Social media video sharing platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram have existed since the 2000s. But TikTok’s short video style really took the world by storm and completely changed the video-sharing game.

Sharing information, increasing traffic, making sales for businesses of all kinds, and growing a community are some of the advantages of sharing short video clips on the internet.

According to The Cold Wire, “the short videos and shots of dopamine that TikTok gives its viewers can cause them to spend hours on the platform.”

Learning from the video streaming platform, social media platforms have tapped into the large market of social media video marketing. Facebook and Instagram now have Reels and Stories, and YouTube now has Shorts™. Even websites now include videos in their content.

Short video clips can be used to educate, inform and entertain users. Since many more users prefer videos, they have become more popular than blog posts/texts. This can be tested by a simple Google search. YouTube videos that have helpful tips on many topics rank high on the search results because it’s much more fun to see and hear other people talk about a particular topic than it is to read their texts.

Social videos give users the experience of personalization, and have become very popular since the lockdown.

For these reasons, it is essential that businesses learn how to make videos for their social media in order to increase sales, boost awareness, and build organic engagement.

(Image: social media marketing from pexels.com)

WHY USE VIDEOS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA?

People are watching social videos now more than ever. They watch videos because they’re appealing to their senses, and they leave a lasting impression. Videos are more interactive and make it feel like your audience is right in front of you.

Using videos has proven to be an effective marketing strategy. Videos have been able to convince at least 79% of the people that watch them to go ahead and purchase products. 

Statistics have shown that videos:

• increase click rates by 200-300%.
• have a higher conversion rate.
• help users retain most of the information you share.
• increase organic followers, subscribers, and consequently buyers.
• are easier to share across social media platforms for information and entertainment purposes.
• increase credibility by building a business’ trust.
• keep people on your profile for much longer, reduce bounce rates, and keep them coming back for more.

This is the time to include videos in your social media marketing strategy.

WHAT CAN YOU USE SOCIAL VIDEOS FOR?

Social media video clips are versatile and can be used to present your ideas across all media. Their uses are as broad as your intentions for publishing them.

Social media videos can be used for the following.

• Educate Users: Information is a powerful tool. If your conversion is low, you should look into many things, including how much your prospective buyers know about your products and how to use them. You can use videos to showcase your new products to users or simply show them how your products work. A good trick is to share a short Instagram or Facebook video detailing how your product works and how they can get theirs.
  • Share fun facts.
  • Share free information to make users more curious.
  • Use videos to repurpose your old content.
  • Share how-to videos.
• Brand building: Constantly putting your videos out there, alongside proper branding strategies (logo, colors, fonts, signature music, or tune), has a way of keeping you fresh in your audience’s memory.
• Entertainment: You can share short videos for the sake of entertainment. For example, share short video clips from your events as GIFs that can be used as memes, etc.
• Big company announcements: These can be anything from unveiling a new product to announcing your big merger or partnership with another company.
• Sell your products: Businesses spend a lot on adverts because they can get impressive ROIs with the right message and audience. Adding videos can multiply engagements and convert more prospects into actual buyers.
• Sharing snippets of just-concluded or ongoing event(s).
• Sharing testimonials: People take action when they see that others have successfully performed a similar activity. Screenshots and reviews are good, but videos add an edge to your marketing strategy’s success. Showing your customers people who have used your products and are evidently enjoying them is a total game-changer.
• Appreciation: You can use videos to say “Thank you” to your followers and customers for taking a particular action (following you, helping you share your content, etc.).
• Share inspiring quotes. Share short video quotes once in a while. This can be a good marketing trick since people enjoy sharing motivational quotes. You will reach more people by sheer organic search.

WHERE TO SHARE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING VIDEOS

(Image: Social media livestream)

• Lives: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and most recently, LinkedIn allow users (ergo, businesses) to go LIVE on air and share their messages. A LIVE video could gather as many as 100s of thousands of viewers. LIVE videos also have the advantage of allowing your users to interact one-on-one with you and accessibility even after the LIVE broadcast.
• Facebook and Instagram Reels: Short but impactful videos can be shared via Reels. Reels can be shared across platforms (from Instagram to Facebook) and can be downloaded where applicable.
• Instagram Carousels: Instagram’s carousel feature is a fun way to share information that cannot be shared in one slide. The “swipe left” feature increases users’ curiosity and keeps them swiping left till the end.

