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Before we get started, let’s break down the relatively new term, “social video”.
At EditMate, we define social video as: any digital video that is designed to be viewed and shared on social media.
Distinctly different from TV Commercials, social videos are created knowing that they’ll be viewed in a social media feed, needing to fight for a viewer’s attention. Sometimes, social videos are cut-down teasers of longer pieces of content, and direct the audience elsewhere to view the full video.
Here’s one example, of a video cut down for Facebook for our clients at Club Sandwich Project:
It’s important that brands create different versions of videos in various formats and lengths to suit each social channel. Social video is not one size fits all. Sharing the exact same video across different channels won’t boost engagement or convert prospective customers.
Mark Stanton, ANZ Vice President at Brightcove explains it best:
“It can be tempting to go all-in on Facebook with its sheer size — at eight billion video views per day — but with fewer than half of all views completing a 16 second video, attention is short. The same applies to Twitter, which requires videos shorter than 30 seconds to achieve high completion rates. YouTube is suited to longer videos of up to two minutes in length but requires significant calls to action to ensure that viewers don’t simply head to an unrelated video. And with the rise in mobile content, all effort on social video can be for naught if the video is heavily dependent on audio, which the majority of users have muted on mobile.”
Source: Digerati Mag
Here are our favorite tips for maximizing your social videos quality and reach:
Optimal Length: Under 30 seconds
PRO-TIP: Twitter favors native video (video uploaded straight to the platform rather than using a link to YouTube, Vimeo, etc) so uploading videos right to Twitter will drive way more engagement. 2.5x more replies and 2.8x more retweets!
YouTube
Optimal Length: 3 minutes
PRO-TIP: Use a 16:9 video format with a 1280×720 image thumbnail. Remember 40% of YouTube videos are viewed on mobile devices, so keep the small screen in mind when creating videos to ensure there are no little details or tiny text that would be difficult to see.
Optimal Length: Under 60 seconds
PRO-TIP: You can’t upload videos natively to LinkedIn updates (yet!) so you must provide a URL link to share. When sharing a video link, ensure that you include an attention-grabbing description.
Optimal Length: Under 60 seconds
PRO-TIP: A 1080 x 1080 square video will fill the screen and look best in your “gallery”. However, know that you can upload videos with other dimensions (your typical 1920 x 1080, etc) and they’ll still look great in an Instagram feed.
Additionally, do you need to direct your audience elsewhere to view the full video? You can’t put hyperlinks in your post, so put the URL in your profile under your website and note “Link in profile” at the end of your post.
Optimal Length: 30 to 60 seconds.
PRO-TIP: Native video auto plays in the news feed, so use the first few seconds to capture attention!
And since your video automatically plays on mute, make sure the story can be understood with no audio OR utilize text graphics or captions.
We hope our simple guide helps you get your head around the basic of sharing your videos across all social channels.
As always, if you have any questions or need help editing and re-purposing your videos — contact us! 🙂
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