Video, one of the most engaging forms of content, is dominating social media right now. With the introduction of more video platforms, we have also seen those primarily known for photo and idea-sharing leverage the power of video. However, not all video content is suitable for every one of your social media accounts. Creating engaging content is one step in the right direction, but in order to successfully share your videos to the right audience, you need to know how to optimize based on the platform. For example, where vertical video is seeing success on Instagram and Facebook, LinkedIn crops videos to a square on their feed. Here is a guide on the best practices for each platform.
Instagram offers different kinds of video- Stories, IGTV, Instagram Live, and normal video posts. Currently, live videos and stories are the most effective in quickly grabbing the attention of viewers. Stories has specifically gained popularity with the rise in vertical video. Studies show that vertical videos have a 90% higher completion rate than horizontal videos. When posting to your story, consider that Instagram will break the video up into 15 second segments. To avoid awkward transitions, trim the videos ahead of time. This is a visual platform where users scroll through content rapidly. Therefore, it’s important to keep posts short and engaging right off the bat. If viewers are interested they can be redirected to your IGTV where content can run for up to 10 minutes.
Facebook has innovated video in the last few years as well, introducing Facebook Live and 360-degree video. Facebook live videos appear at the top of the feed and are a great way to ensure followers see your content. People watch live videos 3 times longer than non-live. If you’re a small business or introducing a new product, going live is a great way to answer questions in real time and create a more genuine connection with people. Even when the live feed is over, it’ll be saved to your page.
Videos plays automatically on Twitter, so users have less of an option to skip over your content. Because of this, it is beneficial to create twitter videos like a silent film. Consider that most people either have their phone on silent or will watch the video from their newsfeed without clicking on it. Twitter also has a 280-character limit and that should be translated to video too. Short form content thrives on this platform and other formats like GIFs bring attention to even the shortest of messages.
There’s a whole plethora of platforms to share content on, but as a whole we can see that everyone is taking advantage of current trends like short form content, stories, and live streams. The internet makes it so easy for us to share a video from one place to another, but it is important to consider the differences in each platform. Where it might be easier to just share a link to your YouTube video on Twitter, native videos generate so much more engagement.
