Sharing a promotional video (e.g: advertising, an explainer video) on social media has been both a way to get refreshing new website visitors and a pain in the bum.
It’s a joy whenever it gets hundreds of likes and shares and it’s tough when no one cares about it. We live in 2017, where you can search for anything on Google and almost all businesses have signed up for an account on their favorite social media network.
There are ways to get instant exposure and be popular on social media with your video, namely paid advertising and endorsement, but that’s not always plausible for companies with strapped budgets.
If no one cares about your video, the problem is with either the way you create a video or the way you share it on your social media.
On that note, you should read 5 Keys to Producing a High Converting Explainer Video to make sure you aren’t going to publish a poorly-made explainer video.
But in this post, I’m going to focus on the latter issue.
It’s not going to be as easy as it sounds. In fact, it will take some time to figure out what was wrong with your previous video-sharing attempts.
For this purpose, I’ve put together 4 key aspects that determine if your explainer video works the way you want it to on social media.
1. Would your audience thank you for what you want to share?
The point of sharing your videos on social media is to show your customers not only what you have to offer but also captivating stories.
But you should NEVER do in-your-face advertising on social media any day of the week. People don’t want to follow or subscribe to self-promoting sellouts.
Instead, make sure you have a little bit of additional knowledge, information, or any kind of value to give your audience, plus a point if somehow you can trace everything back to your products. Social network sites have many features that allow you to increase interactions and engagements between you and your audience — use them!
Keeping customers is far cheaper than obtaining new ones. Providing them with useful information is better than giving blatant self-advertising.
While you’re creating your content, try to be as relevant as possible to your audience. This image from Buffer shows where you should be with the content you share with your audience.
2. Timing is Almost Everything
When making video content, you need to know what kind of video you want to make and share and what you shouldn’t. Now it’s time to determine which days and time periods are best suited for sharing your video.
a. Little Experiments
Anyone can determine which times are best for sharing their content on social media with a bit of effort. Try the following:
1. Post your video to your timeline at different times, an hour or so apart. Then see which one gets the most interaction with your audience. Each social media community has different peak times. Posting at the right time can add impressions and engagement drastically.
2. Use Facebook Insights (if you are the page manager) to see which time the biggest percentage of your audience is online.
b. Facebook Peaks on Thursdays and Fridays
Research by BuddyMedia found that the fewer people want to be at work, the more they browse Facebook.
The research found that certain days of the week garnered more engagement than others. However, even though the same research found that specific industries may differ, most industries’ employees sit around and browse Facebook on Thursdays and Fridays. They share videos more often in these times.
c. Go Against Peak-Time on Weekends on Twitter
It sounds a little bit off, but tweets off-peak time tend to have higher click-through rates (CTR) compared to those tweeted during Twitter’s peak times.
d. Get More from LinkedIn Just Before and After Work Hours
According to Chron and KISSmetrics, professionals are either preparing to start their workload in the early morning, or they have finished their projects in the late afternoon so they’re browsing LinkedIn while waiting to leave.
3. Facebook and Twitter Love Posts with Images.
According to HubSpot’s stats compilation, posts on all sites (not just Facebook and Twitter) with visual content generally see more engagement compared to those without visual content. It’s probably because images or clips occupy a central place on the user’s screen whether they’re on a desktop or mobile app.
Videos shared on Facebook obviously don’t need additional images since you’ll automatically get a visual snippet when you upload or share a YouTube video to Facebook.
But when you share videos from a third-party host (instead of uploading them directly to Twitter) to your Twitter timeline, you’ll get a plain link like this:
That’s not interesting unless you hand-craft your tweet with a creative headline.
It’s not practical to upload videos to Twitter. If you weren’t already aware, Twitter only allows a 15MB maximum video size.
But I have a handy trick to share a YouTube video to Twitter while attaching the video’s thumbnail.
First, you need to download the thumbnail for the video you want to share. Go to LyricsHunt and copy-paste the video link. In a blink of an eye, you’ll be able to download the video thumbnail.
Second, fetch and download the thumbnail.
Next, go to the YouTube video you want to share and copy the share link–but don’t click the Twitter icon there, just copy the share link.
Then go to Twitter, compose a new tweet, and paste the YouTube share link (a shorter link for character limitation reasons). Finally, attach the thumbnail you just downloaded as a media file.
And voilà! Your tweet looks like a legit snippet. Now you can catch more attention with the thumbnail attached to the tweet.
4. Only Post Videos Under 2 Minutes Long
When people are on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or any social media, they want to scroll through their newsfeeds, check notifications, answer messages, and such.
None of them are on social media to watch a long video.
If they wanted to do so, they would go to YouTube or Vimeo
So the video you share on social media has to be short enough to keep people interested, but long enough to expose them to your brand.
One of the main reasons a short length is important is that most social media users access their social media through mobile devices and the upload size limit is relatively small.
According to EngineGroup, the shorter the video, the more it is watched.
An earlier study by Wistia found out that the shorter the video, the more people watch the full length of it.
One neat trick is if you are sharing a short video (less than 2 minutes), uploading the video directly to a social media platform (like Facebook) will get you more views than just posting a link to the same video that’s been uploaded to another social media (like YouTube).
For example: if you have a short 15-second video, uploading the video directly to Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram will get you more views in total than if you just upload it to YouTube and then share the link (of the same video) to the social media mentioned above.
A study by SocialMediaBaker found that videos uploaded to Facebook get 200% more views on average compared to views from YouTube videos that are shared on a Facebook post.
On a side note, brands are also switching from YouTube to Facebook for their video publishing. In fact, there are roughly 20,000 more brand videos on Facebook than on YouTube.
Conclusion
Too busy (or lazy) to read the whole article? Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered:
1. Timing is everything. Don’t post on different social media platforms at the same time.
2. Include visual aspects (imagery, thumbnails, snippets) whenever you share your video.
3. Twitter loves tweets with images in them.
So, how are you sharing your video on your social media pages? Apply these simple tips and let me know how it goes.
