With the viewing of video on Facebook increasing every year - Facebook now serves more that 8 billion video views per day - it's important to do more than just link a video to your page and hope for the best.
Here are 3 tips that will give you an advantage in your marketing efforts.
1. Create a video release strategy -
Just posting a video or link to your Facebook page and expecting to the views to pile up is usually about as effective as going to a networking event and waiting for people to hand you their business cards. In order to be effective at both, you need to have a strategy in place to connect with the people that are there.
On Facebook the key to a successful strategy is to build anticipation through consistency. Start by planning on releasing a teaser to your video, or break your video concept into a series of shorter segments. Then schedule out the posting of those segments over weeks or months to keep followers coming back to your page. Sprinkle in a behind-the-scenes video or a Facebook live video post talking about what's coming up to build on your video content.
2. Create a silent version of the video -
Over 80% of Facebook video views are with the sound turned off. This means that the majority of times that people see your video on Facebook they will not be hearing it, but watching it for the visuals. If you plan for having a silent version of your video ready for Facebook, you are already ahead of your competitors who aren't thinking that way.
One approach is to produce a special version of your marketing message that is targeted specifically to Facebook viewers. This could be accomplished with visuals and text, or with an animated explainer video. Another alternative for the budget concious would be to take the videos you've already produced, and have them re-edited to include subtitles.
3. Upload directly to Facebook -
It's very tempting when creating a video post on Facebook to just repost a video link from YouTube or Vimeo. You've already hosted the video, so why waste the time to upload it again directly to Facebook? Isn't it better to just link it to the same place that your website links to? The answer, is no. Native Facebook videos reach twice as many viewers as linked videos according to researchers. Due to the higher reach they get 2x more likes, 3x more share and 7x more comments according to Search Engine Journal.