How to Develop a Social Video Strategy?

Social Media Video Tips & Strategies

Which platform are you using to showcase your video content? There is a quick change in the video platform. Currently, people are not watching video content in the same places they used to do some ten years ago. Nowadays, users are watching videos on mobile phones, tablets, connected TVs, airplanes, and many more. The consumption of video is now dominating web traffic, and people are watching them in several places at higher frequencies. Even video marketing for small businesses has become a current trend globally.

For example, social networks are paying a lot of attention to the online video. For instance, YouTube has over 1.3 billion users who watch 5 billion videos every day. Facebook has more than 500 million users watching an average of eight billion videos every day. Besides, 82% of Twitter users like watching video content on Twitter. The truth of the matter is that the consumption of videos is on the rise. Close to 75% of those who watch videos use them to make purchase decisions. The most important thing is to create a compelling video for your brand, and you will succeed.

Use of videos is an excellent opportunity for all brands. However, all opportunities come with challenges. The primary difficulty with social video is effectively managing the publishing of workflow across several social media platforms and consolidating analytics across these channels to understand performance. Each channel has varied information that it needs for every post, different user interface, different metadata for management, different levels of user permission or access, a different set of metrics or analytics and managing all this is not easy. Here are some tips on how to develop a social video strategy.

Organizing Your Online Video Content

Even though it is hard to keep up with the rapid speed at which social media is growing, there comes a time when you need to slow down and be more methodological. You need to approach your presence on social media with a clear plan. The social media strategy will help you to get the right audience. From here, you need the right tools to help you implement it effectively. An excellent starting point is to determine the social networks that will suit your videos well.

Once you are sure of where you will be posting your videos, decide whether you need to create different accounts for separate purposes within every social network. For instance, most companies that operate internationally create several Twitter and YouTube accounts one for every dominant language. You may also develop a technical-focused and market-focused Twitter account. It will give you an excellent framework for understanding the types of videos you need to create and the best places to publish them.

Optimize Creatively for Smart Social Consumption

Each social platform handles videos differently, and you need to adapt if you wish to succeed. For instance, the native video players of Twitter and Facebook start playing videos automatically without sound when the user scrolls over the video in his or her feed. In such an example, it is crucial to capture the attention of the audience visually once the video begins to hook them so that they don’t scroll past the video. Some generic tricks to follow include avoiding long title cards that may delay the starting of your content and instead lead to compelling imagery. Don’t forget to include layer text and captions over your images so that viewers who can’t or don’t turn on sound will follow along and understand.

Expand the Reach of Your Brand and Give the Audience a Better Experience

If you are not uploading a native video experience in your social platforms, you are not actually doing social video. Including a URL to a video that is hosted in another place cannot just cut it anymore. Most of the links from 3^rd party sites just display like that, glorified links that pick up lower visual real estate. Therefore, how do social media platforms reward native video users? Facebook will automatically play the videos that are uploaded on this platform via the native video player and it has an algorithm that favors natively uploaded videos which gives them the highest viewership probability on the in-feed. On the Twitter platform, videos that you upload via the native player receive 2.5 times of replies, 1.9 times the favorites, 2.8 times retweets in comparison to third-party video players. Social media platforms give priority to their native video experiences and also build out higher functionality around analytics and mobile viewing. Therefore, it is essential to leverage their native players. It is a brilliant idea for video marketing for small businesses.

Optimizing Video Assets for Every Channel

Your target audience should have some expectations on the type of content they receive on different social media platforms. Create guiding editorial principles or a mission statement for every social media network.

Keep in mind the preferences for social video consumption and the demographics of your audience if you want to create content that will perform well on all social media sites. The preference for video length differs across social platforms. People use various social media platforms for different purposes, and hence you have to adhere to the recommended length of the video to deliver an optimal social media experience. The last thing is to leverage the whole social post. Add descriptive and engaging text and link back to relevant landing pages or web pages to drive further engagement.

Measure The Performance of Social Media Across Channels

You cannot improve or understand the performance of social media without video metrics. This task is not easy if you are using outdated ways. For instance, if you wish to gain a higher brand awareness on social media, you can measure success by evaluating the increase in shares, favorites, and overall video views. You also need to analyze your Twitter Video results and the number of retweets and likes the video received. Look at your website’s social referrals to see whether social engagement led to further video engagement and website traffic.  Therefore, you can see that it has a lot of moving parts.

In the real sense, you need to take your social video analysis to the next level through the aggregation of the analytics of your social media videos together with the video analytics on your website and mobile apps. With such a holistic approach, you may compare the performance of the same video on your site and various social channels. You also need to analyze multiple versions on every platform, reiterating, and testing on successes.

Author Bio: Ariana enjoys blogging and nurtures interest on all most all topics. She contributes to many reputed blogs, social platforms and makes her living as a content writer. She is Content Writer of SearchEngineMagazine.