It’s estimated that over eight billion videos (the estimated population of humans on planet Earth) are watched on Facebook each day.
Facebook video is a fantastic tool for marketers, looking to capture a brand’s story, promote a campaign or showcase a new product in an imaginative and engaging way. Video offers so much more than still assets, as it helps bring your messaging to life, evidenced by the strong performance of video not only on Facebook, but across other social media channels. For content, video marketing is king.
In this blog, we will explore the best tips and tricks for maximising the number of engagements your video will receive. By actioning each suggestion, your brand can experience a higher number of likes, comments, shares and clicks alongside greater brand awareness. Here are our tips for higher engagement on your Facebook videos.
Attention grabbing video content
Facebook videos now auto play for users. This means just by scrolling past your video post on their Facebook feed, users will see and hear the opening of the video.
It goes without saying that the opening three-five seconds of the video need to be impactful and grab your viewer’s attention. Facebook users generally have a short attention span when it comes to scrolling through their news feed – so if you really want to engage users, the opening of the video needs to be visually striking to truly capture their interest. This will increase the chances of them continuing to watch.
There’s a number of ways to implement this, but generally speaking your video post should dive straight into showcasing your key messaging. If its a new product, then that should be clear early on in the video. If its a new venue, create a featured video that showcases it instantly. If users don’t understand what your video is promoting from the offset, they are very unlikely to continue watching the video to completion.
Ensure your video sells itself in the opening few seconds, to entice viewers to find out more and ultimately engage with the video.
Make sure your video works without sound
It’s estimated that the majority of online users watch videos without sound. If your video requires sound to ‘make sense’, then it will lose its purpose for those watching on mute and they will simply continue scrolling and you won’t generate more engagement.
To ensure your video connects with your audience and communicates the brand message clearly, make sure you add captions and subtitles. This will ensure that any key conversations or audio descriptions (that would require sound to be played) won’t be missed by the user watching – resulting in a greater understanding of the content and more engagement.
Videos optimised for Facebook should make sense with or without sound. If its a new product, the supportive social copy and video captions should clarify any specifics and key selling points. By ensuring your video makes sense to the majority of users watching without sound, your target audience are more likely to understand your video content and engage further.
Optimise using Facebook Advertising
If you haven’t already, consider a paid social media advertising campaign to generate more engagement for your featured video.
Facebook, or Meta, has one of the most strategic and thorough social advertising platforms in the world, offering a range of extensive targeting options and custom audiences to effectively drive engagement on your Facebook video.
With sufficient budget and a tailored Facebook marketing strategy, you can gain real engagement on your social posts while also driving awareness to your business and traffic to the website. Before setting up your video campaign, consider the following:
- How much budget do plan on putting behind your campaign?
- What objective do you in mind? Is engagement the true goal or would video views be more suited?
- Who are you wanting to target? Are you targeting existing customers, recent website visitors or something entirely different and new?
- Can you dedicate time and effort to effectively monitoring and optimising your Facebook ads campaign?
When optimised correctly, Facebook ads are a great way to maximise your video further, generating higher likes, comments or shares on your video posts.
Take a ‘Test and Learn’ approach to Facebook video marketing
A test and learn approach should be considered when sharing Facebook videos across your feed.
By trialling a variety of different video types with varied social copy to support, only then will you be able to see what content is driving more engagement and resonating well with followers and non-followers alike. This will also help you see which video posts perhaps need refining, improving or removing from future content planning.
Study recent Facebook content both on your brand’s organic page as well as its paid campaigns, to understand the engagement and engagement rate for native videos. If one video is generating a higher number of likes than your average post, then consider either maximising this to a larger audience with a targeted ads campaign or boosting the post with a small budget.
Only by reviewing your recent posts can you be best informed on what your followers do and don’t want to see, strongly supporting you and your team when it comes to sitting down and mapping out content strategies and creative briefs for your video marketing.
Clear and concise social copy
The supportive social copy that accompanies your Facebook video can prove just as important as the content itself.
The social content should be clear and concise, offering no misinterpretation of the video in question. Filling the social copy with overly long paragraphs or confusing jargon will not interest viewers and will not encourage them to watch your video.
To go one step further, consider a clear call to action in the social copy. If your video is promoting a new product or service, then the copy should feature either a call to action button or a link to purchase the item. Too often video posts do not direct users to the right page or the next step of the ‘customer journey’. To ensure engagements are not wasted likes or comments, ensure that you guide the user to continue learning more about your business and its values. For example, if you’re showcasing the charity of your business, perhaps a link to previous charitable campaigns, a blog post, your latest articles or a sign-up page for volunteering, is the best course of action.
It’s the video posts that encourage action from the customer (a like, a click, a comment) in the social copy that perform best.
Format your Facebook videos correctly
Due to the increased number of users now searching Facebook via their mobile phones, instead of a laptop or tablet device, Facebook now encourages vertical video, not square video or landscape videos, to ensure the size of the video formats suitably for users scrolling through their mobile news feed.
To ensure your Facebook video content performs successfully, capture and upload video content vertically – square video or landscape videos. Video content sized horizontally will make the post more accessible for users scrolling their feed, driving interest and engagement as a consequence.
Studies have also revealed that vertical videos outperform horizontal videos both on Facebook’s organic and paid channel. It only makes sense then, to drive likes, comments and shares, to make sure your video content is vertical when uploading to Facebook.
Timing your post
Another trick to increase the reach of your social media post (and consequently the number of engagements it gains) is by strategically posting your videos at optimum times.
For example, if you notice that engagement on a Sunday afternoon is low comparative to the rest of the week, then avoid Sunday posting! Conversely, aim to post during clear times of high traffic and engagement.
There are a number of tools to help understand when is the best time to post social media video content. Simply using the analytics tools available on the Facebook page, you can manually compare posting with times of the day to understand what days and times to avoid and when is best to post. We also utilise a number of paid-for tools that will compile the stats of your pages social media posts and help you visualise when is the best times for posting (based on engagement). Using the data, you can then implement these findings into your next content strategy to help drive the number of likes and comments your video post gains.
Ultimately, there does not exist the ‘perfect post’ to follow for guidance, as each piece of content should be tailored day-by-day to suit the needs of your audiences. And of course, with the ever changing algorithms of Meta platforms, your approach to Facebook video marketing will need to be refined continuously. Which is where working with social media experts can significantly benefit your business, allowing you to create videos and content that resonates.
By implementing these Facebook video tips you will ensure your video content is met with a positive reception online and more importantly generate greater engagement. By strategically thinking about the post copy, video quality, paid social support and timings of posts, you can help grow your brand’s online presence and strengthen your Facebook video marketing.
At Prohibition, we work with a range of brands across all sectors, B2B & B2C, to create compelling videos that help to achieve a business goals and objectives. Get in touch today to find out how we could help you.
For more interesting articles from us check out these posts:
- Why You Should Utilise Video Content as Part of Your PR Strategy
- How brands can utilise TikTok to support PR strategies
- Best Practice When Using Video Across Different Social Media Channels
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