Great, you’ve got a completed video for your product/service/festival. So you should share it on your social media, simple really, just click ‘post video’ and voilà! The video will be watched by hundreds and thousands and your video will become viral leading to improved sales, massive expansion and industry dominance.
Well sadly, it’s not that simple. We can help you though, with our expert Video Strategy service. Here’s our 5 step guide on how to get your video watched!
Video content is the most popular content on social media, it’s a great tool for your company’s marketing. It’s important therefore to make sure you maximise its potential by understanding what each social media platform wants. In terms of video dimensions, size does matter. If you scroll up and down any social platform you will notice the different sizes popping up between Instagram and Twitter, or YouTube and Facebook. As each platform encourages different sizes, it’s important to create content that fits perfectly into each platform, otherwise your video (not matter what the content) will be marked down by the platform’s algorithms and the video won’t appear as much on your audience’s newsfeeds, so it won’t be watched!
The exact preferred dimensions for each platform is quite a lot to take in, which is why we’ve written a separate article with all of the social media platforms current recommended dimensions, formats, frame rates, durations and much much more in our “Social Media Video Specifications” blog post. The basics however are, Facebook and Instagram prefer square video (1:1) or (4:5), and Youtube and Twitter prefer wide screen (16:9).
So when producing your videos, make sure you know what sizes you require.
That brings us to Stories (or called Fleets on Twitter). You’ll have seen them before, posts that appear at the top of your feed, which last for 24 hours and then disappear. These are a great promotional tool as, even though they disappear after 24 hours, allow you to be more relaxed with your followers, be more conversational and in general create more of a conversation, compared with your more tailored posts. However again these posts have a whole different aspect ratio. Similar to that of TikTok, the videos need to be in portrait (9:16) when posted.
Another thing to think of is the graphic safe zones when recording a video. As displayed below, when recording a video you might want to leave room for text to add to your video later, such as tagging a product, service or person.
We’re moving on now to more of the curating of your videos. You’ve uploaded the correct format/aspect ratio/codec so new we need them to look neat and tidy on your profile. A curated news/video feed looks 100x better than one where the thumbnail is a random still generated for the video, or the title text is “Promotional Video_V4.MP4”.
Thumbnails are one of the most important aspects of video curation. A good thumbnail is simple, it will have an engaging still from the video and the title of the video. Take a look at our sister company Fishbulb Films and their YouTube page. The images from Fg1 are brightly coloured and engaging. The images from Fg2 are stylised to match that of a viewfinder of a camera. Both different but both on Brand and both tell you what you’re going to be watching.
Fishbulb Fg1
Fishbulb Fg2
These are also things to think about when curating your video feed:
Tag, you’re it. How does a potential audience find your videos? All social media platforms run like a search engine, harvesting as much data as possible for posts, giving audiences the best results possible for their searches. The data can come from video titles, descriptions, locations, tags and metadata. Which means you should utilise everything at your disposal to give your video a fighting chance at being found.
Video tags are just like aspect ratios, they’re unique to each platform. So don’t just wack on the same old hashtags for each post, engage, look to see who your audience is on each platform and tailor each tag towards that audience. Here are Crosscut we use a industry standard hashtag tool to allow you to find the hashtags which are getting the most engagement for each industry, and apply it to your posts.
Similar to tag, metadata are words which relate to your video, helping it to be found on search engines. The tags however are added directly to the video file, rather than the social media post. This way, if you choose, you can keep your social media posts clean, whilst still reaching out to your potential audience.
Video captions are a massively important detail to add to your video. Not only is it important to be as inclusive as possible as a business, and video captions are a effective way to do this, but also it’s a powerful search engine tool. Google now use video captions as one of their highest ranked searching tools when giving you results on a search. As long as your video is uploaded with a separate captions file like an SRT (so don’t ever burn your captions into the video), Google, YouTube, Facebook & LinkedIn can scan through the file and recommend any of it’s content to potential customers.
Now that was A LOT of information. All of it, hopefully, useful to when you’re uploading your companies videos. But why not just hire an expert to do it for you? Here at Crosscut, we offer a Video Strategy service, which means we will solve all of these points (and more!) when uploading videos to your social media platforms. We can work with you to fit within the same style other previous posts, and we will make sure you’re happy before signing off on the project.
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