Social media videos are an effective way to reach and engage your target audience. But if you're not careful, you can make significant mistakes that could cost you time, money, and customers.
From low-quality visuals to bad audio to a lack of strategy, brands face many pitfalls when producing social media video content. And unfortunately, these mistakes can be costly in more ways than one.
In this article, we'll cover 20 common social media video mistakes brands make and how to avoid them.
With the right strategies in place and a little extra care taken during the production and editing phases, your brand can create engaging videos that will capture your followers' attention on any platform – Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or Twitter!
If you are still not convinced that you should create video content for social media, here are some reasons why you should-
Videos help businesses increase their reach and engagement. Here are a few statistics which prove the same:
Videos are a great way to convey your vision and make your customer understand your product better.
Content creation means more engagement with your target audience, which will help you achieve the trust of your future potential customers.
Videos help convert from leads to sales, and the facts that prove so are stated below:
Social media videos help you reach more audiences who will engage with your content. Moreover, you can convert the audience from viewers to buyers with the power of videos.
Remember that your audiences will watch your videos to find out if your product or services will be helpful and worth spending their money on.
And in doing so, make sure that your product takes the spotlight, not you.
These are a few tips you can use to make sure that your video is received well by your target audience:
Your audience may not be patient enough to wait to find out if your video will have a solution to their problems or answer their doubts.
It would not be wrong to say that nobody would like to waste time watching an unfocused video with nothing to say.
Sharing related videos is an excellent way to interact with the audience. But what's even better is if you share your original content.
You can upload your original videos on different social media platforms.
This, in turn, will help you interact with your audience on an even more personal level.
So, make the best use of all the social media platforms that have the short video format, and watch your business flourish. Here are two vital things to do:
It will always help you to make sure you have a clean and frictionless video shot rather than a video with shaky camera work.
This will make your video looks more appealing and show your audience that you are here to mean business.
These are a few ways you can avoid having a shaky camerawork
Rules of Thirds is a rule in photography for the better composition of a shot.
This rule places your subject in the left or right third of an image, leaving the other two-thirds more open. You can use this rule to create well-composed videos.
Every social media platform your business is active on means you must dedicate extra time and effort to create significant, compelling, and original content for all the platforms.
It would be best if you also made sure to engage with your fans on all the platforms. This can be daunting and time-consuming.
Make a list of all your social media profiles and consider which social media channels are working for your business and which are not.
And move away from social media platforms that do not suit your business or are not performing well.
Focus and dedicate more of your time and efforts to the platforms they are working on.
The best way to avoid making social media video mistakes is to ensure you are using the right social media platform.
Find out where your target audience spends most of their time and choose your social media platform accordingly- whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Youtube.
One of the greatest mistakes a brand could commit is being blind to the customer's want for a response or answer to the questions or redressing their queries.
According to research conducted by Sprout Social, given below is what they found:
Therefore brands must reply to the questions on their social media pages as quickly as possible.
This way, you gain a reputation of being super interactive and a great brand always there at the service of its customers.
The content you post will work differently on different platforms.
What might work for your Instagram business page might work differently for your Youtube channel.
The traffic distribution and the choice of content vary from platform to platform.
So make sure you plan your content according to the platform you will upload on and make sure they are different and just not a repeat version of the same content you posted on another platform.
Uniqueness and creativity will take your business a long way.
However, you can repurpose your content and optimize it for various social media channels if you do not want to put in the extra effort.
Always keep an eye on your post insights and check which one is doing well and getting a great response from time to time.
This is great because it encourages you to create quality content that generates excellent reach and engagement before spending advertising money to boost your reach.
It also prevents you from completely relying on ads to do your video marketing.
When it is about posting content, always make sure to choose quality over quantity. Your brand's social media presence matters more than you might realize.
In a generation that is hyper-connected to the world, consumers are constantly seeking out quality content from their favorite brands.
Quality content is what will carry your brand through the social media storm.
Make sure you're sharing only quality content and making intelligent decisions about everything for your business.
It's all about the best approach for your brand and business.
However, consider some of the most common social media mistakes big brands make when creating video content, like overloading your pages with too many posts.
Avoid posting too much; focus on timely, valuable content.
One of the biggest reasons for skipping a video is poor audio quality. If your customers cannot hear what you have to say, there's no point in making the video.
To make Make sure to have a good microphone and a good mic placement.
Try to reduce or altogether avoid background noises. Invest in good sound equipment for recording your videos.
Remember to add closed captions, so your audience understands the content when they watch with the sound down or no sound.
Always know who your target audience is. This will save you a lot of time and effort. Study your target audience, find out about their likes and dislikes and design your content accordingly.
By limiting your posts only to your relevant audience, the platforms will show your posts more than irrelevant posts from other brands.
You need to be very specific when creating social media content. You want to target an audience interested in your topic and then share content relevant to their interests.
