Lights! Camera! Facebook Video Action!
Brands expect big results on Facebook. Fresh ideas and photo content win fans, but what else can a social media manager try to spice up a Business Page? Consider Facebook video play!
Facebook users now automatically see videos in their newsfeed. Brands are rewarded for video uploads with huge increases in reach. Video posts outperform other posts by 10X, and get significantly more reach than an outside link to YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion or any other video player.
There is already a 200% increase in Facebook video views since June 2014, and over 3 billion uploaded videos. Since November 2014, 80 percent of all digital video views have come from Facebook! That number will continue to grow now that Facebook allows users to embed videos from the platform onto their own websites.
Still not convinced of the power of the auto-play video on Facebook? Here’s a recent example from one of our client's pages.
On February 19th, we posted a promotion video of George Lopez for his Omaze charity campaign. In just two weeks, the video had nearly 4 million video views and over 300K engaged fans —a staggering reach, well exceeding 13 million.
The video was 2:46 minutes, and it held the average viewer’s attention for nearly 60 seconds, allowing enough time to understand the campaign. The video post lead to over 1.7 million post clicks directly to the charity.
Compare the video post with the average of the top 5 non-video posts from February:
Video Post: REACH 13.7 million | ENGAGEMENT 312K (Likes, Comments, Shares) | POST CLICKS 1.76 million
Average Post: REACH 4.52 million | ENGAGEMENT 82.3K | POST CLICKS 446K
This is a great (and inexpensive!) way to increase exposure for an important product, service, celebrity, or charity. Including links in a post usually lowers reach, but this is not the case with video posts. The power of the auto play offers exponential reach.
One word of caution, be careful not to post long clips. As with our sample, the average view length was less than a minute. No matter how important the message, chances are that your target audience won't watch for more than 60 seconds. Keep videos around 15 seconds for maximum engagement.
Should you only use videos on Facebook? DON'T DO THAT! If you constantly upload video-only content, your audience will get bored and may unlike your page. Like most things in life, you can have too much of a good thing. Try one to two videos a week to test your results. Send us a link on Twitter @ThinPigMedia and we will watch it too!