Let’s face it, social media is an integral part of business today. While as many of us like to blame it for various ills, social media has made the world closer, at least in the sense of communication. And since it’s not going away, most business leaders have accepted and welcome it as a way to reach and market to their customers. Videos are really ideal for this technology as a way for people to view anytime and anywhere using virtually any device. Based on lower video production costs over time, companies really have no barriers on benefitting from the marriage of social media and video. Consider some trends:

• YouTube: More than 5 billion video views are watched each day
• Facebook: Around 500 million people watch Facebook videos every day
• Twitter: 82% of Twitter’s audience watches video content
• Snapchat: says they generate 10 billion video views every single day

In just about 5 years, social media has relaxed the need for specific video formats, enabling even more adoption.

With all the information to be digested on social media, the attention span of most users is minimal. While the purpose of any particular video is contextual, generally speaking, video content should be kept shorter for social media use.

We provide ‘cut-down’ videos for use on client social media platforms. This can be a 20 second video that was cut-down from a 2 minute promotional video. It can be posted on a client’s social media platform then be linked to the longer video or perhaps a specific webpage that provides more information for the viewer.

Another good option are short videos intentially meant for social media. We call them ‘shorts’. They are 15-20 second videos that really drive home one or two points. I wrote about video ‘shorts’ earlier. A series of shorts, such as 8 that are included in an organization’s content branding mix, will likely be the heavyweight in terms of marketing content impact.

If you need helping planning out your social media video strategy, let us know!