Why videos need to be included in your social media marketing strategy

No matter what type of product or service you're selling, social media can be a great tool to use in helping share your company's values, goods, or story. However, with Facebook's algorithm changes, brands have to be more strategic with how they put their content out on their social channels. For example, a best practice for posting on Facebook and Twitter is that you include a photo with your status update. As it turns out, Socialbakers looked at more than 670,000 posts by 4,445 brand pages between October 2014 and February 2015 and found that video posts had an organic reach of 8.71% versus a reach of 3.73% for photo posts. Now wait, don't freak out and delete all your photo posts or create a job listing for a videographer. On the blog, I'll go over why your brand should start posting more videos on social media, some tips on how you can create engaging video content in-house and how to incorporate it into your social media marketing strategy.

• Before you start slicing and putting clips together, here's a few things you should keep in mind:

Consider creating a video similar to those paper mazes you use to figure out when you were a kid. You could start from the beginning and just work your way through to the end, but it might be easier to start from the end and work your way to the beginning. When creating a video, no matter how long or short it might be, you should always ask yourself, "What do I want people to think or do after seeing my video?" Asking this question before you start working on your video will help you plan out your video and make you think about what needs to be in your video between what you want in the video.

• Let's talk about why video needs to be included in your marketing strategy:

Whether you're in an agency setting or working in-house, you should try to incorporate videos into your marketing strategy. Not only because it receives better engagement from viewers organically, but it can also come in handy when trying to explain very technical, confusing processes, how to use a certain feature, or give a point of view to an event you're trying to promote. For example, if you've ever bought anything from Ikea, then you know how quickly things can go south if you accidentally misread a step. Can you imagine how much easier it would be for you, as a consumer, if you could just go to their website and pull up a video of the thing you bought being built? Let your video answer your consumers' questions with an evergreen, ever-important, informational video. 

• Videos are virtual storytellers and are in a format that is very easy for people to share:

When you go on Facebook, what do you see? Probably photos of your friends on vacation somewhere along with videos that they reshared. Now, why would they share a video from Mashable versus something from the New York Times? Not just because the New York Times doesn't mass produce videos like Mashable, but Mashable and other video journalism organizations are the masters of creating easy to consume, relatable, emotional content that tells a story. Despite your buyer personas being fictitious characters, the people they're based off are not. We're all human at the end of the day and love to share things that made us cry, laugh or just genuinely moves us. So if you want to tell a story about your brand, make sure you 1) make it with a purpose and 2) ask yourself, 'Would I share this as myself?'

• Tools to help you become a video editing wizard:

Learning these skill sets won't just help the clients and brands you have now, but also expand your skill set as an agency or individual. If you haven't played around with video editing before, you might want to play around in the Quicktime function on your computer, if you have a Mac. There, you'll be able to practice trimming, muting, and flipping video clips. After you feel a bit more comfortable, a tool you can use (if you're a Mac user) is iMovie. It's basically a cheaper, watered down version of Photoshop's CS6 that is very user friendly and can help you strengthen your video editing skills. If you are a creative with a Windows computer, you can rely on Windows Movie Maker as a starting point.

See? That wasn't so scary. There might be a few videos that had great concepts but just fall through near the end. Don't let this deter you. You'll only get better the more times you fall, get up, learn from your mistakes, and try again. Hope this blog helps you on your marketing journey, encourages you to start using video marketing and helps you expand your brand's reach through social media!