4 Thoughts you have when creating Facebook videos for your Brand Page

Facebook videos have been an offering for users and brands alike giving a native functionality to include videos within your Facebook presence. While there are tons of other video platforms you can use, which are often still extremely beneficial to your brand, don’t count out using Facebook videos. When talking about videos we understand the time and effort it might take to produce something even if it is just a short video, but overtime more and more brands are seeing the ROI in Social Media videos. However, you might be thinking…

 

Thought 1: Why Videos?

“Video is one of the most engaging and immersive ways to tell your story. Whether capturing breaking news, a baby’s first steps, or rising to a friend’s challenge for charity, it is a remarkable storytelling medium.” (The Latest on Facebook Video)

Videos are becoming more and more popular and have become a great way to engage easily with your audience while providing a bigger window into your brand. Not only does it give you the ability to create better branded content and engage with your core users but it gives the users something more and a greater connection with you. Facebook has shown that video videos grew over 50% over last year and 65% of video views were happening on Facebook.

 

via Facebook

 

Thought 2: Why do I have to create different video files to have a Facebook Video?

The honest answer is because that’s the game we have to play if we want to do it right and maximize our success (& ROI) on Facebook as well.

In September, with some new features releasing, Facebook released this in an article:

After introducing videos that start playing automatically in News Feed earlier this year, we’ve found that people discover significantly more content with this feature. And when used in combination with our new video views objective, businesses are seeing a significant decrease in cost per view for their Facebook video ads.”

 

via VentureBeat

 

If that isn’t enough, VentureBeat broke down the differences and metrics among the various types of video platforms showcasing the Facebook vs YouTube debate in this recent article. Through their study they went to brands to understand what was most important when measuring their video results and at the top of the list was “engagement, shares, conversions, and total time spent watching.” Although YouTube offers great SEO helping to drive views to videos, Facebook provides a much better environment and opportunity for users to engage and share.

 

via VentureBeat

 

Thought 3: Where do I even find the analytics for my Facebook Videos?

Once you’ve posted your first video you will certainly want to measure and analyze the results but those analytics look a bit different than your status, link or image posts. However if you are familiar with the insights tool you should easily find them. If not, to see metrics about a video shared from your Page:

  1. Click Insights at the top of your Page
  2. Click Posts
  3. Scroll down to All Posts Published
  4. Click the post you want to see metrics about (To easily spot look for the video icon under “type”)
  5. From the Post Details window, click Video

 

via Ad Week

 

Thought 4: What do these numbers mean?

There are quite a few metrics you may find the top three to pay attention to are below:

  • Video Views – A view of 3 seconds or more of a video. You can also see the portion of your video views driven by paid advertising.
  • Unique Video Views – The number of people who viewed your video for 3 seconds or more. You can also see the portion of your unique views driven by paid advertising.
  • Average Duration of Video Viewed – The average amount of time people spent viewing your video.

 

 

 

Alright, so now that you have the scoop on Facebook videos, let’s see what you’ve got! And if you need a bit more incentive to get started on your next Facebook Video campaign, we love these engagement tips from Social Media Examiner.

 

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300 Million People at Your Fingertips (Instagram for Brands)

At the cost of $1 Billion a couple of years ago, Instagram is still growing and trending around the world. It has become a necessity for brands and users alike on social media even with the limited ad options. The visual focus, simplicity and popularity of the app itself combines to make a powerful platform for brands. It’s all in the way you use it. We’ve put together a few topics that make Instagram what it is and to showcase some of the best ways to leverage the platform as a brand.

via Instagram

Statistics:
A LinkedIn user, Katy Elle Blake, prepared a list of all the Instagram facts you need to know for 2015. While she covered a full array, we pulled together what we thought were the most useful for our audience but we encourage you to read the full report.

  • Instagram currently has 300 million monthly active users.
  • 75 million of those use Instagram every day.
  • 30% of teenagers consider Instagram the most important social network.20% of US adult females use Instagram, compared to 15% of US adult men.
  • 20% of Internet users aged between 16 and 64 have an Instagram account.
  • 41% of Instagram’s audience are aged between 16 and 24 and 35% are from 25-34.
  • This one might shock you - 51% of Instagram’s audience is male. 49% is female.
  • Instagram launched in October 2010. Over 20 billion photographs have been shared on the site since then. 70 million new photos are shared each day.
  • There are around 2.5 billion Instagram likes every day, or 8500 new likes each second. 1000 comments are left each second.
  • 70% of Instagram users log in at least once a day. 35% check Instagram multiple times per day.
https://instagram.com/press/

In addition to the stats specific to the platform, we found these five stats about user engagement on the app and with brands from Sprout Social incredibly useful.

