Back in May, we wrote about the importance of incorporating YouTube into your video marketing strategy. This month, we’re focusing on elevating your video marketing strategy by posting video to your other social media accounts. 

Video lends itself to social media so well that posts with video are almost guaranteed to perform better over any other kind of content. Videos are shared 12x morethan images and text content combinedon social media. On Facebook, videos generate 59% more engagementthan any other type of post and on Twitter, videos attract 10x more engagementsthan Tweets without video. 

Okay, so you’re ready to use video to elevate your social media marketing strategy. Here are some tips to ensure your video content reaches your target audience on social media.

1. Experiment with Video Types

As with any type of marketing, you need to experiment to find the type(s) of video your audience responds to best. A couple of popular formats for social media are:

• Live Video – Live videos are great for connecting with your audience in real-time. They’re especially useful for announcements, events, presentations, and Q&A sessions. According to Social Media Today, social media users are inclined to watch live videos for three times longer than  pre-recorded videos. Be sure to promote your event on your social media channels in advance so your audience knows about the live stream.
• Tutorials – Tutorials are among the most-shared types of video on social media. It’s also the kind of video users save to refer back to long after it was originally published. These videos not only provide helpful information, but they can also establish your business or brand as a thought-leader or expert in the field. Tutorials can range from separate overviews of your products or services to action-oriented how-to. The length of your tutorial is important as well. It needs to be long enough to sufficiently cover each step or segment, but short enough to keep your audience’s attention. For a previous blog post, How to Create a Cinemagraph, we incorporated a brief video that walked through how to use Cinemagraph Pro to create your own cinemagraphs.
• Behind the Scenes (BTS) Videos – During the springtime Marvel frenzy, actor Chris Evans was the first member of the Avengers: Endgamecast to post behind the scenes(BTS) videosto his Twitter account. These videos have since accrued over 8.5 million views and 10.4 million views, respectively. While you may not have a super-secret film set to share, BTS videos are great for humanizing your brand and making your content more personable and relatable to your audience. Examples of BTS content include employee interviews, event setup footage, and sneak peeks into your day-to-day operations.

2. Optimize Your Videos

We wrote a blog post last month about how to optimize your YouTube videos.Videos posted to your other social media channels need to be optimized as well. For Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, shorter content that is uploaded directly to the sites performs best. Some additional tips for fully optimizing your videos on social include:

• Strategically incorporating keywords in the video’s title, description, and tags.
• Making sure the title is short — no more than 60 characters — and informative. 
• Using relevant keywords when writing the description and include a link to your website, but try to keep it under 70 characters.
• Choosing a strong thumbnail. Most platforms will curate a couple of options to choose from, but you can create a custom thumbnail that includes branded text overlays.

3. Always, Always, Always Include a Call to Action

In case the header didn’t drive this point home, here it is again. Always include a call to action (CTA) in your video. Just like you should have a strategic purpose for creating your video content, your CTA should reiterate why you wanted your target audience to watch the video. Some common CTAs include asking your audience to subscribe to/follow your channel, to share the video, or to click on the link in the description. CTAs should:

• Be action-oriented – it’s called a “call to action” for a reason.
• Convey a sense of urgency – you want your target audience to act now or risk losing out on an offer or opportunity.
• Be short and sweet – don’t make your CTA overly complicated. 
• Be varied – A/B test your CTAs to see which work the best for your target audience. 

4. Analyze Your Video’s Performance

Once you’ve shared your video content, you need to analyze its performance to determine what worked well and what you can do to improve your next video. Each social media platform has a dedicated analytics section where you can measure key performance indicators (KPIs), including:

• Engagement: This includes the type of engagement, the percentage of users who watched your video, and at which point during your video viewers start to drop off. 
• Views: Every platform measures video views differently. For example, Facebookcounts views as the number of times your video played for at least 3 seconds, but YouTube (and by extension Google)counts views the number of times your video played for at least 30 seconds, or the total duration if your video is shorter than 30 seconds. 
• Comments: What is your audience saying about your videos? What types of video are conversation starters? 
• Shares: How many times was your video shared? This metric can help you identify the type of video content that resonates most with your audience.

While it takes time to develop an effective video marketing strategy for your target audience, experimenting with the type of content you share, optimizing your videos, and analyzing the results are key for ensuring your videos perform well on social media.