Business Video For Facebook
“In five years, most of [Facebook] will be video”
— Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg (2014)
When it comes to promoting your business online, you can’t ignore the looming presence of social media.
Love it or hate it – it’s everywhere.
And, of all the major social media platforms out there, Facebook remains their heavyweight champion.
As of the fourth quarter of 2017, Facebook had 2.2 billion monthly active users (Statistica, 2017).
That’s a lot of people sharing a lot of content and engaging with one another.
What’s particularly interesting is the growing prevalence of video content on Facebook.
Over 8 billion videos (or 100 million hours of videos) are watched on Facebook every day (TechCrunch, 2016).
Put simply – video is taking over Facebook.
Video gets more likes, shares, and comments on Facebook than any other kind of content.
So, if you want to build a strong Facebook presence for your company, and have access to that big, worldwide audience, you need to be making some compelling business videos for Facebook.
But, wait.
Throwing a video on your business’s Facebook page isn’t going to magically grow your business.
You have to be strategic.
Here are some important facts and proven strategies you need to be aware of before launching a video marketing campaign on Facebook…
1. People are primarily on Facebook to have fun
Never forget why people are on Facebook in the first place.
It’s called SOCIAL media for a reason.
People are there to chat up their friends, engage, have some fun, and quickly move on to the next thing.
They are NOT there to buy your product.
They are NOT there to learn about your service.
They are NOT there to grow YOUR business.
Never try to take the social out of social media.
If you want your video to get views on Facebook, you need to offer a ton of value.
Your video can’t be all about you or your business. It has to be about your audience.
Your video must be educational, inspiring, entertaining, or any combination of the above.
It must be something that people will be enticed to click on, watch all the way through, like and comment on, and share with others.
2. Your Facebook video needs to be the right length
Research indicates that human attention spans have dwindled over the years, and this could largely be a result of the online digital era.
According to a study from Microsoft Corp., people now generally lose concentration after 8 seconds – this is shorter than the attention span of a goldfish (who clocks in at 9 seconds).
So, when people are scrolling through their newsfeed, and your video comes up, it needs to grab their attention quickly.
Then, it needs to provide massive value so that it keeps their attention.
In any case, most viewers will tire of watching the video and will want to stop watching by the time they reach the 90-second mark.
Facebook’s algorithm – which effects how much visibility your content gets on Facebook – used to favor very short videos.
But nowadays, changes to the algorithm make it such that longer videos get favored.
The key is “percent completion”. According to Buffer Social, if people are “watching 50% of a 30-second video and 50% of a 10-minute video, the 10-minute video will rank better in the News Feed than the 30-second video. That’s because the 10-minute video has to be more engaging than the 30-second video to keep people watching for five minutes (vs 15 seconds).”
So, your videos need to find that sweet spot… be long enough so that you don’t get sidelined by the Facebook algorithm, but be short (and more importantly, interesting) enough to hold your target audience’s attention.
3. Upload your videos natively to Facebook
When you think of posting a business video on Facebook, you might intuitively think of uploading your video to YouTube first, and then share the link on Facebook.
This isn’t entirely a bad idea, but you will win the favors of the Facebook algorithm and get way more views if you upload your video to Facebook natively.
Native video is simply a video that is uploaded directly to Facebook, as opposed to sharing a link to a third-party platform such as YouTube.
Native video on Facebook gets 10X more views on Facebook than videos posted via links to third party platforms like YouTube (Forbes, 2017).
And, according to a Quintly study, there were more than 4x more interactions on Facebook native videos than those shared from other platforms, including YouTube and Vimeo.
When you think about it, it makes perfect sense.
If you post a YouTube video to Facebook, you run the risk of your viewers getting distracted, and losing your Facebook audience to YouTube.
Facebook knows this, so its algorithm heavily favors native video to keep its audience securely on its own platform.
Bottom line – if you want more views and more engagement on Facebook, upload your videos natively to Facebook.
Now, this is not to say you shouldn’t upload your videos to YouTube as well – you definitely should. YouTube videos perform very well in Google searches, after all. It’s just that if your goal is to get more views on Facebook specifically, you need to keep your videos native to Facebook.
4. Most videos are viewed on Facebook without sound
This might be hard to believe, but 85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound (Digiday, 2016).
With this in mind, you will want to make sure you make use of Facebook’s captioning feature and have it so that captions show up on the screen whenever your video gets viewed with the sound turned off.
You’ll also want to make sure you provide informative text descriptions to accompany your videos.
Captioning your videos isn’t very complicated. In fact, you can employ an online service such as Rev.com that will create your caption files for you at a very reasonable rate, and then all you will have to do is upload the file – called an SRT file – along with your video file when you upload natively to Facebook.
Just the Facts
Building your brand on Facebook is a wise idea.
Facebook boasts over 2.2 billion monthly active users worldwide and as a business, you don’t want to miss out on that potential audience.
By far, video content performs the best on Facebook. When creating Facebook videos, you want to make sure you add value to your audience, first and foremost.
- Don’t just give your viewers a sales pitch – stand out from the crowd and help them in some way with a message that resonates with them.
- Understand that there is a lot of content on the internet to distract them, so you need to grab their attention quickly.
- You then have the responsibility of holding their attention, but most people will want to drop off after 90 seconds.
- You will get more views and engagement if you upload your videos to Facebook natively.
- Also, keep in mind that most people watch Facebook videos without sound, so it is in your best interests to go the extra mile and provide captions and descriptive text to accompany your videos.