So, including video on your social feed can make a difference, but what about for making sales? According to Unbounce, adding a video to your landing page can increase conversions by 80% - not too shabby. Knowing that video can greatly increase social media engagement left me wondering wanting to know more about the practices for creating social video. After interviewing Oliver Wellington on my daily tech podcast, I asked him to share the secret ingredient to the success of the Headliner tool.
Social Video Creation Tips
According to DigiDay 85% of Facebook videos are watched with the SOUND OFF? You need to make sure your point comes across via text. Graham Mudd, Director of Monetization Product Marketing at Facebook, says that as many as 40% of Facebook ads do not effectively communicate their message without captions!(Business Insider).
Make the text big and easy to read from a mobile device. When 16px is popular for main text while secondary text should be smaller, around 14px, so a distinction can be seen (learnui). Make sure the text is on the screen long enough. It is recommended that no more than two lines of text be displayed at a time, and for a minimum of 0.3 seconds for each word For example, the caption “I’m Neil Hughes, the host of The Tech Blog Writer Podcast!” should be on the screen for at least 3.3 seconds. We suggest rounding this to 4 seconds. (BBC)
Aspect Ratio―Portrait vs Landscape vs Square
Portrait is great for stories posted on Snapchat and Instagram, with an ideal ratio of 9:16
Landscape is best for Youtube, Facebook, and viewing on computers.
Square is easy to use on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and is overall the most versatile since it works on mobile and desktop.
How long should your video be?
In general, audience engagement tends to drop off for videos longer than 2 minutes, but the optimal video length varies per platform (Hubspot)
Instagram: 30 seconds
Twitter: 45 seconds
Facebook: 1 minute
YouTube: 2 minutes
Ok, what’s next?
Now that you know the best practices for creating social video, it’s time to get started! You can create video directly within most of the apps listed above, or you can use a video creation tool, such as Headliner (it’s free!). The Headliner editor makes sharing your content more unique by allowing you to:
Auto-transcribe audio clips and even video clips to create text captions
Add images, videos, and text
Add customizable waveform animations
Export in 1080 HD quality video
Audio is the backbone of podcasting, but it doesn’t always translate alone to social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Creating a video with Headliner using your audio as a starting point increases where you can strategically share your content.
Another creative way to use Headliner is to make a highlight reel of the past week’s/month’s podcasts so listeners who have missed some episodes can get caught up in one video. Maybe they’ll head on over to hear the full podcasts they heard snippets of!