• Instagram Boomerang: Short videos that keep going and coming in a loop are widely-used on social media channels. They are a fun way to show your product, share a meme-style video, or “show your face” once in a while.
• Twitter: According to Twitter, video views on the microblogging platform have grown 220 times within the last 12 months. Native videos (more on this below), LIVES, and GIFs are a great way to show your audience who you are and what you can do for them.
• TikTok: Whatever you sell or do, TikTok is a great place to explore your social media marketing strategy and make more sales. See how big companies are making the most out of TikTok?
• YouTube: Yes, we know; big step. Still, if your industry is very much inclined to sharing information frequently, YouTube is a great way to get your message out there.

Now let’s discuss the strategies that will ensure you create engaging social media videos.

HOW TO MAKE (AND SHARE) VIDEOS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA

Making social media videos has never been easier. You can produce high-definition videos with simple mobile apps available on the Play or Apple Store. If you’re having a hard time learning how to use their features, YouTube has tons of how-to videos for all the mobile video editing apps out there.

With the advent of high-quality phone cameras, even shooting videos with your mobile phone is now easy.

SOME TIPS ON HOW TO CREATE VIDEOS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA

• Prepare

Every great social media strategy has worked solely because it has been through a brainstorming session. Social media marketers spend hours creating a fail-proof strategy for businesses to enable them collect leads and make sales. You should do the same. Look carefully at your marketing goals, plan your script from 0.00 secs to the end, and brainstorm on speed, length, pattern, transition, and choice of words.

What are you trying to achieve with this video? Which of your marketing goals are you focusing on? Do you want to increase your brand awareness? Or inform your customers of a new product? Or advertise your product? Answering these questions will help you set the perfect tone for your video. Asking the right questions will help you decide on the right videos for your audience.

Usually, you have a bank of ideas from previous posts that could easily be recycled for your video. Pick from posts that have done excellently (the ones that went viral, the most shared, etc.) and build from there.

Also, a good place to look is your competition. “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” is such a relieving marketing strategy. What are they doing well? Why are they getting so much engagement? What have they added to their videos to make them irresistible? Ask, and pen down all of your results.

Preparation includes:

• Understanding your target audience and what makes them tick. Do you know who you’re making these videos for? What are their interests, pain points, and concerns? What kind of solutions are they looking for? Where are they looking for those solutions? What can you do to ease their concerns?
• Collecting your tools: These include characters, fonts, colors, sounds, script, stock photos/videos, and video clips.
• Preparing your script and voiceovers. Voiceovers can do magic for your video. Use a calm, soothing voice to make listening, and watching, a pleasant experience for your viewers.
• Mapping out your video from start to finish: After collecting all necessary clips, sounds and images, make a mental map of how every piece will flow logically from start to finish. What do I show first? What jingles do I use for my opening? Is this information flowing logically? How do I achieve a compelling end?

Planning is the most important part of social media video creation. Once you get it right, all other stages will fall right in place.

• Shoot/plot your video

Many videos contain characterizations: people, graphics, fonts, and colors. Start plotting your video from the start, and allow it to flow logically to the end.

Since some of your videos do not need actual shooting, video and scene editing should come in here. All of your texts, stock photos/videos, and sounds should be properly aligned and placed where they need to be.

Some easy-to-use mobile video editing apps include Canva, KineMaster, and Inshot. They are user-friendly and are perfect for your short social media videos.

• Use explainer videos to share information.

Explainer and whiteboard animated videos are good resources for making videos that do not necessarily need real-life shooting. They’re also good for infographics and data sharing.

• Edit to perfection

This is probably the most tricky part of video making. It is important that you pay attention to flow, alignment (of sounds and images), proper lighting, and transitions.

Ensure that all scenes end properly before the next one enters and texts do not appear where they are not needed. End voice or sound clips where their video clips end, too.

Editing should be done in a calm atmosphere and with a clear mind to avoid producing a haphazard video that is not pleasing to viewers.

• Steal their attention from the start

Marketers will tell you to start with a compelling title, and although it sounds cliché, it works all the time. Let your script follow the copywriter’s bible to the latter: an attention-grabbing headline, a hook, and a call to action.

Without mincing words, let your script flow seamlessly from start to finish, keeping your audience glued to their screens. Allow your viewers to feel exactly what you want them to feel by using the right tone, colors, and elements.

Steal their attention and keep it till the end.

