Facebook is the largest social media website in the world. With our world’s ever-increasing need for visual content, it’s no wonder the social media giant wants to expand even further into providing video content for its users. It’s no secret that Facebook is starting to favor video content in user’s news feeds. So, what is your brand doing to provide online video content that not only Facebook users will want to watch but also (and more importantly) share? If you’re looking for ideas on how to get started with Facebook video marketing, jump on over to our blog post by CLICKING HERE for some ideas.
Case Study
So, you have a great video (produced by Delack Media Group, of course!) and now, you want to get that video in front of as many eyes as possible, right? Well, we didn’t know that. We just assumed it. Because, who doesn’t want their new corporate video to be seen by as many people as possible? Well, we can’t guarantee anything, but we can share some amazing results we just had with a video we recently produced for a nonprofit organization.
Learning the Ropes
Essentially, we went to medical school 101. In a matter of days, we became corpus callosum experts and learned everything we could about this fascinating part in the brain. We then tried to figure out how we could possibly explain this extremely complex body part to a 3rd grade audience. We didn’t want to “dumb it down” but we wanted everyone who watched this video to understand exactly what a corpus callosum was, what disorders are associated with it, and what the National Organization for Disorders of the Corpus Callosum is doing to help.
When Are Your Fans Online?
Before starting any social media campaign, you need to have some sort of a following. If people don’t already “like” your Facebook fan page, the only way they’ll see your posts is if one of their friends share your post. Having a strong, active, and engaged social media following is key to continuing your online video marketing success.
We worked with our nonprofit client to identify a day of the week and time their audience was online. To help determine when your Facebook is business page fans are online, visit this blog post.
For them, it was Friday at 5p Central. The nonprofit has an international social media audience who follows them online. This time allowed audience across various time zones to see the post while they were awake at key times in their day.
Upload Directly to Facebook
YouTube is the strong leader in video content with Facebook inching closer and closer each day. This is in part to it’s News Feed algorithims, which are now favoring native Facebook embeds versus YouTube links. What does this mean? It means that if you upload a video directly to Facebook, your video will reach more people than if you copy/past a video’s website URL from YouTube, Vimeo, or any other online video hosting platform for that matter.
Schedule Your Post
Facebook has given business pages that ability to schedule their posts for a date in the past or in the future. This is nice because you don’t have to be online at the exact time you want your post to appear. For this video production, our nonprofit client scheduled the post to appear at a future date and time (Friday at 5p Central).
Optimize!
Next, the video needed to be optimized (Search Engine Optimized)! Facebook provides several opportunities for business pages to optimize their video so that other people can find it. First, create a catchy post. Your post can include keywords that you are trying to target. When Facebook users use the search box at the top of their browsers to search for various topics, they’ll be able to find your video if you’ve used the correct keywords for which they might be searching. Another opportunity to optimize your video is in the title. Create a short title that describes your video but here’s another opportunity to use keywords. Finally, in the “Video Tags” section, Facebook has created a group of keywords. Start typing in some keywords that apply to your video and see if Facebook has them as part of their pre-populated list.
Create an Engaging Thumbnail
The video thumbnail is the image that people will see when they first land on your video player. You’ll want to select an image that is engaging and interesting; something that visually describes what your video is about. Depending on the user’s Facebook settings, your video may automatically play in their News Feed. For users who don’t have this option selected, it’s important to select a good thumbnail. Once you upload a video to their platform, Facebook randomly chooses 10 thumbnails from the video. From there, you can scroll through them and select which one you prefer or upload your own.
The Results
The results that our nonprofit video production client experienced were astounding! In less than 24 hours online (20.5 to be exact), the video had received 21.4k views, 401 likes, 51 comments, and 970 shares. AMAZING! This video had tons of engagement. See some of the comments below (last names and profile photos have been removed for privacy):
Here are the final totals for the 24-hour run online (the screen capture was 40 minutes after the 24 hour mark, but you get the idea). 24.4k views, 428 likes, 54 comments, and 1k shares. Incredible!
It’s important to note all of these results were achieved organically, which means the post was not “boosted” (i.e. pay for better results). If the campaign were “boosted”, we’re assuming the results would have been even greater.
Have a video project you’d like us to produce? Just fill out our contact form and let’s get started today!