MAKING SOCIAL VIDEO WORK FOR YOU
A TOOLKIT FOR GETTING STARTED
You will learn how easy, inexpensive and impactful it can be to use social video in your marketing campaigns.
A new chapter will arrive in your inbox every day, with a new challenge to help you create your campaign step by step.
PART #4: UNDERSTANDING AND CHOOSING YOUR CHANNELS
In the previous chapter you brought together your audience insights, value messages and responses to our inspirational examples, and then used them to fuel your ideas. Today, you are going to identify the channels that will best serve the goals of your social video campaign.
The challenge sheet for today will help you understand your chosen channels and the content that engages you the most.
STEP 1: UNDERSTANDING THE REQUIREMENTS OF EACH CHANNEL
Facebook: Immediate visual impact is essential, you have to stop people as they scroll through their feed. Always add subtitles or captions because 80% of videos on Facebook are viewed without audio.
Twitter: Embedded videos (from YouTube or other 3rd party players) don’t autoplay, so native videos tend to get more engagement. You can record up to 2 minutes and 20 seconds of video.
Instagram: Like Facebook, great visuals are essential – including your thumbnail image. The max length is now 60 seconds.
LinkedIn: Relatively new to the platform, people giving insights into their businesses have found video to be very effective.
So how about YouTube? Although not strictly a social network, YouTube could become key in your strategy. For this free series we have decided to focus on the 4 platforms chosen here but we are going to run a live video Q&A session on Facebook to answer channel related questions. Join the group now to be notified.
STEP 2: CHOOSING YOUR VIDEO TYPE
These channels offer 3 ways for you to share your video content; recorded, live and disappearing (although Twitter doesn’t offer disappearing). The best known and most used is recorded, probably because it offers most control as the content can be edited exactly as the creator wants it to be.
Snapchat was the pioneer of disappearing videos, a trend adopted by Instagram and made mainstream through their ‘Stories’ feature. These videos only last for 24 hours and then disappear altogether. Facebook has recently incorporated disappearing videos, but they aren’t proving to be so popular.
Live broadcasts on mobile were first brought to social media through the app, Periscope, acquired by Twitter. Facebook quickly followed with Facebook Live and now Instagram Stories also has a live broadcast feature.
STEP 3: ALIGNING CHANNELS AND GOALS
It’s time to start thinking about your highest priority goals in light of the work you’ve done so far. What would you most like to achieve with your social video campaign?
Perhaps your insights work revealed that your audience is often looking for tips or instructional content on subjects related to your area of expertise and value. If that’s the case, you’re going to be creating some longer, ‘how-to’ type content.
Perhaps you found that your existing customers are not particularly brand loyal, but your brainstorm session produced some ideas for events that would keep them engaged. In which case, live video could be a great option.
Or perhaps the most important thing is short, snappy and visually engaging content when you have new products to publicise.
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