I’m sure you’ve noticed - video is now a common component of social media content marketing for a lot of brands. Facebook users alone watch 100 million hours of video a day. Take that number in for a moment. There are only 8,760 hours in a year. Facebook users' video watch time, if laid out sequentially rather than concurrently, would amount to 11,415 years worth of video watch time in a single day.
There are many reasons why there’s been such a tremendous boom in video and visual content as a whole. For one, our brains are busy making sense of visuals all day - that makes watching a video far more natural and less taxing than reading an article. There’s also a much lower expertise barrier for creating videos today. Additionally, social media platforms dedicated solely to video and image content have grown tremendously. Instagram for example went from a user base of 1 million in 2010 to 1 billion as of 2018.
Some additional research that makes a strong case for video content:
- A Facebook executive predicted that their platform will be all video and no text by 2021. (Quartz) A Facebook executive predicted that their platform will be all video and no text by 2021. Share on X
- People are 1.5 times more likely to watch video on their mobile phones. (Facebook) People are 1.5 times more likely to watch video on their mobile phones. Share on X
- Facebook videos receive 135% more organic reach on average than a Facebook photo. (Socialbakers) Facebook videos receive 135% more organic reach on average than a Facebook photo. Share on X
- Video content gets more engagement than text and image combined. (Smallbiztrends) Video content gets more engagement than text and image combined. Share on X
- 59% of executives would rather watch a video than read text. (Forbes) 59% of executives would rather watch a video than read text. Share on X
So what does it take to create engaging social media video content? It can be broken down to five essential elements:
- Pitch - Hook.
- High Quality Media.
- Narrative.
- Optimized Length.
- Call to Action.
Pitch-Hook
Social media users and people in general are naturally inclined to tune out most forms of content. Who can really blame them? Facebook announced that there were 65 million business pages at the start of 2017. That number jumped up to 80 million in 2019. Each of these pages is busy churning out content. What's more, all social media platforms run ads. It’s estimated that we’re bombarded by as many as 4,000 to 10,000 ads on a daily basis. With so many different interests vying for a user’s attention - users will tune out anything that doesn’t pop, grab their attention, or drive them to take action. That’s why a pitch - hook is an integral component of engaging social media videos. For a video to be successful, it needs to cut through and demand that a user pays attention. So what’s a pitch-hook?
Pitch: This is the main idea that you want to throw out into the world. Here’s an example of a pitch:
“The formula for an engaging social media video is much simpler than most of us believe.”
Hook: this is where you capitalize on your pitch. You aim to capture the viewer's attention. Here’s an example of that pitch with a hook:
“The formula for an engaging social media video is much simpler than most of us believe… today, we’ll reveal how to put one together.”
Make Your Pitch-Hook Clear and Fast
What’s clearer than being clear? Being crystal clear. If a viewer can’t ascertain what your video is about in the first 10 seconds - they’ll mostly likely scroll on to the next thing on their newsfeed. Visible Measures found that 19.4% of users will click away from a video after the first 20 seconds. Visible Measures found that 19.4% of users will click away from a video after the first 20 seconds. Share on X If you place your pitch-hook in the first 20 seconds, you’re more likely to keep viewers engaged for the remainder of your video. Which brings us to the next part of engaging social media videos.
Some additional pitch-hook styles:
Communal: “Our community is seeing a big rise in visual content. Here are 10 quick video marketing statistics every marketer should know.”
Exciting: “We’ve discovered what makes for a perfect social media video, today we’ll present you with a full breakdown.”
Thought provoking: “If you’re not investing in social media video marketing, then you’re falling behind. We know it seems daunting, but here’s how you can create a video in less than one hour.”
Dramatic: “Marketers are failing at creating engaging social media video. Here’s why.”
Aggressive: Have your social media videos failed miserably? Have you wondered why that is? Then watch this one minute video.”
Narrative
A pitch-hook is intended to set the tone of the rest of a video. What comes next in an engaging video is usually a story. Why a story? Storytelling is a strong way to build and maintain engagement for your video content. But what is it about storytelling that gets people engaged? Is binge watching Netflix a modern phenomenon or is this proclivity to sit and watch one story after another something with deeper roots? It turns out that we’re naturally inclined to identify and pay attention to patterns (i.e. stories). When you employ storytelling in your social media videos you’re going to tap into some primordial human traits - ones of anticipation and confirmation seeking. You don’t have to take my word for it. If you’re interested in a TL;DR take on this - I recommend reading Mark Mattson’s Frontiers in Neuroscience paper titled, “Superior pattern processing is the essence of the evolved human brain” and “how to read literature like a professor” by Thomas Foster.
