When it comes to producing great social media videos that increase engagement and audience growth, there is no perfect formula. But there are some ingredients that can be your path to success.
1. Repurpose your successful content and convert it into a video
Creating high-quality social videos isn't cheap. Therefore, we are always looking for blogs or topics that we have published in the form of written text that have met with great demand. And we convert it into video content. This is an effective way for us to reuse content instead of investing resources in something that has not been tested.We share similar audiences across our blog and social channels, so we know that if your written blog post performs well, there's a good chance you can create a video that is popular. This is the case with the previous TED Talks blog post. And when it was successful it was converted into a video.
Any piece of content that becomes a social video must meet these criteria:
- Easy-to-digest content (often in a "listicle" format)
- The possibility of condensing the information in a one-minute format
- Opportunity for graphics and / or visuals
And since the TED Talks blog post includes the videos themselves, it was naturally suitable for the video format. It was easy for the team to obtain images and audio clips to accompany the text.
2. Write a short text
The transcripts for our social videos are no more than half a page for a 1-minute video. In the case of TED Talks and other short videos, texts are usually around 100 words. If there is a lot of text on the video, it is difficult for the viewer to follow it.3. Choose the appropriate platform for your video
We decided to share our TED Talks social video on Facebook and Instagram. We chose Facebook and Instagram because they have a strong audience of social media practitioners interested in advancing their careers.4. Choose the correct video direction
There are several options you should consider before shooting your video in portrait, landscape, square, and full screen format. Each direction has its own advantages depending on the type of video you're creating and where it's published and shared. For example, if we knew that our audience was divided across desktop and mobile, we'd use the square because it looks good in both.We chose the vertical format for the TED Talks video because we wanted to focus on the mobile experience first. And from previous videos like this one, we learned that most of our viewers were watching them on a mobile phone.
5. Apply the unique visual aesthetic to your brand
If we're running a video series or campaign that belongs to a campaign, we'll ask our designers to select specific color palettes and icons for a seamless look and feel. We also make sure that any videos in the series are the same length.TED Talks was a standalone video. So he didn't need a specific aesthetic match in it. However, it matches the aesthetic of our video genre and style, which uses the same combination of typography and animation.
Once we create a "theme" for a certain type of video, we use it as our template. This saves a lot of time and resources when it comes time to create more videos in the future.
6. Create animated / motion graphics
Our video team uses Adobe Creative Cloud to create our social videos, specifically After Effects and Audition. After Effects is for Audition animation and animation for voiceover and music. These tools are the industry standard for animation and sound design, but there are other options like Premiere and Final Cut Pro X.After Effects and Audition require learning and experience, so it's not something we would recommend unless you have some production experience. If you don't have an in-house team, it can be helpful to outsource video production at this point.
Creating our TED Talks video from the video team took about two days. Based on the text, we found screenshots and screenshots that matched the talking points and built the visuals accordingly.
7. Add an audio clip
If viewers are following your video with the audio playing, it's important to keep them engaged with the background music. We obtain our music from music licensing sites like Premium Beat and License Lab.The cost of the music is between $ 25 and $ 100. There are also tons of free music sites out there if you are on a tight budget. If we are obtaining music from a paid service, before that we upload a preview of the music so we can test it with our video.
As a general rule we choose music without words. We don't want anything to distract. That is why we choose the electronic, audio, simple or technical options. The music we picked for the TED Talks video was cheery and playful to match the educational theme.
While finding an audio to fit our video is important, we are also making sure to optimize the silent display as 85 percent of people consume Facebook video content with the audio turned off.
8. Optimize your video for a specific platform
The TED Talks video performed really well on Facebook and Instagram because it was optimized for those platforms. The video dimensions recommended for Facebook depend on the type of video you create, so it is important to follow them for the best user experience.We created our Facebook video first because it was our longest release. It was just under a minute, in portrait format, and under 1GB.
Then we forwarded and trimmed this video into three 15-second clips for Instagram, which was also in portrait format and under 50MB. We added "swipe" in our edits for Instagram videos because it has a different user experience that requires people to swipe up to view the link.
9. Target the right audience
Even the best videos need to be shared with the right audience for them to resonate. In our TED Talks video, we targeted people who were:- Interested in TED Talks
- They had job titles related to social media
- Already watch one of our previous videos
Based on these categories, we had a focused target group on Facebook and Instagram. Knowing your audience is the key to getting a high engagement rate.
10. Measuring video performance to improve future content
Our TED Talks Social Video is built on learning from previous videos. Based on user data and performance stats for similar videos, we knew what needs to be tweaked to make TED Talks more successful.If we don't test and duplicate every social video, we won't know how to improve our strategy. That's why we closely monitor the performance of all our videos and seriously track demographics, audience and interests. We also group our videos according to different genres so that we can understand why some of our videos perform well.
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