• Keep it short and sweet (KISS)

Videos that do very well are short videos between 15-90 seconds. People on social media are busy, and unless they know they’re watching a movie or a comedy skit, they will not spend up to 10 minutes watching your videos. When you publish videos this long, you’re simply telling them to move on to the next item on their feed.

Remove unnecessary scenes and excess information and keep only the elements that are useful.

If you plan well, you can achieve everything you want within the first 60 seconds or less. Keep it short. Let the sweetness of your video remain even after it has ended.

• Use an irresistible caption.

Captions are just as important as the videos you post. The short descriptions you give your videos are indications of a good or bad video. If you post a video without a caption, users are most likely going to ignore your post; unless, of course, your thumbnail does the work. Still, make sure you caption your videos and pictures with attention grabbers.

Powerful words to use in your caption include free, new, limited, secret, and easy.

The secret is to take your time to put out a short but irresistible caption.

• Use well-researched hashtags

Hashtags are a good way to increase your video’s (and other content’s) visibility. Hashtags are a combination of at least one industry-relevant keyword and the hash sign (#). When users search for keywords on social media, all posts with relevant hashtags are presented before them.

Hashtags can increase organic traffic and drive engagement to your videos.

Hashtag best practices:

Hashtags should not be used carelessly. Attention must be given to how they are used in order to achieve their said aims.

A few hashtag best practices include the following.

• Use keywords that you know people will search for.
  • See what’s working for other businesses in your industry and copy them.
  • Use simple hashtags that contain at most three-four words. Instead of hashtags like #dontallowpeopleoverstepyourboundsries, use something like #healthyboundaries or #personalboundaries. People are more likely to search for the latter, than they will the former.
  • Use hashtags without spaces, e.g., #BlackLivesMatter.
  • Use industry-relevant keywords.
  • Use hashtag research tools or generators like Hashtagify.me, RiteTag, and Keyhole to generate relevant and trendy hashtags.
  • Use as many hashtags as are relevant to your industry, but the fewer, the better. Always.

• Do not leave your thumbnail to chance.

Sometimes you do not have a say on how your thumbnails appear. But when you can, like for YouTube or website videos, ensure that you take your time to prepare a thumbnail that briefly summarises your video.

A few minutes on Canva (or your preferred design app) will help you create something that can attract more viewers.

• Allow closed caption (CC) or add subtitles.

Closed captions and subtitles make it easy for people with hearing difficulties or foreigners who do not understand your language to kinda get what you are talking about.

Videos on YouTube usually have CCs. For other than YouTube, you might want to spend that extra time making those subtitles. It is totally worth it.

• Only use sounds and other elements that you have a right to

Piracy is a serious offense, and many people have been sued for using music (or other elements) that they do not have a right to.

It is better to save your brand’s dignity by acknowledging the owner(s) of the elements you use or by strictly using free and permissible resources.

• Share High Definition (HD) videos.

The picture and motion picture industry has gone places. With 4k resolution videos available on TVs and social media, it is best to keep the same quality when making your own short videos. Buyers enjoy high-definition videos and images, and HD gives your products the look of quality and luxury. Social media marketers understand this and are placing only the highest video quality possible on the internet.

• Share native videos

Instead of sharing a link to your website or YouTube, share your video directly on social media platforms. People spend hours on Facebook Watch and usually do not mind watching about 3 minutes of entertaining content. Since your videos are going to be shorter, why not bank on the opportunity?

• Promote your video for a wider reach

Either paid or free promotion works well. Share the link with your friends and colleagues and ask them to engage with your content. (Make sure there’s something in it for them.)

If you can (and you should), budget a few bucks to get your message delivered to the right people. See here for how to run a successful video ad. 

• Show your brand in your videos.

Include your logo, use brand colors and fonts, and keep the ambiance of your videos as close to your theme as possible.

Doing this consistently will make a mark on your audience, and they will remember you for all the things you represent.

Videos are the motion pictures moving sales (and impressions) on the internet. Recently, short videos have been used to drive massive sales on all social media, especially Instagram (Reels, Stories) and WhatsApp Status. These 30-60 seconds magic makers have been able to steal users’ attention and mesmerize them into doing a marketer’s bidding.

You should dedicate time and resources to creating videos that are both engaging and entertaining for your audience.

Avoid long videos that are boring, and that might even increase your bounce rate.

Take your time to study what works well. Social media platforms are evolving every day, and new trends are emerging. The secret is to take your time.