I’ve noticed recently while working with my clients that video has really become a driving force for new growth in both reach and engagement. “Well duh,” you might say, and touché. BUT, not all video is created equal! Just because you have video, that doesn’t mean you have gold. So before you start throwing every video you have into News Feed… consider this:
Facebook has defaulted all video to auto-play in News Feed. So you can’t rely on your script to tell the story. At the recent News on Facebook event hosted in Atlanta, Facebook’s local media team suggested this KEY to identifying what video works best on Facebook:
So that first three seconds starts rolling – muted. What kind of visuals are you going to use to grab attention? Are you adding text overlay or captions to your videos? Can you tell what the video is about by the description in its headline or summary? What are you doing to make sure the sound-off experience is truly “thumb-stopping?”
Facebook also suggests putting links back to articles and related content into the caption of the video. Think about the “sound off” experience. What options do I want to give my users who are in a place where they’d like to know more, but they’re sitting somewhere where they can’t turn their sound on?
All of what Facebook told us this week at their Journalism Project event in Atlanta supports one idea in video production that you may be overlooking or think you don’t have time for: producing video specifically for Facebook use. Video that was cut for air doesn’t typically have the properties required to grab and stop someone’s attention – without sound – in the first three seconds. There may be elements of what you shot for air that you can reuse, but if you really want to be successful with your video on Facebook you need to consider the unique properties of the Facebook medium.
We’re in the February book right now and it’s a safe bet that you’re running promotional pieces on air for your sweeps stories. Is your strategy to run the same spots on your Facebook feed to promote the story? Consider what we just discussed: can that thirty-second spot grab a Facebook user’s attention without the assistance of audio? Probably not.
One way to see for sure what’s working and what isn’t working is to go into your SND Dashboard Post Manager, filter your posts down to the “video” type, and then scroll all the way to the right to see your detailed video metrics. These newly enhanced stats can show you which videos are getting the most total views, unique views, autoplay views, organic video views, paid video views, 10 second views and 30 second views. And you can sort by metric to see your videos in order from most to least views per category.
Want to see how it works in the SND Dashboard Post Manager? Spend thirty-six seconds watching (and listening) to this right here.
