5 Ways to Boost Social Media Engagement Using Videos

If you have a social media presence of any kind it is important that you try to boost its engagement levels. If you’re able to engage more people you’ll end up with more followers, likes (or other types of ratings), shares, and comments. In turn this can lead to even more followers – which is why engagement is so critical on social media.

While there are many factors that can influence social media engagement, videos have a particularly pivotal role to play. As content videos are far more engaging (in general) than images or text, and you will want to capitalize on that to build up your engagement levels.

To take full advantage of how engaging videos can be however, you need to know how. That is why you should try these ways of boosting your social media engagement using videos.

5 Ways to Boost Social Media Engagement Using Videos

1. Create bite-sized videos

   Bite-sized videos refer to videos that are short. Normally the duration that tends to be best for social media engagement is anything from 10 to 60 seconds – though the optimum duration can vary depending on the platform, target market, and type of content.

   Needless to say these short videos will have to be direct and highly-focused, so that they can deliver their content and get the message across in a compressed time frame.

2. Try live broadcasts

   Although live streams have been around for some time, it is only over the last year or so that social media fully embraced them. Since that time live content has consistently produced higher levels of engagement than any other type of video, which is why you should definitely try it out.

   There are a lot of different types of live videos that you could look into, including discussion panels, webinars, events, and so on. It may be tricky finding the right type of video for your niche, but it is definitely worthwhile.

   Keep in mind when you broadcast live you should find a good time to do so. After all there’s no point putting up a live video when most of your target demographic will be asleep.

3. Provoke emotional reactions

   Credit: UnearthedComics.com

   Have you noticed how funny, inspiring, and surprising videos tend to get lots of shares and seem to go viral a lot more easily than other types of content? That is because these videos provoke an emotional reaction in viewers, and engages more of them in the process.

   That is something that you can learn from when you’re creating social media videos of your own. One way to provoke emotional reactions is to structure your videos as stories that focus on a central subject. By doing so you can make viewers feel emotionally connected to that subject, and invested in the outcome of the video.

4. Highlight benefits in the first 8 to 10 seconds

   For most social media videos, the first 8 to 10 seconds is the most important. That is normally all that it takes for the average viewer to decide whether or not they want to watch the rest of the video.
   To stand the best chance of engaging viewers and ensuring that they continue to watch your videos – you should try to highlight the benefits they stand to gain within those first 8 to 10 seconds. The idea is to give them a reason to keep watching, one that they hopefully find compelling enough to do just that.

5. Track engagement levels and learn from them

   While you can’t directly track engagement, you can definitely track other metrics associated with it – such as total views, duration of each view, likes, comments, follows, shares, and so on. As far as possible try to track as many of these metrics as you can, and use them as a yardstick to measure how engaging your videos are.

   By having solid data that you can use to measure the effectiveness of your videos, you can learn from each and every video that you publish. In a nutshell you’ll be able to experiment with new ideas, measure how successful they are, and then either continue to incorporate them in your videos or discard them then try something else.

Hopefully this should give you an idea of what you need to do to boost your social media engagement using videos. If you’re worried that you’re not going to be able to produce videos that are impressive enough for social media – think again. To be entirely honest the videos that you create for social media don’t need to be expensive productions, and you should be able to get by with just a digital camera, camcorder, smartphone and the right software.

Video Editing Software

The one thing that you do need to create engaging videos for social media is a video editing software for Windows or Mac – like Movavi Video Editor. With its help you will be able to record videos from various sources then compile the footage, trim out any unwanted parts, and cut it into a video that flows smoothly. The best part is that it will make it easy for you to use its features, and requires no prior experience at all.

Additionally Movavi Video Editor will provide you with other features that let you add background music, insert captions, apply filters and effects, and enhance the video quality. All in all with it alone you should be able to create impressive and professional-looking videos that are perfect for social media and able to improve your engagement levels across the board.