Creating engaging social media videos can be a challenge, but it’s worth the effort to produce content that your followers will want to watch and engage with. If your content isn’t relevant to them, they’ll most likely stop watching the video and you’ll miss out on opportunities to market your brand.
A study by Wyzowl found that 87 percent of marketers believe video content is effective for achieving marketing goals. That same study also found that businesses using video enjoy 41 percent more web traffic than those that don’t. Not to mention the growing trend of younger generations turning to social media for search instead of Google. So, it’s smart to invest in creating content that is interesting, engaging, and on-brand for your business.
So, what can you do to make your company’s social media videos engaging? Try these tips to get started, and learn even more with our free video strategy guide.
1. Plan ahead to create engaging social media videos
Before you even pick up your camera and press record, it’s important to have a clear plan and measurable goals in mind for your project. What is the purpose of your video? Who is your intended audience? What kind of tone and message do you want to convey? Does this video’s concept align with your overall social strategy and business goals?
Once you are able to answer these questions, decide which social media platforms you want your video to live on. Then, start writing out your script.
Having clear objectives for what you want your video content to achieve is a crucial step in the video production process.
2. Hook your audience on your video from the very start
Audiences today are consuming hundreds (if not thousands) of pieces of content every day. As a result, attention spans on social media are becoming smaller and smaller. Within the first few seconds of your video, you need to hook your audience and give them a reason not to scroll past it.
Storyblocks in-house video producer provides quick tips on how to sync your video and audio in Premiere Pro.
In these first few seconds, you need to answer two questions from your viewer:
- What’s your video about?
- Why should they care?
For businesses-to-business videos, you don’t need to capture the attention of everyone who might see it. You just need to capture your intended audience’s attention. The “hook” is a critical part of your video, regardless of the channel you plan to post on. It should be fluid, brief, and engaging. You can achieve that by addressing a direct pain point or asking a question your audience wants the answer to.
Some ideas for an engaging hook are:
- Open with a shocking fact using a text motion graphic
- Ask a personal question
- State a problem and offer a solution
- Begin telling a story
- Show a compelling preview in your video introduction
3. Provide value to your audience and solve for a need in your video
When you’re creating video for social media, you should always have one key goal in mind: Provide value to your audience.
In order to do this well, your product shouldn’t be the “star of the show.” Instead, create social media videos that show off your business’ human side. That means making your audience the main focal point of your video. Zero in on their needs instead of rattling off details about your product. This allows you to form a personal connection with your digital community. And personal connections open the door for you to deliver the information that your target audiences actually want.
A human-centric approach to video marketing requires some due diligence on your part. You’ll need to gain a solid understanding of the problems your target audiences are trying to solve — and what topics interest them. Start by studying your target audience on social media. Take a look at what you’ve posted in recent months, and try to identify any patterns around topics or content types that have garnered strong engagement. Then choose some followers who represent your next video’s target audience. Check out the videos they’ve liked and shared from other businesses. You’ll likely find some clues about what types of content will resonate with them.
How Storyblocks makes engaging social media videos
We recently launched the Storyblocks Plugin for Adobe Premiere Pro. It’s a really cool time-saving product feature that gives our members unlimited access to our entire diverse, royalty-free stock media library — directly in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Within the first 10 seconds of the video we created to announce the plugin, we addressed problems that we know our core audiences face with video production. Once we established that we understand their challenges, we dove into how the plugin can help — rather than just talking about the technicalities of the product itself.
YouTube video announcing the Storyblocks Plugin for Adobe Premiere Pro
From there, we created a second short-form video narrated by Kyle, our in-house video producer. Kyle has a lot in common with the target demographic for this plugin, so it was an obvious choice to lean on him to create content about this product. In that video, he explains what he loves about the new plugin and how he uses it in his everyday workflow. By presenting the perspective of an in-house expert who’s relatable to our target audience, we were able to establish a sense of trust with our viewers. And that trust leads to a stronger personal connection.
Storyblocks in-house video producer explaining how he uses the Storyblocks Plugin for Adobe Premiere Pro to improve his workflow.
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4. Keep your company’s social media videos short and sweet
According to Woosuite, short-form video has the highest ROI of any social media marketing tactic at 30%.
Needless to say, short-form business social media videos are here to stay. They’re indispensable in our digitally driven world where audiences are constantly consuming content at a mile a minute. Once you’ve captured their attention with a solid hook, your goal is to keep them engaged for every second after that with a valuable message. And the fewer seconds in your video, the easier it is to do. That’s just math!
While concepting the “body” of your video, ask yourself:
What’s going to stop the scroll, but also prevent people from scrolling again once they’ve stopped?
If your hook was captivating enough to pique their interest, the rest of your video should be focused on maintaining their attention so they watch it until the end.
A short-form social media video for business should generally be 30-90 seconds long. It should feel quick, but also be substantial enough to engage viewers and deliver value. When they’re done well, these kinds of videos encourage sharing on social media. And sharing boosts video views, reach, likes, and comments. The videos that get shared the most provide value and capture the viewer’s attention for the entire duration of the video.
Short-form videos allow you to create impactful, relatable, and effective content without the effort required to produce something more detailed in long form.