For example, if you are a writer and want to share writing tips, then the target audience will be writers, only some who use social media.
Patchy lighting can also degrade the entire watching experience of your audience.
Having a bad lighting situation can lead to improper lighting, silhouettes, shadows, underexposure, and overexposure. This is what you can do to avoid patchy lighting:
Don't try to shoot video with an iPhone or any phone camera! If you want great quality video for your social media posts and Tweets, then invest in a good camera (or two), lighting equipment, microphone, etc.
The more equipment you have available, the better quality of videos you will be able to produce which will result in more likes and followers!
It is necessary to have at least the basic video equipment. Otherwise, it will be difficult for you to create video content for social media that looks professional and sophisticated.
Consider having the following video tools ready to work with:
It is suggested that you can get a high-quality microphone as well. It will be great for your video when the sound quality is not a hindrance.
Editing is a skill every video creator should know to post an eye-catching video. These are a few ways to edit your videos before finally pressing the share button.
It would help if you also had the right editing software to make your videos look professional. There are many free apps to choose from, like CapCut, InShot, etc., which you can use for the same.
But if you want high-quality content, you should use software like Adobe Premiere Pro.
As a business owner, you should be sharing content from others and your own. This helps to humanize your brand and shows that you care about the people who use your products or services.
Sharing only your content is the easiest way to get fans and followers, but it can also be a huge mistake.
If your social media account consists of the same content as your blog, it will not successfully engage new viewers or build connections with people who might be interested in what you do.
You need to share other people's content so that their voices are heard, and they can get valuable feedback from others.
Including user-generated content in your social media strategy is essential, but only if it authentically represents your brand.
This means that you should focus on creating authentic videos that people will want to share rather than just posting random videos.
With the rapid increase in social media engagement, companies need to utilize the data points provided by social media.
But not all user-generated content is suitable for your social media. It would be best if you curated everything before it's uploaded to your account.
The best advice for sharing user-generated content is to leave it up if it's good, but if it isn't, remove it.
This will help build consistency in your feed and ensure clarity among followers. When you find a piece of content that resonates with your community, share it so they can learn from it too!
The most common video and image mistakes on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram have to do with not using content in portrait orientation.
Videos and images in a square format are no longer automatically cropped on Facebook and Twitter; they now occupy more space on your timeline or newsfeed.
Square videos generate higher average views and engagement, especially on mobile phones, than landscape videos posting vertical videos and images.
Some users are posting only landscape images and videos. This can limit the quality of your social media posts and make them less engaging since most visitors view their devices in a horizontal format.
It can be tempting to fake your personality or be someone you're not in public. But this will come across as disingenuous and off-putting to your followers.
Instead, be yourself and show who you are.
This will help create a stronger connection between you and your followers, who will feel more comfortable giving feedback about what they see in real life.
You will have to have a personality similar to the one you have offline because people can tell if you are faking it. Don't try it if you don't know how to do this.
Competitor research can help you discover who your competitors are, what they are doing well, and what they are not doing well.
Doing this will help you figure out what areas of your business need improvement, which will lead to an increase in your sales and profits as well as a decrease in costs.
Researching other businesses in your industry is a great way to learn how they work and communicate with their customers.
You can use this information to create content that stands out from theirs and gain followers who appreciate what you offer them.
Sometimes, we tend to overanalyze things instead of just doing them. We get caught up in our heads and spend hours thinking about what we should do next or if something is right or wrong before actually doing anything about it.
The problem with this type of thinking is that it leads to procrastination, which ultimately fails because our time has been wasted unnecessarily by not accomplishing anything worthwhile while overthinking what we should have done instead.
So, if you want to show your audience a great video idea, go for it! Even if it is not a success, you will learn a lesson.
Some of the common mistakes people make while creating social media content for their business pages are:
Given below are a few social media platforms you can use to target for promoting your brand or business - Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, and LinkedIn.
The best ways to create engaging videos for the social media accounts of your business are as follows:
It is crucial to tailor your content according to the necessity of each platform. Here are a few ways you can do so.
Having a high post count is not always enough to win over your audience. Posting too frequently can be off-putting and may turn potential followers away. The Sprout Social Index supports this notion, with 74% of consumers indicating that brands should only post between 1-2 times a day for optimal results.
Reposting the same content on every social media platform is not advisable. Just because you can cross-post your content everywhere doesn't mean you should.
Your followers on each platform are likely different, so it's vital to customize your content for each audience. So, creating a video for each platform is better than posting the same one across multiple platforms.
Overall, you want to use videos in your social media strategy.
They're a great way to make your brand stand out and communicate with your audience more effectively, which ultimately increases engagement, visibility, and trust.
By avoiding these common mistakes, you will have more success within social media and be able to find a solid place within today's growing marketing landscape.
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