Effective Social Media Video content

Social media – and effective use of video in social media channels – is an opportunity that no marketer should miss to grow reach and brand awareness, and it is an important component of a well-considered video marketing strategy. That said, I often get questions about how to build a strategy where video in social media works hand-in-hand with the video on companies’ own properties. Here are a few tips to help you think about how the two pieces should complement each other, and how to create social media video content that will get people back to your sites.

The whole concept of using social media as a marketing tool is to think of it as a fishing net. You want to cast wide in order to draw in the largest catch. You can and should build a presence directly on the social channels where your prospects are, but ultimately your objective is to drive traffic back to your properties where you are able to control the user experience, collect better analytics, and have the ability to convert prospects and retain customers.

Social media channels warrant their own style of video content, meaning bite size video, partial stories, or live event highlights that create the desire for viewers to find more information and drive them to visit your site for the rest of the story. Think of it as the movie trailer version of your main video content, which you should not view as mutually exclusive at all from your other video content. In fact, creating content geared towards social media marketing is easier than you think, and is a supporting rather than separate activity.

Let’s get practical and look at a few ways you can actually create this content. I know the challenge of handling an additional video deliverable first hand. When I was a Brightcove customer, I initially avoided creating social media content because my primary content was plenty time consuming and pricey. However, when I dug into it, I realized it was not too much incremental effort, and I discovered tricks along the way that made the social content easy to create and highly effective in driving traffic back to my sites. It ended up being the biggest bang for the buck!

If you learn only one thing today, let it be this: the biggest trick is to plan these secondary pieces from the very beginning. When you are planning a shoot, writing a script, and before you start directing an on-camera talent, you should decide what these secondary pieces could be. (Also check out my colleague James Hamar’s blog about the importance of planning ahead for a shoot). I’ve discovered that once you have cameras, lights and talents on set it takes very little effort to have them shoot one more version just for your social channels. This is where most of us fail. We think of social marketing after we’re done shooting and then we have to create something last minute, which seldom yields effective content.

The same thing goes for editing a trailer or shortened version of the video. You’ll be surprised how willing your video editor will be to create a short version of the finished pieces. Truth is 90% of the work is done, and it takes little effort to edit and receive two videos for the same resources as one.

Another great way to create marketing content is to have someone hang out on set and shoot behind the scenes footage. You’re looking for funny out-takes, shots with camera gear or people in it, or anything that tells part of the story and lets the viewers become invested in seeing your final video.

One of my favorite ways to collect social marketing videos is recording a live event stream. The Brightcove Live module has a built-in trim tool, which allows you to mark in and out cut points throughout your long-form video so that you can save them as little sub-clips right to your Video Cloud account. These can then easily be shared to YouTube, Facebook Twitter, you name it, directly from your account. By knowing how you intend to use the footage, you’ll be able to pay attention during the live event, jot down notes on interesting events within the live stream, and then create social videos quickly and easily when the live stream ends.

I hope you noticed that in each of these scenarios, the common theme is to plan ahead. Video production professionals know that time spent in pre-production saves you double to triple the time fixing things in post-production. Creating the social media portion of your video marketing strategy is no different. Even minimal planning up front will save you tons of work later on, allowing you to create and easily syndicate compelling social content that drives to your business goals.