How to Start Making More Engaging Videos for Social Media
Have you ever wondered how it is that some videos on social media seem to magnetically draw viewers to them and end up with tons of shares, comments, likes, and other reactions? The simple answer to that is that these videos are more engaging – and it goes to show just how important it is for you to create engaging videos for social media as well.
“What Exactly Makes a Video Engaging?”
Before you can start to create engaging videos however, you need to know what it is that makes a video engaging. The definition of video engagement and the methods by which it is measured can vary, but ultimately it is a way to gauge the impact of a video on viewers.
To accomplish that engagement measures two different types of factors:
- Viewer retention that is measured based on the average view length and completion rate.
- Reactions that is measured by the number of shares, likes, comments, ratings, and other reactions.
Although it is a bit subjective, the bottom line is that if you want your video to be engaging your goal should be to retain viewers and try to encourage them to react to your videos.
Retaining Viewers in Social Media Videos
In order to keep viewers watching you need to keep them interest – and it should go without saying that finding a topic that they find useful is a big part of that. Aside from that however there are several other steps that you should take in order to retain viewers and ensure that they don’t end up clicking away:
- Create videos with short durations
Social media videos tend to steadily lose viewers over time, and so the longer your video is the fewer viewers you can expect to retain. If you want to engage viewers it is important to avoid that, which is why it is best to create videos with short durations instead.
As a general rule you should keep your videos under 1 to 2 minutes in length, though in some cases you may want to create videos that are shorter than that. The optimal duration for videos will vary based on the social media platform and your target demographic – and you may need to experiment a little to find what works best with your viewers.
- Try convincing viewers to keep watching within the first 8 to 10 seconds
While videos will steadily lose viewers over time, most tend to lose a sizable number of videos within the first 8 to 10 seconds due to the fact that viewers will decide whether or not to keep watching in that timeframe. As such you need to convince them to keep watching right off the bat, by using a hook that provides them with a reason to stay.
To be more specific, try highlighting the benefit they stand to gain by watching the video and let them know how it could help them.
Both these steps should help you to dramatically increase the number of viewers that stay and watch your videos – and that will then give you the opportunity to try to encourage them to react to it.
Provoking Reactions with Videos
People react to social media videos for a variety of reasons, but there are several basic factors that prompt them to do so. It is important that you understand those factors, and incorporate them into your videos:
- Visuals
The main strength of videos lies in the fact that it can deliver information visually, and viewers find that more appealing and easier to digest than other types of content. Because visual information is absorbed more easily, you are going to be able to engage viewers and get them to react more frequently if you make it a point to ‘show’ the message instead of just ‘telling’ viewers about it.
- Emotions
More often than not the decision to share, like, comment or react to a social media in other ways is an emotional one. When viewers watch videos that trigger their emotions, they feel drawn to it and want to show it to others or respond to it in turn.
Incorporating any type of emotional trigger can help to increase your video’s engagement – though as a rule it is best to stay positive. As a starting point you could try to create funny, inspiring, entertaining, or surprising videos.
- Questions
One of the easiest ways to get viewers to react to your videos is to simply ask them a question. Quite frankly you’d be surprised how many viewers will react to your video simply because you invited a response from them.
Each of these factors can help you to create social media videos that viewers actually feel driven to react to – which will cement its engagement.
Final Words and Tips
Based on everything that is listed above you should be able to create far more engaging videos for social media – but there are a few other notable tips that you may want to be aware of:
- Try creating live videos as the engagement levels they have been proven to be able to engage viewers far more effectively than conventional videos.
- Make sure the video and audio quality is top notch or it will put off many viewers.
- Add captions and subtitles so that your video can be watched even if it is muted, as is the case with a significant number of social media views nowadays.
As much as it is important to create high quality videos that look good, engaging videos don’t necessarily need to be expensive to produce. In fact if you’re able to record high quality videos and tidy them up with an editor, you should be able to keep your cost low. For example you could use Movavi Video Editor and may want to find out more about it here.
If you use everything listed above, your videos should be much more engaging. Just be sure that you track the engagement of all the videos that you publish and learn from them – so that you can gradually improve each video that you publish.