How Your Video Content Could Be Hindering Your Social Performance

When it comes to creating and running targeted social media campaigns your targeting and analysis can only take you so far. Facebook is very clear that the “quality” of your advert’s creative (video or images) needs to be high, and there’s even a ‘quality ranking’ associated with each advert that you run. Although the ‘quality’ of each advert is subjective, Facebook does give you a few tips on how to optimise your content accordingly, meaning that you can achieve the most results. 

Make it vertical

If you take nothing away from this blog other than to have all of your videos produced in vertical as opposed to landscape, I will be happy. Facebook (and Instagram) recommend that your videos are vertical (600 x 750 pixels or 4:5) or at the very least square (600 x 600 pixels or 1:1). The reason for this is very simple, it takes up more of you audience’s screen on mobile! And, with the majority of social media users being on mobile, this is a simple step to massively increase the performance of your ads. 

Make it short

Facebook adverts are not meant to be long, complex videos with a story arc and a plot twist. The aim of your advert is to get attention and achieve an objective. The best way to do this? Your videos need to be 15 seconds or less. This may seem strangely short, but with the average attention span being 8 seconds, and the average Facebook video watch time being under 10 seconds, you are actually just wasting your time by emphasising your character development and having a lovely but extremely dull intro/outro. Get your point across quickly and effectively, Facebook will thank you (so will your audience). 

Make it enjoyable without sound

I can’t emphasise enough the importance of this point. It’s a common fact that the majority of social media users use the platforms on mobile and without sound. The likelihood of you playing a video out loud whilst on public transport, for example, is very, very low. Why then, would you run adverts that require sound for understanding? If your audience doesn’t understand what is going on in the first few seconds because they aren’t listening with sound, they will simply scroll past and you’ve missed your opportunity. Subtitles are an easy way around this, but they’re definitely not the best way to go about it. If your video is short, snappy, full of quick transitions and cool effects, you should be able to get your point across with minimal words. 

Take a look at these examples of videos that are socially optimised for inspiration:

https://www.instagram.com/p/B3XTY5aB8Kn/

https://www.instagram.com/p/B3KX1CGg8Im/

https://www.instagram.com/p/B0QVgoLHdHN/