Using Video Across Social Media
In this online age of digital media, you should absolutely have video across your social media platforms.
However, this isn’t as simple as posting the same video across every single site; each requires a different approach.
Which is what we’ll try and help you with today, giving you a brief rundown of how you can use video on the leading social media platforms, and which approach works best for each.
YouTube
The biggest video platform, with over 300 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute! People have built entire careers from hosting videos on YouTube, so if you’re at all serious about video, you need to be on YouTube.
YouTube is best as a portfolio of your video work; a place where you can show the world what your company is capable of.
It’s a brilliant place to connect with a new audience, so everything that goes on YouTube needs to be top quality, as lesser content could do your brand more harm than good.
The best kind of videos to upload to YouTube is promotional, tutorial, and event videos, these can be longer than videos you’d post on other platforms.
Following a recent push to make the site more video friendly, Facebook regularly sees 500 million video views per day.
More people are likely to see your video on Facebook, due to the volume of traffic the site receives.
But while on YouTube, video is watched in longer form, on Facebook, catching the viewer’s attention early is much more important, people will turn a video off if not engaged within a couple of seconds, viewer’s attention spans are short, so your video shouldn’t be much longer than a minute, as people will move onto the next thing.
Facebook has recently been pushing its live-streaming features, but like any good promotional video, these need planning. You should consider When you go live and what you stream if you want to maximise the features’ potential.
You should also consider subtitling your videos, as a significant proportion of Facebook videos are watched without sound.
If you have videos to share with your existing audience and customer base, Facebook is the place to go.
Instagram
Instagram is an image-based social media site, with multiple video features, including the newly launched IGTV (Instagram TV)
The rule of keeping it short is even stricter here, as the average Instagram users’ attention span isn’t longer than a few seconds.
If you’re going to share videos on Instagram, they need to feature striking imagery to stand out from the multitude of other videos and pictures on the platform.
As with Facebook, users are likely to view videos without audio, so your message should be conveyed visually. Subtitles might be an option if you need them.
Videos need to be shorter than what you’d put on YouTube, and even Facebook, as Instagram has a 60 second time limit for videos.
Instagram also supports live-streaming and has recently taken a leaf out of Snapchat’s book with its ‘Stories’ feature. These are images and video that last for 24 hours so you can publish newsworthy content you won’t use in the long term.
If you have something short, punchy and visually striking to share with your audience, or if you’re sharing content which is of-the-moment.
Video has been on Twitter for a while now, but it requires a unique approach, as feeds are under a constant bombardment of new tweets and posts.
This tidal wave of new content per-second rate means your video needs to stand out more than on Facebook and even Instagram if it’s going to leave any impact.
Again, assume people are watching without sound and make the video self-explanatory without audio.
Twitter is where many internet users find their news, so topical of-the-moment content is a must.
If you’re going to share videos on Twitter, don’t make them specifically for that platform, as the site’s quick refresh rate means it’s likely to get lost amongst the flood of new content.
As you can see, each of the big social media sites requires a different approach to utilise them in your video marketing. Hopefully, this has given you a better idea of how to get the most out of them.
Sources:
https://merchdope.com/youtube-statistics/
http://tubularinsights.com/500-million-watch-facebook-video/
https://www.jeffbullas.com/10-types-visual-content-instagram-get-shared-like-crazy/