Improve How You Share Video On Social Media

To maximise the effect of your video content on social media, it’s important to understand the basic advantages and disadvantages of each channel, whether it be Twitter, Facebook, Insta, LinkedIn and so on.

Sharing video on social media is a vital and valuable part of marketing. 85% of people have been convinced to buy a piece of software or application by watching a video and 76% of marketers say video has helped their company increase sales. Below we look at the fundamentals of video content on various social media channels To help you decide which social media is best for your video content, and how to effectively utilise them.

Facebook is the most widely used social media platform on the planet. This means that you can reach out to a number of different people at the same time when advertising your product. The videos you share are easy for users to comment and share, thus getting feedback and expanding your audience through individuals shares. Facebook also works on a ranking system on peoples newsfeed; this allows for your video to appear higher up on users’ feeds if it creates a ‘buzz’.

However, it’s important to remember that your video on Facebook has a limited lifespan. This means that once the engagement drops, the organic reach will fall as it’ll disappear for peoples timelines. You can pin your latest or most popular and effective video at the top of your page, meaning that it won’t get lost within your feed and will still be available to your visitors. This is why publishing regular video content to your Facebook page is an important marketing strategy.

Another thing to remember is that the majority of views of your post will only be viewed by people who are already engaged with your brand. If people share your video, that helps, but for most brand and companies, paid Facebook ads and boosted posts help to bump your video back up the rankings and reach new, targeted, customers.

Twitter is a growing platform that is essential for brands to engage with their audience and inform them with new information. Twitter is an excellent platform for starting discussions and receiving feedback, meaning that you can develop new ideas and grow as a business. It’s very effective at drawing attention to topics, such as product launches. With one of the most significant amounts of the users on a social media platform, Twitter is essential to use to broadcast your brand and receive a high level of engagement back from viewers, customers and potential clients.

However, having large amounts of users also has its disadvantages. Lots of users mean lots of posts. With so much content shared in such a small amount of time means that tweets posted have a short amount of time to be effective. This means that your post needs to catch peoples attention quickly the first time rather than the second or third time of seeing it.

YouTube is the most effective social media to share your video. With billions of hours of video viewed each day, there is more of a possibility that your video (or paid ad) will be displayed a lot. With a great video on YouTube, your video is going to have a greater chance of being discovered as its effectiveness will wear off a lot slower than Twitter and Facebook. You can also drive action in your videos by using annotations and links to encourage individuals to look further into your company. One of the main benefits of using YouTube is that Google owns it, this means that it will assist your website ranking and increase your organic reach.

However, when using YouTube you need to ensure that your video is well-optimised, otherwise, it will just get lost and won’t drive your views.

We’ve created a super easy beginner’s guide to YouTube optimisation to get you started and improve the rankings of your videos. Check it out here.

Instagram was created in 2010 as a photo sharing platform. Since Instagram’s release date the number of individuals using the platform has skyrocketed to around 1,000,000,000 users in 2018. However, during the growth of the platform, the importance and relevance of online video also started to snowball and will account for approximately 85% of the worlds mobile data traffic by 2019. That’s a lot of traffic which Instagram was missing out on. In 2013, Instagram started allowing basic video sharing and that has since blossomed to enable stories, posts and live videos across the platform.

Instagram allows you to use filters, text and stickers to edit stories and personalise them to fit the message and image that you would like to put across. They also allow you to incorporate hashtags into stories and in the captions on posts to help boosts the traffic to your posts and reach people that is has missed out on within your feed.

Even though sharing video on Instagram is pretty nifty, there are a few downfalls that may limit your results. For example, 90% of the active users are under the age of 30. This statistic is a massive implication if your target audience is 30 or above. As well as this, true engagement numbers are somewhat inflated as views are counted after 3 seconds. 3 seconds is never enough time to receive enough information from a video. There isn’t much you can do about this, but being aware that views by themselves aren’t the only (or best) measure of success helps manage goals.

In April 2017, LinkedIn had 500 million members in 200 countries. This brought around 24 different languages to the platform and made it very accessible to gain contacts around the world. With the large, relevant, audience it is easy to get a return on your posts and build up relationships with your followers, with the majority of them being from a business background.

It can be tough to see posts from people that you don’t follow or connect with, but unlike other channels where users share your video, in LinkedIn, simply liking the video will bring it into their feed.

Video on LinkedIn is relatively new, which means the players aren’t as good as other channels, but they are getting better. What it does mean is that although users are taking to video, it’s easier to stand out by creating outstanding and engaging video content.