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The Bread and Butter of Digital Content: Video

Marketing with quality content has already been something we like to encourage everyone to do, but let’s take a more in-depth look at the benefits of video content for your business.
Generally, your main focus to posting on social media should be to increase engagement and interest as well as get your customers talking about your business positively. But how do you get people engaged?
Videos are great at turning your business from a name and product to a human face and a lifestyle. When you post a video of what it’s like to work with your business or clip of how your products can be used in creative ways, you gain trust from the audience that, in turn, creates loyalty and long-term customers. Show what happens behind the scenes. Give some insight into what your day looks like. Be creative and original with your videos. Most importantly, think of your audience and what they’ll want to see!

Facebook
When it comes to posting videos to a wide audience, Facebook is the place to go. Through liking, commenting, and sharing, your audiences will help you increase your reach. Rather than posting longer informational videos, Facebook is best used to post short, fun videos with tips, jokes, or heartwarming clips. The best outcome is that your audience relates to the video and shares with friends and family.
Since Facebook isn’t primarily designed for video, users are much less likely to watch a lengthy video. After about a minute, most users stop watching videos so try to keep it shorter, putting the most effort into grabbing the attention of viewers within five seconds. Most users don’t watch with sound on so spend the time to create and include captions with the video.
Facebook has put a lot of effort into emphasizing their Live video feature and will notify followers when you start to stream. This can be great for live streaming events or presentations of announcements where customers might want to “be there.”

Instagram
Much like Facebook, Instagram is a platform used to connect and share with friends. While Facebook relies more on communicating and sharing written content, Instagram supports exclusively content with photos and video. With more than 500 million active daily users, Instagram can be a great place to keep your audiences updated with posts on your account and through Instagram Stories, which are automatically deleted after 24 hours.
Videos on Instagram should stay under a minute in length and are most popular when a few hashtags are included. Here, you can show off a product in use, include your audience in the production with some behind-the-scenes clips, and share fun and artistic videos from influencers. Most importantly, try to create an artistic theme for your photos and videos so that even just the style of the media is related to your business. Also, just like Facebook, viewers are often viewing without sounds so avoid relying on speaking without captions.
Basically, whether you are posting organically or sponsored, you want to fit in with the rest of the posts on Instagram.

YouTube
Without a doubt, YouTube is the best option for informative content when it comes to marketing with video. It’s basically a huge library of video content, from amateur to professional quality content. From both desktops and mobile devices, YouTube supports over 5 billion views on their videos every day. It’s massive. YouTube takes in 300 hours of new content every minute. 
By creating your own channel, you can post informational videos such as testimonials, tutorials, and behind the scenes clips, ideally under 5 minutes in length. With the proper tags, people can find these videos through searching, the trending section of YouTube, or postings of the link to the video. Keep in mind that more than 60% of videos are watched via mobile devices, so be sure to plan for a mobile-friendly experience.
Since there are so many different brands and personalities fighting for attention on YouTube, it can be difficult to push ahead. Instead of trying to reach as many new people as possible, create videos that support existing customers and reach potential customers looking for instructions related specifically to your type of product or service.

Remember: Quality over quantity 
Creating quality video content to share on social media ought to be a priority of yours when planning how to continue growing the online presence of your business. Depending on your target audiences, one platform may need more focus than the others to get the best results.

Need help creating and sharing content for your business? Contact us a Racer to get tips and guidance through the process!


This post was originally published as a Racer blogpost.
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