How businesses can make the most of their video content

Top social media platforms Facebook and Instagram suggest ways to help businesses maximize the impact of mobile video.
7 August 2018

Video is one of the most important formats today. Source: Shutterstock

Videos are exciting, aren’t they? Combined with the right visuals and audio, they captivate audiences everywhere.

According to a recent report by Media Group Online, businesses in the high-tech industry, in professional services, and in media, entertainment & publishing produce 53, 23, and 21 videos per month, respectively.

In fact, according to experts, video content will make up 80 percent of all internet traffic by 2021.

Also, it seems that companies with annual revenues of less than US$5 million produced the second-largest average number of videos during 2017. This is critical because it indicates highly professional, slick video production is not necessary to benefit from video marketing content.

Given the explosion of video content out there, companies seem to know and understand the importance of video content, but the question really is: Are they producing the right kind? Is their investment yielding the results it should?

Well, here’s some advice from Facebook to help businesses re-think their video strategies.

If you’re doing video, go mobile

Facebook, citing eMarketer, and said that more than 75 percent of worldwide video viewing is mobile. Hence, their advice to every digital marketer creating video content is to optimize for mobile.

For marketers struggling to capture the attention of today’s audiences, Facebook has a few solid recommendations:

  • Introduce your brand name and message quickly, since people often watch mobile video in short bursts when they’re on the go.
  • Don’t forget to include captions so that your video can be easily understood whether people view it with sound on or off.
  • You can make your content more immersive by creating vertical videos, which take up more space on the screen than horizontal videos when people hold their phones upright.
  • Vertical videos have also been shown to perform better than horizontal videos in terms of ad recall, according to a 2016 analysis of data from 10 advertisers.

How to measure the business value of your videos

According to Facebook, marketers tend to look at view duration as a KPI.

However, they argue that duration isn’t a good proxy for attention, and measuring duration alone doesn’t account for the fact that mobile video consumption is often fast, frequent and on the go.

Instead, the social media giant recommends measuring impact based on business goals — like brand image and sales targets — which should be a marketer’s top priority.

From 2016 to 2017, the company reveals that there was a 3.8x increase in advertisers using video in direct response campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, and the Audience Network.