transcription to your website or to the video description makes it easy for someone to double check something you referenced in your video and gives the search engines something else to crawl—helping your SEO.

3. Mind Your Length

Each social media platform has a different focus and format. Therefore, each video post you create for social media should vary depending on where you plan to post it.

A big difference between social media platforms when it comes to video is length. What’s the recommended length for each social media platform? Here’s a quick rundown of the most popular platforms and the ideal length of video for each one:

• YouTube and Vimeo: 2 minutes
• LinkedIn: 30 seconds
• Instagram: 30 seconds
• Twitter: 45 seconds
• Facebook: 1 minute
• Pinterest: 30 seconds
• SnapChat: 10 Seconds

To meet these length guidelines, you may need to break your video into clips for social media posts, in addition to posting the full-length video on YouTube or Vimeo.

4) Choose between Live Streaming and Prerecorded

Today’s media environment allows brands the choice between live streaming and prerecording video. In fact, most of the main social media platforms—including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn—allow users to live stream video.

How do you know when is it best to live stream a video versus publishing a prerecorded video? Here are a few guidelines:

• Livestreaming is the best way to build engagement. When you live stream video, you can see who’s watching and they can post questions in the chat or react to your video in real time. Livestreamed video is great for impromptu, behind the scenes video content. For example, consider live streaming when walking through a store or event to show your viewers the latest products and trends. Consider live streaming when something fun is happening behind the scenes at your office or production area.

• When you want to ensure your messaging is on-script and carefully presented—and you want to ensure you have the right lighting and background—you should prerecord your video. Prerecording also allows you to share the video to multiple platforms. If it’s content worth scripting, it’s worth sharing in multiple places and repurposing into multiple formats, such as articles, blog posts, shorter clips, and so forth.

Your Marketing Mix Needs Video

No longer can you question whether video makes sense for your marketing—you now need to determine how to maximize the results from the videos you create.

Videos are a key part of every social media and content marketing plan.

Feel a little overwhelmed by how to add video to your marketing? You’re not alone! Schedule a consultation with FrogDog today to learn how we can help.