Some narrative styles that work really well for social media include:
Tutorials and How-To's
Buzzfeed’s Tasty has built up a massive and highly engaged following by producing how-to videos.
Announcements and Reveals
Ben and Jerry’s product reveals are some of my favorite social media videos. In their case, the pitch-hook would be the flavor combination and the CTA is implicit - buy this ice cream.
Trending News and Topical Media
The World Economic Forum does a great job of condensing trending and topical news items in short social media friendly videos.
High Quality Media and Visuals
The very best pitch-hook will live or die, in part, based on the quality of the media you use for your videos. There’s a reason that big budget films with thin storylines, but breathtaking visuals are box office successes. It’s all about the visuals and cinematography and often that’s enough to keep people glued to screens for hours. While social media videos aren’t competing on the big screen, they are competing on the small screen. If your media doesn’t match your topic or you use a completely inappropriate color combination - you’re likely to lose a lot of people. I recommend checking out canva’s guide on color theory to brush up on some ideal color combinations for your video text, intro, outro, and branding. If you find that your yellow text highlighting and color scheme isn’t a big hit in certain parts of Africa or Latin America - that’s because yellow is the traditional color of mourning. Who knew?
Optimized Length
There’s research that would suggest that the human attention span is less than that of a goldfish. The study by Microsoft Corp., found that people lose concentration after about 8 seconds whereas a goldfish’s threshold is 9 seconds. What does that mean for your social media videos? As you might’ve guessed: shorter is better. Hubspot offers some guidance on the ideal video length. I’ll recap their findings for you here:
Call to Action
Finally, your social media videos should have a call to action. A call to action acts as the transition taking the viewers from passive content consumers to involved contributors. What that action is will depend on your particular objective. Whether you want new followers, clients, or just some engagement with your particular topic - be sure to ask the viewer to do something!
Wistia does a great job of incorporating a pitch-hook (learn how to shoot video), a visual narrative (people prepping DSLR cameras to shoot videos), high quality visuals, optimized length, and a call to action.
6 Tools for Creating Social Media Videos
If you’re ready to start making some engaging social media videos then you might want to consider using one of these six tools. The tools offer a variety of formats, but I’ve found that square videos work best in most cases. The folks over at Digital Marketing Stream wrote up a piece on using square video across social media that digs into the research behind why that seems to work well on social.
Lumen5
Lumen5 uses Ai to make videos for you! It’ll scrape your content, pull out headlines and main points, and then pairs your content with media from their free database.
Watermarked videos are free and it’s $49 per month for high definition watermark-free videos.
Animoto
Animoto is a storyboard style video creation tool. Styling, branding, and customization options are extensive as are pre-built templates. Their media library contains over 1,000,000 stock images and videos.
Watermarked videos start at $9 per month and business plans cost $94 per month.
Typito
Typito is specifically geared toward social media videos. Videos can be optimized for square or vertical settings allowing you to quickly create videos geared toward mobile users. Their plans include access to 600,000+ high-quality images.
Plans start at $29 per month for 5 video projects and goes up to $149 per month for 60 video projects.
Adobe Spark
Adobe Spark is a drag, drop, sequence, and publish video creation tool. It’s simple to use, but it doesn’t come with a media library - you’ll have to hunt down or create your own media to use this tool.
Watermarked videos are free and it’s $9.99 per month for watermark free videos.
Notable Additional Readings
- Social media videos are only one aspect of the video content marketing spectrum. For the more B2B driven businesses, you might find that webinars are going to be more effective for your bottom line. If that’s the case, then I recommend “How To Turn Strangers Into Qualified Leads” which is essentially an article on the anatomy of webinars and their promotion cycle.
- While this article addresses short bite sized social media videos, there’s an entire aspect to video content marketing where lengthier videos made by YouTubers have found tremendous success. If YouTube is more your style, then this article on optimizing your videos for YouTube gives a nice quick breakdown on technically optimizing videos for engagement.
- There are some additional resources out there if you want to jump into video marketing. While this article addresses social media videos, I recommend this article by Wisepops which lays out the anatomy of engaging website popup videos.
One final note: I hope you found this article useful. If you’re going to invest some time in creating social media videos, I hope you’ll check out our social media aggregator tool. With Juicer you’re able to connect 15+ social media profiles and display your social media posts, including videos, right on your website with our easy to install WordPress plugin. Start your free account today or check out the other Juicer plan options.
Matt Bentley is the Marketing Lead at Juicer.io – a simple way to aggregate all of your brands’ hashtag and social media posts into a single beautiful social media feed for your website. Our product has been used by McDonalds, Ralph Lauren, Starbucks, Expedia, Stanford University, Bank of America, Deloitte, Bon Jovi, and the Golden Globes.
