Video marketing: Tips for increasing social media engagement

Video content rules the internet. Think about it. When you’re scrolling through your Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook feeds, what jumps out at you? Today’s consumers love video content and video marketing is increasingly important to a company’s ability to engage new prospects and existing customers.

Video content is everywhere and continues to take social media platforms by storm, especially when it comes to digital marketing for commercial brands. In fact, according to Web Video Marketing Council, about 60% of brands are actively using social media videos as a part of their digital marketing strategy.

High-quality video marketing can boost your SEO results, offer you easier accessibility to your existing fans (and new ones), and increase your conversions and sales.

Moreover, utilizing video for your digital marketing strategy can significantly benefit your social media efforts—not only by increasing your follower base (though it certainly does that), but also by dramatically increasing your social media engagement rates.

Leveraging killer video content on your social media platforms gives your digital marketing efforts an edge. A video is more memorable, fosters stronger emotional connections, allows for higher accessibility, and helps you build stronger relationships with customers and prospects.

All of these factors increase engagement on your social channels and encourage social shares.

People enjoy consuming content that’s engaging, informative, and entertaining. If you master this, you can utilize video as a strategy for boosting social media engagement.

However, using video on your social channels to increase engagement isn’t as simple as posting a random video clip on your platforms—it requires strategy.

Below, we cover some important video marketing tips that can help you excel; when implemented and done properly, these can boost social media engagement levels to new heights.

Deliver high-quality video marketing content

The quality of your content directly affects your engagement levels.

So, to ensure you don’t have low levels, your video content must be compelling, captivating, creative, informative, inspiring, and entertaining. Also, it has to fit within your niche and be directed to your target audience for it to be effective. Additionally, incorporating voice overs using AI text to speech tools, which make your video more engaging, can contribute to its overall effectiveness.

Great video content tells a story to its viewers that they can relate to, utilizes a captivating and creative strategy, and is concise in its goal while remaining entertaining.

Your video content should be visually appealing. It also needs to stand out against the sea of video content that already exists on social media.

One way you can do this is by creating videos that focus on what differentiates your company from the competition and why that matters to your audience. Once you’re confident in your positioning, you can use humor or be witty to provide engage and connect with your audience in a way that your competitors can’t.

Before you post your video content to your social media feeds, ask yourself: “Does this provide value to my audience? Am I providing an inspiring, informative, and entertaining video that will set itself apart from the flood of other videos on social media?”

Know the right specs for your videos

This plays directly into your video quality, which, as previously discussed, plays into your social media engagement. If you’re posting video content, that—by all other standards—is great content but is low quality because of incorrect specs, you’re not going to get the social media engagement you’re after.

Every social media platform has different specs, dimensions, and ratios that you have to follow to create quality social media videos and for increasing your followers.

This doesn’t mean you need the most expensive equipment or studio-level tools, you just need to do your research and understand which specs are necessary for each platform.

Boost views and engagement with native videos

Before we dive into why this matters, allow us to explain what this means.

When you’re uploading a native video, you’re uploading your video content directly to each social media platform. In other words, you’re not adding it to YouTube or Vimeo and then linking it to your Facebook, Twitter, or other social media platforms.

Why does this matter?

Statistics show that native videos tend to have higher viewing and share rates than those that are linked via a platform like YouTube or Vimeo.

This is because many social media platforms—like Facebook—rank videos based on whether someone has watched a video (and for how long), but this is only the case if it’s a native video.

In fact, native videos earn about 530% more comments on Facebook and 477% higher share rates on Facebook than YouTube video links.

We know it sounds like a lot of work, but the ROI you’ll receive via engagement and potential sales will be worth it.

Consider text overlays (and captions) for the silent revolution

There’s a whole segment of viewers on social media channels that watch and consume video content with the sound turned off. So, if your video depends on someone listening to the audio, you’re losing out on engaging a large chunk of your audience.

Try to optimize your video content with text overlays, captions, or subtitles. Doing so not only provides a way for those with hearing disorders the ability to interact with your video, you’re also allowing those who have their volume off to engage with your video, which delivers a better customer experience.

Optimizing for silence is one of the best ways to guarantee you’re getting the engagement you’re after—aside from the fact that tons of social media channels will auto play videos without sound as users scroll.

Write great social copy to support your video content

It’s a huge accomplishment to post quality video content on your social media channels. But you can’t stop there and expect your engagement to skyrocket. You need to support that quality content with optimal social post copy.

Leaving your video content on your social channels without engaging post copy is a missed opportunity. Know what type of post copy makes sense for each platform—Twitter utilizes hashtags, Facebook lends itself to longer stories and shareable copy, Instagram utilizes emojis and hashtags, etc.

Using strategic, quality post copy (as well as other social media features) with your videos, based on social channel, ensures that you’re boosting your viewing and engagement rates.

Ensure your video lengths are social media friendly

Like with video specs, every social media platform has a different video length that works best for that specific channel. Knowing these and using them in your video creation is going to dramatically affect the quality of your video as well as the engagement and viewing rates of your post.

For example, Instagram videos typically perform best when they’re approximately 30 seconds long. However, Instagram stories perform best when they’re roughly 15 seconds long.

You need to consider your audience, the social platform, the video type and the expectations of that social channel when planning for the length of your video.

You also need to be sure that you’re putting your most appealing content in the first few frames of your video. Unfortunately, consumer attention spans are short, and if you don’t grab their attention within the first ten seconds, you’ll likely lose them.

According to Wordstream, 65% of people who watch the first three seconds of a video on Facebook will stick around for 10 seconds, and if you keep them for 10, about 45% of them will watch for almost 30 seconds!

Translation? Make sure your most captivating, engaging content is in the first few seconds of your video, so you can reel in views.

Don’t forget your call-to-action

Your video is intended to draw people in, attract new fans, and most importantly engage viewers. To do this, you need more than a beautifully executed video—you need one that has an immaculate and concise call-to-action (CTA).

Gently guiding your customer, existing or prospective, from your video to your call-to-action can be accomplished in several ways. Maybe it’s a direct link under your video. Perhaps it’s a text overlay with a nudge on what to do after the video. Or maybe it’s a part of the video content itself. For the best results, repeat the same CTA in different formats.

An example would be if your video is about a webinar you’re releasing. Include your “Sign Up Now” CTA in the post copy, then again in the text overlay, insert the link to your webinar in the comment section, and mention it a few times in the video content.

Whatever you decide, don’t forget the point of your video – to provide value to your audience and ultimately expand your reach and boost sales. Learn more about creating killer calls-to-action.

Use social media management tools to measure results

When targeted audiences are engaged, you’re doing something right. The underlying point of implementing videos in your marketing strategy is to reach an audience and engage them. If your target audience is showing interest in your product or solution, you’re on the right track.

However, you can’t gain this insight without the right tools in place. This requires the right social media management tools to track video engagement across all platforms. We recommend leveraging a single social media management tool that can cover all of your social media platforms and provide robust reporting and metrics around video engagement.

If your audience is engaged, you’ve already won half the battle. Now, in an effort to close deals, your marketing team can nurture them using a CRM tool with marketing and sales automation.

But for now, focus on increasing your social media engagement with the tips above. Then, before you know it, you’ll have more social media engagement than you’ve ever seen.