How To Harness The Power Of Social Media Videos

Social media is cluttered with posts from friends, family, and brands. All of these people are fighting for your attention, so how are brands successfully grabbing your attention? The reality is, they aren’t… they are demanding it with well crafted social media videos.

Social Media Videos Trending

Videos on social media continue to rise in popularity. But, just how popular are they? According to research conducted by Renderforest, 100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook every day. Meanwhile, 82% of Twitter users watch video content.¹

It’s important for businesses to recognize this trend. If you follow the tips below, you can use this type of content as a funnel to get more business.

How To Create A Successful Video

The statistics above showcase an interest in users to watch videos. However, it’s important to remember that these videos need to be carefully crafted in order to capture attention. Follow the tips provided below for a better chance at developing a successful social media video marketing plan.

Understand Your Audience

Like many marketing strategies, developing a successful social media video strategy all starts with understanding your audience. By asking questions such as the ones listed below, you can then begin to develop the perfect strategy.

Who are we speaking to?
How do they learn about products?
What platforms are they typically using?

“The context of where you will engage with them makes all the difference in how you will need to tell your story.”

– Nathan Hall, Simple Story, CEO

Simple Story’s CEO, Nathan Hall elaborated, “Once you have a good picture of who you will be speaking with, you then need to determine where they will be seeing your video. The context of where you will engage with them makes all the difference in how you will need to tell your story.”

Set Goals

Once the audience has been determined, the next step is setting goals. This will help shape the direction of your video. Setting a goal is similar to having a destination when driving. Don’t just drive around aimlessly…instead, have a clear goal in mind for your business.

Here are a few common social media marketing goals:³

Increasing brand awareness
Sales or lead generation
Increasing web traffic

Goals are crucial to all aspects of marketing. They guide your budget. And, arguably more importantly, they hold marketers accountable.

Capture Attention

Source: Statistic Brain

Every Second Counts

A few years ago, Microsoft conducted a study to determine the average human being’s attention span. The average attention span is only eight seconds!² This is terrible news for marketers, as many people no longer have the patience to read or view your content. Therefore, it is crucial that this is considered when developing a content strategy especially when it involves videos.

“…you need to fight a lot harder to capture and keep their attention. The first few seconds are critical.”

– Nathan Hall, Simple Story, CEO

You have just a few seconds to capture your audiences’ attention. Hall with Simple Story said, “…your video will be disrupting their scrolling with a message they had no intention of hearing and it could be coming from someone they had never heard of before. In this situation, you need to fight a lot harder to capture and keep their attention. The first few seconds are critical.”

Deliver a Compelling Story

Storytelling is an extremely powerful tool in the marketing world. The ability to invoke emotions is one of the core components of every successful brand on social media.

Sociallyin SEO, Tausif Al Hossain added, “The goal is to make your video arresting. You want your audience to stop the eternal scrolling for sixty to ninety seconds and enjoy the art you created.”

“You want your audience to stop the eternal scrolling for sixty to ninety seconds and enjoy the art you created.”

– Tausif Al Hossain, Sociallyin, SEO

Learn From These Brands

Oreo

There is no denying that OREO has a great product to market. However, they never take the easy route and are always pushing the creative boundaries. In April 2019, OREO released a recreation of the Game of Thrones title sequence as a way to promote their limited edition OREO Game of Thrones pack.

This video premiered across their social media channels and was an instant hit.

Nike

Nike is one of those brands that excel at storytelling. They do a really great job of going beyond just promoting their own product. Instead, their angle is to share stories of the individuals who use their products. The video below is one from their social media campaign, Sports Change Everything. See how Nike highlights athletes in an extremely compelling manner.

BMW

See below how BMW captures your attention right away. By understanding how crucial those first few seconds are, you can greatly increase your chances of developing a successful video marketing strategy. See what agencies BWM works with to develop their marketing strategies.

In Conclusion

In order to overcome our society’s decreasing attention span, brands need to get creative and engage their audience. There are so many different aspects that go into social media marketing and video production. But, businesses don’t have to do it all alone. Find an agency that specializes in social media or video production today.

References

¹ Renderforest | ² Cision | ³ Sprout Social

Marketing Matters