5. Ditch the jargon in your company’s social media videos
Oftentimes, business messaging on social media can feel dry, corporate jargon-y, and dare I say… like word salad.
Remember, your audience on social media are humans (unless you violated the Golden Rule of Social Media and bought followers — or you’re just unlucky and bots have infiltrated your IG comments). Some of those humans may have more business buying power than others, and some may influence decision-making more than others. Regardless, they’re all human. It’s your job to talk to them like one.
Practicing what you’re going to say in your video is a great way to weed corporate-speak out of your script and make sure you sound approachable.
Always read your video script out loud before you record, and omit unnecessary words to simplify sentences when you can. Do you really need to say “utilize”? Or can you just say “use?”
A few quick and simple script edits can make a huge impact on your video’s performance. And having a natural-sounding delivery can go a long way toward building stronger connections with your audience.
6. Optimize your business video for each social media platform
People expect different things from different platforms. For example, they may go to YouTube to search for video editing tutorials and LinkedIn to search for a job or share a career milestone. Scrolling on TikTok is a much different experience than scrolling on Twitter. And users don’t go to Reddit for DIY project ideas — they use Pinterest for that.
Because audience expectations for style, content, and tone differ from platform to platform, your social media strategy needs to reflect that. You may just need to change the aspect ratio of your video, or maybe the content itself will just perform better on certain platforms than others.
Storyblocks How I Made This series
As a business, you need to think more granularly. That requires research and testing on your target audiences.
Some questions to consider in your research and testing process are:
- What social media platforms does your target audience spend the most time on?
- How do they engage and interact with certain styles of content?
- What platforms are your competitors the most active and successful on?
In addition, take note of the types of content that performs best on different social channels — not just in a general sense, but for your own business’ channels. The more data-driven decisions you make for your social media strategy, the more likely your engagement metrics will improve. Keep in mind, data doesn’t always tell the whole story, though. Sometimes, video content that has historically performed well may flop.
Social media algorithms are an ever-changing riddle. They’re both confusing and frustrating for marketers to fully understand. And, the humans on the other side of the screen consuming the content (your target audiences) are also ever-changing. Their wants and desires for a certain type of content one day can change the next. Both of these things can impact the performance of your video, even if they are out of your control.
You might put time and effort into a social media video that doesn’t perform the way you want or expect it to. In fact, you probably will (it happens to the best of us). When it happens to you, think of it less as a “flop” and more as an opportunity to improve your strategy based on actual results. Social media is all about trial and error. Every piece of content you publish should teach you something that will help make the next one even better.
I love this quote by Zaria Parvez, (aka the Duolingo owl) on LinkedIn, “Great social content comes from being okay with venturing off, steering back (if needed) and finding new paths to relay the same message.”
7. Prioritize value over production and perfection
If you only follow one tip in this blog post, make it this one.
Audiences don’t expect you to be perfect on social media. To build a truly authentic connection with your audience, your company’s social media videos need to be relatable and valuable to them. Your followers care less than you might think about your production quality, and more than you might expect about how you make them feel.
This is great news for marketers.
In a world where video marketing is a must-have for businesses, you can still create valuable and high-quality content, even if you don’t have access to expensive equipment and an entire production team. Even if you have an in-house video production team, odds are they need an extra hand in content creation to keep up with the massive demand for video on social media platforms.
Regardless of what level of experience you have with video production, you can film high-value, engaging videos from the phone that’s most likely in your hand right now. (Just follow the steps above, and you’ll do great. I promise.) High-value is not defined by the cost of your equipment or even the fidelity of your finished videos — it’s defined by how your target audience engages with the content.
Oftentimes, the most daunting part of the video production process for non-video experts is what comes after filming — the editing process. There are a lot of in-depth video production software tools on the market for professional video editors. These programs can be intimidating and confusing for marketers who have little to no video editing experience, though.
You don’t need to be a video expert to make engaging social media videos
For marketers who aren’t savvy in the Adobe suite, Storyblocks offers an easy, intuitive, and collaborative video editor called Maker for Teams. It enables businesses to streamline the creation process by giving even video production novices the power to create video. With custom branding and video template features, you can set up colors, fonts, logos, and more to ensure consistency across all of your team’s video projects.
Maker for Teams is fully integrated with Storyblocks’ royalty-free library, so you can access unlimited high-quality stock assets for your videos. And, it also allows you to upload your own content to create and edit high-quality and engaging videos. For social media marketers, Maker also has an easy resize feature, where you can instantly change a video’s aspect ratio to fit different social platforms with just one click.
Getting Started with Maker
Let’s start creating social media videos for your business
Rather than worrying about creating the “perfect” video, try focusing your efforts on the value it provides to your audience.
Well, what are you waiting for? Grab your smartphone and start creating content!
When you partner with Storyblocks, you’ll gain access to more than one million royalty-free assets, from video footage to templates, music, and photos. Imagine how easy that will make it for you and your team to make business videos for your social media accounts. Don’t worry, our business plans give you access to our easy and intuitive video editor, Maker for Teams. You’ll be creating and posting more social videos in no time.
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Let’s talk about what my team can do with Storyblocks.
