Visual content in social media can mean more than just images. Today, with more connectivity than ever, people are liking and sharing videos faster than ever. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video may be worth a million. Here’s what you need to know when using visuals in your social media posts:
VIDEO IS TAKING OVER
If you’ve been holding back from jumping on the video bandwagon, you’d better not wait much longer. Over 300 hours of video content are published on YouTube every minute and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. While that sounds like a lot, if you want truly scalable reach when it comes to your audience, you can’t just upload a video to YouTube and hope for the best. You also need to leverage Facebook.
YOUR POSTS WILL GET MORE INTERACTION
Facebook has one major advantage over YouTube in the video department. They let you perfectly target your video to the right audience at the right time. Facebook has collected so much data, on such a massive scale, that you can literally pinpoint your exact customer or user with scary-good accuracy. Want to target single mothers in your neighborhood and advertise your daycare service? Looking for model train builders who live in Pennsylvania and are retired? Chances are you can find both of those groups easily on Facebook, and target them with your video ads. It’s niche marketing like you’ve never seen it before.
YOU’LL BE ABLE TO TRACK THE RESULTS OF CAMPAIGNS
Spend any amount of time on social media and one thing becomes immediately clear – there are a LOT of videos, and the vast majority of them are nothing new. Repost after repost, share after share, even videos that are decades old seem to get a revival every few months. By having an original video created, you’re setting in motion a “ripple effect” that will go on long after the first shares have happened, and that’s something that few other types of media can achieve.
VIDEO LETS YOU GET PERSONAL
Videos connect with us in far more ways than text or even an image could. They explain. They empower. They enlighten. They entertain. Our brains process visual stimuli far quicker than words, which is why we can share videos halfway around the world and even in different languages, and still find the same things amusing, interesting or unique. That’s the kind of hold that video has on us as human beings, and that’s the kind of sway that marketing your message in the right way can have on your audience.
VIDEO WORKS BEST IN CONTEXT
For example, Facebook videos are often poignant, funny or interesting. Twitter videos, while relatively new, are much like the network itself – direct and to the point. YouTube videos tend to be much longer and more detailed. Whatever video you’re looking to have created, be sure that the goals you have set for it match the network you plan on promoting it on. It’s all about the context in which it’s received. It may even be worth having separate videos created with these separate goals in mind.
As you can see, preparing your visual content for social media isn’t just a matter of hitting the post button and hoping for the best. It takes foresight, planning and business goals in mind to craft a video that perfectly meshes with your audience in such a way that they can’t help but share it. Don’t forget the “social” aspect of social media – people aren’t about to watch a video that’s all about your latest product unless you specifically translate the benefits into something they need and can integrate with their lives.
It’s a tall order to fill, but with the right planning and production company behind you, you’ll be able to have videos on social media that get attention, get watched and get spread.
