Videos continue to make their presence felt in the marketing world, with more than 75% of the online advertisers using them in their marketing efforts. Videos not only help the consumer gain a better understanding of products and services, but it also helps the parent companies to drive traffic to their social media accounts with increased followers and better sales.
Social videos help improve social engagement, forge a relationship of trust with customers, improve loyalty, stimulate conversations, and increase lead generation by a fairly large margin. Although it may seem daunting to create videos, that is just a myth.
Tips To Create Engaging Short Social Media Videos
- Begin With A Strategy
Before creating any video content, it is extremely pertinent to do some prior preparation. This can involve ideation, competitor check, audience research, content scheduling, task delegation, budget allocation, and so forth. All these steps can prove crucial in creating videos that would visibly impact your marketing campaigns.
In addition to this, you need to be extremely clear on what you seek to achieve with the videos. It could be attracting new followers, building brand awareness, starting conversations, getting new sign-ups, increasing website visits, or increasing sales. Whatever the case may be, you must have clear objectives in place that align with the overall business goals.
- Keep Content Short
Begin with clarity on the length of the videos. The audience will not stay around for videos that are 15-20 minutes long. The key here is to keep the videos bite-sized and easy to consume, while still remaining fresh and providing value to the viewing audience. This entails that you remove all the excessive parts of the video and only keep portions that are engaging and relevant. This can be easily done using an online video editor with good UI/UX that makes it easy even for a beginner to do video editing. Above all, the short video must be able to grab attention, deliver a message, and get the viewers to act in a limited time.
- Include Subtitles
Your video content is likely to reach people from all over the world. So, it is obvious that the people who are non-native speakers will watch the video. Adding subtitles would help such viewers get a sense of the content and also increase your viewership organically. Moreover, it has been observed that videos on social media start playing automatically; adding subtitles helps get the message across, irrespective of the availability of sound.
Most often, people are doing something on the go while watching videos. This means they are watching videos without sound. This is also where subtitles become extremely important, as even without sound, the viewers will be able to make sense of the video content.
- Stand Out With A Strong Intro
Generally, viewers lose interest in the initial eight seconds. Hence, it is extremely pertinent that you showcase content that can grab attention right away. If you can ensure this, you can be positive about the viewers watching the rest of the content.
You can start your video with unique questions, inspiring quotes, appealing music, strong hooks, or even eye-grabbing visuals. Along with these video elements, try to include your logo, tag line, brand name, and the product or service you wish to advertise. This will allow the viewers to immediately identify your brand when they encounter it the next time. The intro for a short video can make or break the content, and it is imperative that due attention is given to it.
- Focus On The Story
After you succeed in getting the audience’s attention, it is crucial that you keep them interested. To do so, you need to put in the effort to create high-quality content that would keep them curious and make them stick around. Your video needs to not only look good, but also sound and feel great. This can only happen if you share a compelling story that has wit, value, and relevance.
Storytelling is the part where you create a brand that strikes a chord with the audience. If you succeed in delivering a message and appealing to their emotion, you succeed in creating a strong, reinforced relationship with the audience. This, with absolute certainty, will take your brand to the next level with even better sales. Such videos are often created with the help of some slick editing which can be done with online video editors that come with a friendly interface, appealing to even beginners.
- End With A CTA
When people are done with your videos, they are keen on what to do next. And a CTA (Call-to-Action) is something that provides the answer. Include a CTA in all videos for the viewers to have a purpose for watching the videos till the end. Moreover, CTAs are often the encouragement that the audience needs to make them act after watching a video.
Remain focussed on the fact that your CTA cannot be overtly salesy, as that can turn off the audience. Hence, the CTA needs to circle back to your campaign objectives and business goals that were envisioned during the planning stage. A CTA can be separately created for the video and added as part of the editing process with the help of a good online video editor, making the whole exercise look completely seamless.
- Optimise On All Channels
Once you are done creating the video, you could be tempted to post it on all available social media channels. However, you must first learn about the rules of different social media channels that you need to abide by. Each social media channel has its own dimensions, video length limit, orientation, and specs. Thus, ensure by all means to adhere to these formalities before posting the short video.
Final Thoughts
The blog would have given you ideas on how to create short social media videos. That being said, the process does not stop there. Take the help of video analytic softwares to understand the number of views and reach of the campaign. With this knowledge, you can both refine and fine-tune your video content for it to reach new levels of success. Above all, focussing on the content right at the beginning can take care of the hurdles in the video, finding acceptance from the audience.
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