Modified Transcript
Hello, everyone. My name is Itamar Blauer and welcome to this week’s episode of Weekly Wisdom with SEMrush. Today, I am going to be talking about how to effectively share your video content to increase engagement. As we all know, video is very, very popular nowadays. Making video content is not enough to succeed. It is vital that you know which platforms to use and how to share it effectively to get more people to watch your content and interact with it. With this information, you can get more viewers, but more importantly, more leads for your business.
Why Video Content Is On the Rise
So, you have recorded and edited a video. That is great, but then what? What do you do next? And that is something that is really, really common when people have already got the videos, but they just don’t know how to spread it, how to get people to watch it, how to get it out there to the right audience, and that is very important.
Let’s just take a look as to why video content is so important nowadays.
- People are less interested in reading blog posts and long forms of text, etc., even infographics and images.
- The trend nowadays is people like to consume video content because it just makes it a lot easier to watch.
- Video is an easier consumption method for your audience.
- People don’t really have a long time to be reading a blog post that is one or two thousand words; they would much rather watch a short video that explains everything in detail.
- It is much more efficient.
Video-Sharing Platforms to Consider
Let’s discuss the platforms that you should be sharing your video content on. We all know platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube, and even Reddit is a great platform.
You can also share your video content on your own website, and I am going to cover a case study that I did for a client where they managed to increase their engagement by just embedding a video on to one of their service pages.
We have got loads and loads of different options here for platforms that you can choose to share your video content on, but you need to be really specific about knowing where your target audience is and also what type of content people on these platforms like to consume.
Above is a long versus short-form content table where you can see which type of content typically does better in terms of the length of the video on different platforms. For three of them, the length of the content does not matter —that is, YouTube, Reddit, and your own website.
On YouTube, people will typically expect to find both long and short videos. The length doesn’t really matter because YouTube is the most popular video broadcasting platform in the world. So you don’t need to really worry about video length when you are talking about YouTube.
It is the same thing with Reddit because users are more likely to be really interested if they are in a particular subreddit with a certain type of niche that they really like, and that is important to them. They wouldn’t generally care about how long a video would be as long as it matches what they want to get out of it.
The same applies to your websites. Video on your website does not have to be limited in terms of time.
Where and Why to Be Cautious with Video Length
The platforms that you do need to be cautious of are the other ones on the table like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. These platforms are filled with so many content types from different people, and this is all the time.
Think about the Twitter feed and how often it changes. It is constantly updating. Typically, people won’t have time to be watching a 10-minute video on their Twitter feed because there will be new tweets that come up, and there are always distractions and prompts about new content available to them. And that is why on platforms like this, you need to keep your video content much shorter.
There is a strategy that you can use to help leverage this short video form on these platforms and get your viewers to watch a full-length video. If you upload a full video onto YouTube, say, for example, it is a seven or eight-minute video, then you could upload a shorter version of that video on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter. You could actually link out to the YouTube video for those who may want to watch the full version.
You can use this cool little trick to leverage more views on different platforms using short versus the full or long-form video content that you have. And of course, this entirely depends on the videos that you do have, but it may help you maximize your reach and engagement.
Native Video Uploads
Native uploads are very important for social media platforms. On the following screenshot, you can see a few different examples of native videos being uploaded on Facebook, on LinkedIn, and on Twitter.
Native videos are when you upload the video file directly onto the platform. It is not the same as tweeting a YouTube URL because the video would be uploaded on YouTube. We are talking specifically about taking the video file and uploading it onto the chosen platform. The reason why this is so important is that social media platforms want users to stay on their platform. If they see that you are linking to a YouTube video, for example, they will know that people who click that link will bounce to YouTube and will get away from that platform. You can lose organic reach.
Native Videos on LinkedIn: Benefits
The platform that really, really utilizes native videos and reward it is LinkedIn. Whenever you engage with a native LinkedIn video, all of the first connections of whoever engages with it will also be notified that you have liked or commented or shared that video. And the great thing about this is LinkedIn typically has users who are connected to each other with similar interests, be it within their field of work or general hobbies, or things that they follow. So, somebody who is connected to you on LinkedIn, their connections are more likely to be interested in the same kind of content.
If they get notified, that means that you are branching out to other people who you may not have known, but these are people who are highly relevant to the types of content that you are creating. So native videos are highly recommended to use for all sorts of platforms, especially with LinkedIn, because the engagement you can get is really good compared to native uploads on other platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Embedding Videos on Your Website
Now I am going to move over to a case study that I did that involved actually taking a video that was uploaded on YouTube and then embedding it onto a service page; this is very simple to do, especially on YouTube. The platform provides you with video sharing options, and one of them is an option to embed the video. All you have to do is just copy the embed code, go into whichever page on your website you want to put it on, and then edit it with HTML. Paste in the code, and the video will be embedded.
The reason why embedding videos on websites is really crucial for engagement is that it just gives more opportunities for website users to engage and stay longer on a particular webpage. The example you can see below shows that when the video was embedded, the stats for engagement, the metrics that are related to bounce rates, the average time on site, and even the sessions have all improved quite drastically.
It was mainly because the video was embedded onto this page and it was towards the top of the page, which means that people who landed on the page most likely would have been clicking onto that video and would be watching and engaging before they even read the other content of the service page.
Embedding videos is a very easy option you can use, and it doesn’t have to be only for service pages. You can do this for your blog posts as well, and videos tend to complement blog posts really well. It is also recommended that you get videos embedded that talk more in detail about the subject of your blog posts.
Wrapping Up
The key takeaways for this episode are:
- Have different video lengths for different platforms. People don’t have time on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn to be watching 10 to 15 minute long videos. So, keep it short on those platforms and then include links that go to the longer-form videos that you have on platforms like YouTube.
- Utilize your video content on your website. It is a really good way to increase engagement on your website, which is very helpful if you want people to stay on your websites. Definitely, embed videos onto your website.
- Experiment with video content. You need to try different length videos. Sometimes you might find that 60 seconds will work great on platforms like Twitter, platforms like Facebook, you may find that people are actually watching a four, five-minute video on LinkedIn. You have to experiment and get the info that works with your audience. And this is something that I always like to say, experiment with the video content that you are doing, get the results, and then you will have your own winning formula of how to effectively share your video content.
Thank you very much for watching this episode of Weekly Wisdom. My name’s Itamar Blauer. Feel free to contact me on LinkedIn and Twitter.