After YouTube, Facebook is one of the top channels in terms of video content consumption. In vague, millions of videos are uploaded on the platform daily that is then reached, watched, and endorsed by billions of audiences worldwide. This means it’s not a cakewalk to make your videos popular among your audience. It takes time, effort, and resources.
Recently, Facebook created a guide that contains a series of best practices marketers should follow to skyrocket the reach of their Facebook videos. The tips covered in the guide mainly focused on optimizing video to capture the most important signals that Facebook believes have the greatest influence on distribution in the news feed.
Steps to Create Engaging Facebook Videos
Amid growing competition, unless you're distinct in your offers, you will not gain customers. While promoting your service or brand using Facebook videos, you must focus on the right strategy. Despite a beautiful video and a worthwhile message, marketers most often fail to create touch points while launching a video marketing campaign.
1. Begin with a Video
A video that starts with an impressive note, gains audience's attention the most. Facebook uncloaked the stats that the first three seconds of your video decide whether the viewer will continue for the rest of the duration or not. To stay audience longer, amaze them with a fabulous video.
- Start your video with a positive note
- Appeal to the emotions of your audience
- Add a short video introduction to tell the audience what it's all about
- Keep the video short, crisp, and simple
- Don't stretch unnecessarily
Simultaneously, keep track of video insights to find how videos are performing. Visit the “Video Average Watch Time” metric in your Facebook Insights. Here you can find the average time each of your videos is watched.
2. Consider Using Text In Videos
Amid the craze of special effects and mesmerizing background scores, the text is still a game changer. Since most of the videos are watched without sound, the text is super important for the audience to understand the video and make a decision about the brand. From the very beginning, add some exclusive text to the video to tell the audience the context of the video. You can use subtitles or other relevant text that will convey your brand message.
3. Cover Specific Points Only :
A video that carries some value gets shared and talked about more.
Thus, before you plan a video for the next video marketing campaign, recall your audience, their needs, and their interests. Think of ways to create a video that resonates with them. Produce a video that they love to like, share, and forward. A video should be created around the following goals:
- It should be entertaining to get more hits
- It should express a feeling about a particular topic
- It should show off products/services/entities
- It should be successful in delivering an exclusive message
4. Align with Content Guidelines
Since you may be using the same video to be shared on multiple social networks, consider changing the text to suit the social network being used and your audience there (Facebook in this case). You can introduce your videos in many ways.
- Ask a question and tell people that your video may be the answer. Means triggers their inquisitiveness.
- Take a quote from the video and paste it as text. Spur the audience's emotions to compel them to dive deeper into the topic by watching the video.
- Add emojis, images, and links to support the video. Do it all in the stricter purview of Facebook guidelines.
5. Repurpose Your Best Videos
Content never fades. Even older content can deliver an equally powerful message to your audience. Your existing content may be the game changer if you want to target a fresh audience. Repurpose an existing video that recently secured impressive engagement and reach. While planning a video marketing campaign, rather than producing a new video from scratch, play with the existing videos from the library that secured the most engagement and maximum traction.
Make valid and contextual changes in the text and launch the video. This is how you can grab more eyeballs and win a boost right from the start.
6. Select Right Video Creation Tools
Only an advanced video creation tool can help you produce perfect videos. There are endless options available to choose from to create videos that convey messages the way you want. While choosing the right video-making tool, check the features such as editors, add-ons, and in-built template libraries. Whatever the purpose the video is to serve, a fine video creation tool will help you produce persuasive videos.
7. Create Original Videos
The idea is loud and clear- if a video is original, it’s great. Facebook prefers the video content in the news feed that’s original and created by your own. Facebook suggests video creators to take part in videos to ensure their originality. Don’t steal content from elsewhere. Also, avoid posting content that already exists on Facebook or elsewhere.
8. Track Viewing Behaviors and Video Attributes
How videos are shown on news feeds is dependent upon audience behavior and various attributes of the video itself. More the views a video generates, the more the chance it has to be shown in the news feed. Besides viewing, sharing, and commenting on videos are also great ranking signals for your videos. Facebook prefers that longer videos keep viewers engaged till the end. The guide reads that clickbait videos are shown the door by reducing the reach of videos.
9. Focus on User Intent
Loyalty and user signals are considered ranking signals for the Facebook videos, reads the guide. Chances of a video(s) to appear in the feed improve if people continuously return to a page to watch its videos. The signals become even stronger if the audience is found actively searching for a page’s content. In this guide, Facebook recommends video creators optimize video content for Facebook search. Creators are also told to publish supporting content in between longer videos.
10. Create Engagement
Finally, Facebook prioritizes those videos in news feeds that inspire friend-to-friend or person-to-person interactions. Facebook considers video sharing the most powerful distribution signal. Facebook guide equally prefers likes and reactions if they’re generated organically and not through engagement bait.
How to Create Engaging Facebook Videos?: Conclusion
Videos have the potential to convey your brand message quickly and effectively. More and the better your videos are, the better your results will be. If you have video marketing in mind, keep your audience at the top of your mind when you create videos. Give them a complete dose of creative, interesting, and well-made videos. Start creating videos that get great results now.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.