Almost every single social media platform is beginning to (or has) integrated video into their service. But why? How can this give businesses and professionals the edge in their industry? And, if so, is there a right and wrong way to go about it?
Hopefully by the end of reading this blog article you will have the confidence to start creating and uploading engaging videos for your own audiences – or at least, understand the need to.
What are the challenges?
Videos, as effective as they are to engage and/or inform, take longer to film, edit and even publish, than your usual image/text post. This is likely to be the key reason as to why quite a lot of businesses are put off to start posting. However, like most things – the more you do it, the easier it’ll become and if we take a look at the graph below, it is most definitely worth it as it shows the percentage of shared video over mobile devices between August 2011 to June 2015.
Image Credit: Ooyala.
What type of video engage audiences?
Depending on the types of clients you or your company attracts, the type of videos are going to change. In general however, your videos should hit the 4 criteria below to a tee to be successful.
1. Short videos, under a minute.
2. Avoid using too much text (across the screen) or heavily branding the video.
3. Professionally edited and filmed in landscape (we all hate vertical videos!).
4. Call to action at the end – What was the point of the video? Where should it lead the customer?
Twitter, Instagram or YouTube?
Why not all three? You can create short under 30 second videos for Twitter and Instagram and then upload the longer, more informative ones to your YouTube. After all, most users who use Twitter and Instagram scroll through many posts each day and with so much to look at, wouldn’t want to spend most of it watching just the one long video. On Instagram, videos cannot be any longer than 60 seconds in length, and it’s 2 minutes 20 seconds for Twitter – so keep this in mind.
Let me also segway into saying that having a video on the homepage of your website can be a very clever way of engaging a customer. It can grab their attention as soon as they land onto your website and if engaging enough, can leave them with an important question to answer – Is this product/service for me? Airbnb, 4 Rivers Smokehouse and charity: water use video on their websites effectively.
Interested by the world of Video? Why not check out our Video Production services and have a chat with #TeamCariad about what we can do for your business? There are many different forms of video content from vlogs to explainer videos to even promotional showreels about your business which you can show to prospective clients. You can call us on 01992 582 824 or email [email protected] and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
