Video has arrived, unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere you’ll have heard the same message repeatedly over the last couple of years.
It’s hard to imagine that Facebook only introduced video to its news feed in 2013 and platforms like LinkedIn as recently as 2018. The introduction of video on social platforms has fundamentally changed the way we use the internet to communicate.
We can now connect with vast audiences on a much more personal and engaging level. Video is evolving from something that big brands use to wow us, into a conversational tool that everyone can and should use.
Paying to Promote Your Message
There are two ways to approach video on a social channel. The benefits of each depend on your objective.
If you’re looking to scale your social audience and find new relevant prospects fast, paying to promote your content via platforms like Facebook Ads might be the best approach.
With a paid video strategy you’ll need less content because you can achieve a wider reach with the content you have. But you’ll obviously have to budget for the ad costs and set up.
You should also consider hiring a copywriter or ad specialist to help you create a focused message that drives action and results. Paying to promote bad content is a risky and expensive approach.
Most of the audience watching this type of content will be ‘cold’, in other words, they’ll probably never have seen you or your services before, your message should consider this. Make sure you include more information about who you are and why others should trust you.
Organic Reach
If you’re looking to stay front of mind and build trust with an established audience you should choose to post your content organically.
When you post organic content you’re speaking to your established audience that already knows you (your social media followers and connections). You must also bear in mind that social channels will only show your content to a small proportion of your audience (with Facebook, estimates are around 5%). So being successful with this approach will require a consistent output of valuable content.
What you don’t spend in ad dollars you’ll probably spend in time creating the content.
One advantage of this approach is that you will be able to experiment a bit more as you’ll be creating lots of different videos. Trying a variety of approaches will help you learn what your audience responds to and give you valuable feedback as to their pain points and struggles. It’s worth setting up a spreadsheet to track views and engagement across content topics and channels so that you can look for shapes and patterns in the market.
Understanding the algorithm
Social media platforms offer access to both your established audience and to new contacts. Understanding how they use algorithms to do this will give you insight into the type of content you might create.
When you publish a post on channels like Facebook and LinkedIn the algorithm assesses how useful or popular the content is. It does this by looking at engagement such as likes, comments, and shares.
When your existing audience engages with that post the channel will often show it to their audiences and push the posts rankings up in the feed.
This then allows new connections to view it and either connect with or follow you if they like it.
This viral capacity within social networks is important to understand because it means that you should aim to create content that has broad appeal. Maybe it’s entertaining or controversial. Maybe it’s time specific to a holiday or event. The function of that video is to get people to interact.
Be careful not to get too distracted by this approach, however. It’s addictive to see those social media numbers swelling and get lots of views on a video but you mustn’t forget the part of your audience that might be starting to consider your offer more seriously.
That audience needs more in-depth content that solves specific problems in more detail. The views for that type of video won’t be high, but the phone is far more likely to ring off the back of that type of content.
It’s always worth considering the full journey of your potential customers and creating for all stages of the journey.
Getting consistent
Creating video content takes time and as business owners that isn’t always something that we have a lot of. Like any task, creating some processes will help you get organized. You can use a tool like Trello or Asana to break down the stages of production into simple steps.
[bctt tweet=”Creating video content takes time and as business owners that isn’t always something that we have a lot of. Like any task, creating some processes will help you get organized. #youpreneur” via=”no”]
Planning, filming, editing, publishing.
Don’t be afraid to outsource the parts that you struggle with. What might take you 10 hours to edit could take an experienced editor 2 hours, you’re almost certainly better off spending those 10 hours focusing on high-value work that only you can do.
Some parts you’ll have to do yourself so try and batch as much content as you can. Filming 6 videos in a day will save you time in setting up and also help you get into the flow. Now you have enough content for a couple of months, and you can shift your focus back to your business.
Next, find a decent auto-scheduler to push your content out to your networks. We love Co-schedule because it allows the user to create campaigns. In other words, you can plan out a posting schedule and then just drop a new video into the campaign rather than having to set up individual posts each time.
Co-schedule also allows you to upload videos natively to most channels. Bear in mind that some networks like LinkedIn won’t allow scheduled video upload so you’ll have to set a reminder to do it manually.
If you get organized in these ways, it’s possible to create enough content for up to three months in just a couple of days.
Not only will you be front of mind constantly, but you’ll be building serious goodwill and authority with your audience.
