According to Buffer, videos on Facebook receive at least twice as much engagement as any other kind of social post on that platform or Twitter.
Successful content creators tap into two of the most important psychological needs, as identified by business guru Tony Robbins: certainty and variety. If you incorporate the following video types into your social media strategy, you can help your business post consistently and with enough diversity to keep viewers interested.
Tutorials
Raise your view counts exponentially in short order with instructional videos. If the content is valuable enough to your audience, they will bookmark the video and return time and again to let the pros guide them.
Most social media video types correlate to traditional media content. For decades morning talk shows have included cooking or crafting segments, showing viewers how to make the perfect (fill-in-the-blank). This format will prove popular on your chosen social platform too, as long as you focus on clarity. Diagrammatic tools like arrows, labels, and subtitles can help ensure that your instructional video instructs accurately.
Interviews
Create a direct connection by giving viewers insight into a business leader’s point of view, or perhaps a perspective-shifting discussion with an industry influencer. Providing this kind of access can crystallize a company’s point-of-view for their customers.
This video format is especially helpful for a business that finds themselves in a hard-to-define category. If customers are frequently asking, “What do you do?” then framing that question in an interview lets the question be answered once for thousands of people.
Gary Vaynerchuk, known to his audience as Gary Vee, is at the top of the interview format food chain. Whether he is speaking directly to the camera about his views on business and life, or chatting with subjects from a variety of industries, he consistently gives viewers an engaging and unfiltered view into his psyche.
Promotional Videos
Used sparingly, product videos can be powerful tools. After all, your business is probably trying to sell something. Remember though, social media is primarily used for creating relationships and developing your business’ voice. If you met someone at a party and every other sentence out of their mouth was a sales pitch, you probably wouldn’t choose to develop a relationship with them. Your social media platform is the party. Show restraint in selling.
User-Generated Content
Prove that you care about your audience by giving them a voice. Each engagement becomes an endorsement with a personal authenticity that is difficult to engineer in a studio. When you share user-generated content, the user is then highly motivated to share with their own network, increasing the size of your audience. Just make sure you credit the content-creator, otherwise, the potential for a negative backlash might outweigh any gains.
Live Streaming
Showcase your company’s events. Highlight the guests in attendance, and make the viewers behind the screens wish they had been there too. Just be sure you have an experienced videographer who can direct the camera to where the action is. Clarity is important so people know exactly what’s going on, and where they are.
With engagement and relationship-building being the main goals for social creators, live streaming is unique for its ability to respond to viewers in real time. Let’s say you’re a catering company and a live stream viewer wants a closer look at the canape’s – you can do it!
When it comes to social media video, you are only limited by your own creativity. And don’t forget, every piece of content you make should be repurposed across multiple channels when possible.
Tutorials are a great fit for YouTube, which happens to be the world’s second-largest search platform. Just type in “How To…” and see how many results you get; we received about 795,000,000 results. If your video has a high production quality and is aimed at a more mature audience, then Vimeo might be the right platform for you.
You can also consider embedding popular videos on your website or transforming some of the most valuable content into a blog or infographic. The important thing to remember is that you need to be extracting maximum value for your business from the effort that goes into creating fantastic content – this is on top of the value that you are providing to your viewers and customers.
If you’re looking to build a social content strategy for your business, Informatics has a full-service Media department and in-house studio for coordinating Digital Marketing with high-end audio-visual production. Contact us today to get started!
