In today’s marketing landscape, video plays an increasingly powerful role in brands’ social media strategies. Often considered to be the most engaging form of content, short, captivating videos flood various social channels on a daily basis.
So, how can you deliver top-notch social videos that drive followers to engage with your brand? You can start by avoiding these three common mistakes when creating video content for social media:
1. Forgetting to provide video captions
Over recent years, various social platforms have incorporated auto-mute functionality for video content. This means that in many cases, your followers won’t hear the audio associated with the social videos you upload unless they actively unmute them.
Of course, this poses a variety of challenges for marketers. In order to capture your audience as they scroll through their feed, you need to optimize your social videos for sound-off viewing. One way to do this is by adding captions—allowing your followers to experience the script and get a better sense of what’s happening while the content is muted.
There are a variety of different benefits to keep in mind here. For instance, when you add closed caption files to your videos, the search engine bots that crawl the internet will index and weigh these files in your search results—providing you with a search engine optimization (SEO) boost. And captions make your social videos more accessible for those with hearing impairments.
Thankfully, transcribing and delivering captions can be a seamless process that doesn’t require a heavy lift on your end. By integrating with a company like 3Play Media, you can process closed captions and multilingual subtitles quickly and easily.
2. Linking to a video hosted on another site
In order to fully reap the benefits of your social videos, you must push your content to the channel’s native player—as opposed to linking to a video hosted on another site. Today’s social channels’ newsfeed algorithms reward a native video experience, which means pushing to the native player will give your content the greatest chance of being viewed by scrolling followers. Social networks also build out more analytics and mobile viewing functionality for this type of content—giving you the tools you need to make your videos even more powerful.
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In contrast, posts with external links will take up less visual real estate, and add an extra click between your follower and the video in question.
Recent research has also shown that native social videos lead to increased engagement. According to quintly’s Facebook Video Study, native Facebook videos receive an average of 530 percent more comments than YouTube videos.
3. Missing out on data insights
In order to create the kind of powerful social videos that your audience is seeking, you must refer to your video analytics on a regular basis. Doing so will help you understand what is—and isn’t—working, providing you with the insights you need to make strategic decisions.
Once you’ve created and shared a variety of different social videos, evaluate your data to determine which type of video content earned the most views, comments, and shares. By examining your analytics in this way, you can identify patterns that will help you nail down the types of videos that will resonate best with your audience.
While it’s always a good practice to keep testing out new content types and strategies, it’s important to focus your energy on creating more of what has been proven to work. Doing so will help you ensure that the associated video production time is worth the results you gain.
When creating video content for social media, there are a variety of different factors you must keep in mind. By avoiding the three common mistakes outlined above, you can be one step closer to creating powerful social videos that will lead to increased engagement.