  • At 4.21%, Brand Engagement Rates Highest on Instagram
  • 50% of Comments Are Posted in the First Six Hours
  • @mentions in Captions Receive 56% More Engagement
  • Adding a Location Results in 79% Higher Engagement
  • Open Backgrounds and Single Dominant Colors Return More Likes
via Sprout Social

Brand Tips:
If you are still figuring out how to use Instagram we love these tips and suggestions from B2C. Here’s the full article but we’ll highlight the items we agree with wholeheartedly. (Note highlighted experts are from the article and the remainder copy are our views).

#1: Build a community around an actionable hashtag:

    You can’t go wrong with hashtags and we strongly encourage you to choose quite a few to begin using actively to ensure you are reaching your target user. However, in addition to those it is important to have a hashtag that is your own but isn’t just a brand name. You want a user to see the hashtag, take an action and associate the action with your hashtag. There are some great examples of brands doing this out there across the board and we think Instagram is the most important platform for this.

#4: PLEASE don’t over post:

    For reach this is IMPORTANT! Although on Twitter you can post day and night, Instagram is a unique platform. For most brands posting a couple times a week is plenty so keep that in mind when planning out your content.

#7: Utilize all the tools Instagram has to offer:

    Just like any other platform, it isn’t a one way street, You never want to push content out and walk away. So just like other platforms, understand the behind the scenes including native Instagram features (filters, special effects, editing, etc), Instagram analytics tools to provide you with insight (Impressions, reach, engagement, etc) and finally Instagram’s Business team and Blog.

#8: Get inspiration from others:

    There are so many great brands out there that it is easy to see how users are responding to their content. Use their best case examples to inspire your own content. In addition see what your fans are doing and jump on board. Anytime something is picking up with a fan, even if you didn’t create it, take advantage of the momentum and loyalty they are creating.

#10: Interact with Others on Instagram to Grow Your Following:

    This one should be a no brainer if you are using any social media platforms, but it must be said. The best way to grow your audience is to be authentic and engaging. Find users who are talking about your or a relevant topic for your business. Get a conversation started, #regram their images, highlight top users, and more to garner engagement and additional reach.

 

Tools:
Although Instagram is still pretty closed off, there are a few tools to help in a variety of ways that we have used in the past:

Keyhole.co:This tool is used to see what hashtags are popular and find suggestions for related ones, although its really for twitter, you will find most hashtags are consistently used across both.

Tagboard: This tool lets you see what other Instagram content is being shared using the same hashtag and how often it’s used.

Iconosquare: This tool allows you to collect analytics such as average likes, your best hashtags and follower growth.

 

So now that you’ve got all that information, what will you do with it? We recommend getting out there and trying it out! Try everything and begin to understand what works best for your brand and resonates the most with your user base. Over time you will continue to grow your audience and be one of the top brands we keep seeing!

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What’s Trending Today? 4 Places to Start!

As we find ourselves trying to find out what topics are hot and useful to our users we seem to keep coming back to the same websites. As we wrote in our “Content is King” blog post, having the right content for your users can make all the difference. So understanding what’s trending can be extremely helpful across any spectrum of your social media marketing. We thought we’d share our sources with you to save you some google time. Check out 5 places we go to see what’s trending:

Twitter: Obviously but we had to put it! And if you aren’t sure how to work it, you can change your trending topics to a city, entire country or even the world so you can get a bit more narrow for your target audience. Turn on or off your tailored trends in order to see the more common trends vs the ones that are skewed to what you tweet and who you follow. If you want to get really crazy, check out trends map for real time location trends.

Twitter Trends: May 13, 2015

 

Trends Map: May 13, 2015

Alltop: This site does a great job pulling all of the top and trending articles from a variety of sites including mashable, fast company, wired, cnn, and more. In addition you can create your own topics based on your tastes and customize the site for free. From tech to culture you are sure to find the topics you want to read and share with your audience. To make things easier, there is a home page with a general overview and a search box that allows you to type in anything that matters to you. Alltop will then suggest categories and tags that you can select one at a time to display the most popular posts from specific categories.

Alltop Homepage: May 13, 2015

Google Trends: Sometimes you have to go straight to the source. Taking a look at what’s being searched for frequently on google can give you some insight into what users care about today. You can narrow your search by country and see exactly how many times the trending topic was searched. Dig into trending searches to get more info on the searches trending with up to date links.

Google Trends: May 13, 2015

Medium: Started by the founders of Twitter it’s a blog publishing platform with a variety of topics and details covered. It’s a great place to go for inspiration on writing blogs from titles to post content. Top stories allows you to see the most read blog posts and can help inspire you when you narrow down to some of the tags and topics.The trick is to browse articles that are about specific topics such as tech, blogging, social media, entrepreneurship, or growth hacking. Whatever is most popular in those categories is usually exceptionally well written and inspires many bloggers to share similar experiences or adapt titles to their niche.

Medium Homepage: May 13, 2015

There are tons of sites out there and great content all around but these are our go to sites to see what’s the most popular among most users.  Having content that is based on what’s already popular is one of the best ways to ensure traffic. Is there any other site you think we should include?

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