Sharing a promotional video (e.g: advertising, explainer video) on social media has been both a way to get refreshing new website visitors and a pain in the bum.
It’s a joy whenever it gets hundreds of likes and share and it’s tough when no one cares about it.
There are ways to get instant exposure from social media with your video, namely paid advertising and endorsement, but that’s not always plausible for companies with strapped budgets.
If no one cares about your video, the problem is with either your video or the way you share it to your social media.
On that note, you should read 5 Keys to Producing a High Converting Explainer Video to make sure you aren’t going to publish a poorly-made explainer video.
But in this post, I’m going to focus on the latter issue.
It’s not going to be as easy as it sounds. In fact, it will take some time to figure out what was wrong in your previous video sharing attempts.
For this purpose, I’ve put together 4 key aspects that determine if your explainer video works the way you want it to on social media.
1. Would your audience thank you for what you want to share?
The point of sharing your videos to social media is to show your customers more about what you have to offer.
But you should NEVER do in-your-face advertising on social media. People don’t want to see self-promotions.
Instead, make sure you have little bit of additional knowledge, information or any kind of value to give your audience.
Keeping customers is far cheaper than obtaining new ones. Providing them with useful information is better than giving blatant self-advertising.
While you’re at it, try to be as relevant as possible with your audience. This image from Buffer shows where you should be with the content you share with your audience.
2. Timing is Almost Everything
You know what kind of video you should make and share to social media and what you shouldn’t. Now it’s time to determine which days and time periods are best suited for sharing your video.
a. Little Experiments
Anyone can determine which times are best for sharing their content to social media with bit of effort. Try the following:
1. Post your video to your timeline at different times, an hour or so apart. Then see which one gets the most interaction with your audience.
2. Use Facebook Insights (if you are the page manager) to see which time the biggest percentage of your audience is online.
b. Facebook Peaks on Thursdays and Fridays
A research by BuddyMedia found out that the less people want to be at work, the more they browse Facebook.
Research found that certain days of the week garnered more engagement than the others. However, even though the same research found that specific industries may differ, most industries’ employees sit around and browse Facebook on Thursdays and Fridays.
c. Go Against Peak-Time on Weekends on Twitter
It sounds a little bit off, but a study by Dan Zarella found that tweets off-peak time tend to have higher click-through rates (CTR) compared to those tweeted during Twitter’s peak times.
d. Get More from LinkedIn Just Before and After Work Hours
According to Chron and KISSmetrics, professionals are either preparing to start their workload in the early morning, or they have finished their projects in late afternoon so they’re browsing LinkedIn while waiting to leave.
3.Facebook and Twitter Love Posts with Images.
According to HubSpot’s stats compilation, posts on all sites (not just Facebook and Twitter) with visual content generally see more engagement compared to those without visual content.
Videos shared on Facebook obviously don’t need additional images since you’ll automatically get a visual snippet when you upload or share a YouTube video to Facebook.
But when you share a video (instead of uploading it directly to Twitter) to your Twitter timeline, you’ll get a plain link like this:
That’s not interesting unless you hand-craft your tweet with a creative headline.
Uploading your video to Twitter is not practical if it’s too long. And, if you weren’t already aware, Twitter only allows 15MB maximum video size.
But I have a handy trick to share a YouTube video to Twitter while attaching the video’s thumbnail.
First, you need to download the thumbnail for the video you want to share. Go to pic.lyricshunt.in and copy-paste the video link. In a blink of an eye you’ll be able to download the video thumbnail.
Second, fetch and download the thumbnail.
Next, go to the YouTube video you want to share and copy the share link–but don’t click the Twitter icon there, just copy the share link.
Then go to Twitter, compose a new tweet and paste the YouTube share link (a shorter link for character limitation reasons). Finally, attach the thumbnail you just downloaded as a media file.
And voilà! Your tweet looks like a legit snippet. Now you can catch more attention with the thumbnail attached to the tweet.
4. Only Post Videos Under 2 Minutes Long
When people are on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or any social media, they want to scroll through their newsfeed, check notifications, answer messages and such.
None of them are on social media to watch a long video.
If they wanted to do so, they would go to YouTube or Vimeo
So the video you share to social media has to be short enough to keep people interested, but long enough to expose them to your brand.
One of the main reasons a short length is important is because most social media users access their social media through mobile devices and the upload size limitation is relatively small.
According to EngineGroup, the shorter the video, the more it is watched.
An earlier study by Wistia found out that the shorter the video, the more people watch the entirety of it.
One neat trick is, if you are sharing a short video (less than 2 minutes), uploading the video directly to the social media platform (like Facebook) will get you more views than just posting a link of the same video that’s been uploaded to another social media (like YouTube).
For example: if you have a short 15-second video, uploading the video directly to Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram will get you more views in total than if you just upload it to YouTube and then share the link (of the same video) to the social media mentioned above.
A study by SocialMediaBaker found that videos uploaded to Facebook get 200% more views on average compared to views from YouTube videos that are shared on a Facebook post.
On a side note, brands are also switching from YouTube to Facebook for their video publishing. In fact, there are roughly 20,000 more brand videos on Facebook than YouTube.
Conclusion
Too busy (or lazy) to read the whole article? Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered:
1. Timing is everything. Don’t post on different social media platforms at the same time.
2. Include visual aspects (imagery, thumbnails, snippets) whenever you share your video.
3. Twitter loves tweets with images in them.
So, how are you sharing your video to your social media pages? Let me know in the comments below.
Read more: When to DIY and When to Hire a Firm