Video for Social Platforms Series
…10 Strong Moves For Facebook Video Success
Mark likes our “Video for Social Platforms” series – and we like him too!
It seems almost unimaginable doesn’t it? Yet some of us can still hazily recall a time when we habitually forgot the names of our fifth grade classmates; where our high-school crushes remained forever young in our minds (secretly crushing on us, of course); a world where we did not know the kind of dog our favorite lead guitarist owns; where only people paid to do it wrote obituaries for octogenarian character actors; a world where MySpace was “cool” and seemed to have a great and limitless future.
Well, so much for all that. And while it’s fun (for us oldsters) to make jokes about Facebook, the truth is, Facebook has cracked the code, more than any other application or platform, for what the internet is really good at, and good-for. Turns out, human beings love to be connected. Love to form tribes. Love to spend time with one another -- regardless of real-space or real-time. Which is why Facebook is everybody’s homepage – as the Comscore chart below makes abundantly clear:
Source: Comscore via Wired.com
Facebook Makes The Play For Video – and So Should You
With all of those eyeballs (and hearts and minds, and likes and dislikes, and groups, and links, and clicks) Facebook’s advantage in gaining video dominance is a devastating combination of both “face-time” and big-data-driven insight. In other words, they have your attention, and they know you -- and they know your tribe too. And every time you take a quiz to find out which member of Beverly Hills 90210 you are – they know you even better.
The only move they needed to make – and they’ve made it -- is making video easy for brands and people to manage: not only to upload – but to distribute and measure and test and optimize via FB’s interface & services. In a nutshell, we believe they took their time, and did it right.
And so far, it’s worked. As we reported in the introduction to this series, Facebook has taken over YouTube as the top destination for the posting of videos by brands. eMarketer sums up the big turnover: “Nearly nine in 10 US advertising executives polled said they planned to run a video ad campaign on Facebook in the coming year—the highest response-rate out of all networks studied, and up from fewer than two-thirds who had done so in the past year. Despite usage intent rising 3.7 percentage points, YouTube fell to second place, trailing Facebook by 5.5 points.”
Here’s the graph that show the two titans and their welterweight counterparts:
Facebook’s goals are to not only take over video-investment on the Internet, but to begin to take it away from the old world as well. This is from an article in Mashable, regarding Facebook’s 2015-1Q call – the italics are ours:
"Facebook has continued to roll out auto-play video ads with additional advertisers and we expect a gradual expansion throughout this year," Arvind Bhatia, an analyst with Sterne Agee, wrote in an investor note this week. "Ultimately, video ads will help Facebook more directly go after the $200B+ worldwide TV advertising market."
Facebook Video: 10 Keys to Help You Do it Right
We hope the case for getting active with video on Facebook is more than made. The only question that remains then, is how to make the most of it?
Here are our tippy top tips for making your Facebook video get liked, shared, linked, clicked, and basically, loved lots and lots:
1. KNOW THE TERRITORY: We recommend diving in and learning as much as you can about Facebook Video and Facebook Video Ads as you develop your strategy. Facebook has invested considerable resources to make this easy for you. We recommend you start with Facebook to learn more, and take advantage of their investment in making video decisions & testing easy for you.
2. DON'T RELY ON ORGANIC REACH: Facebook most recent algorithm has throttled down businesses’ exposure on FB Newsfeeds to a mere trickle (they’re not wasting any time cashing in on their reach & targeting advantages.) Two recent articles on Contently will help you understand how this affects you, and helps you understand how to test on a small scale and then invest in winners.
3. GO NATIVE: To gain the considerable benefit of Facebook’s robust measurement tools, and to fully utilize the seductive capabilities of AUTO-PLAY, upload your videos directly to Facebook. Don’t host them elsewhere and link to them: they’ll just sit there like schutmmies not auto-playing, and even when people do look at them, you won’t get anywhere near the detail and nuance of reporting you’d get from Facebook Native.
4. DON’T BORE US, GET TO THE CHORUS: Autoplay means that you want to frontload your video with the good stuff. Grab folks right away. Boom! If you’re looking for inspiration, here are the 50 best movie openings of all time, according to film.com. Remember however, that AUTOPLAY is going to give you numbers for views like you’ve never seen before: that’s because views are counted whenever a user sees 3 seconds worth of your video. To measure real engagement – look deeper into Facebook metrics for your videos. View times are graphed comprehensively there.
5. USE A LITTLE SMART COPY: A little image, a little text – Facebook’s SMART COPY feature allows you to show and tell. Does it work? Well…. “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”
6. TARGET -- BUT DON’T OVER-TARGET: Facebook provides a dizzying array of targeting options – but watch out: they cost. Don’t let the data-freaks go completely wild. Bring some fiscal conservatives along for the ride to make sure the targeting that you’re doing is worth your spend. Consider testing and retargeting before you dig in to spend more…
7. RETARGET: It’s not just for ads and banners. It’s totally for video too. Check out this smart and focused article about retargeting for video from LiveRail. Facebook has retargeting capabilities as well. …Of course they do.
8. TEST, TEST, TEST: Facebook offers a great platform for you to test your videos with small buys before spending to spread the word among the uninitiated. Once you have some basic information to work with, you can optimize with Facebook distribution options, and keep it all on the up and up with Facebook metrics.
9. TEST SEVERAL DIFFERENT CREATIVES: The benefit of having a diversity of videos for any given campaign – different executions, edits, endings, cuts – is realized very quickly on Facebook. That is -- if you have that variety to test. Consider making creative breadth and variety part of your strategy.
10. SPEND A LITTLE, SPEND A LOT: You can think of Facebook as the antithesis of the drama and risk of a big Super Bowl ad-buy. With Facebook, you can be methodical and thoughtful about your investments. When you find the winning formula, you can take it as far as you like, and throttle back when it starts to lose steam.
Share your Facebook Video Secrets or Questions with us – drop us a line at blog@tongal.com
