Prepping Your Social Videos

Consistency is key where your public-facing content is concerned – especially with video. Not only in terms of quality and message, but in how often you post videos, as well. Anyone can look up the best days and times for your brand to post on social media, but actually sticking to that schedule is what is critical. On top of this, if you have a brand that works with influencers (if you don’t, you should), you also have to keep in mind another person or group’s timing, to avoid double-dipping, overexposure and brand oversaturation.

Video Brainstorming

Your brand’s message could look very different in motion than it does in a single, static ad, or a social media image, or some pithy text online. Brainstorming allows you to determine some critical elements, like the look (what kind of polish do you want to add to your video? Will some of them have an element of handheld and homemade video? Will they be big, expensive productions?) of your posts, as well as the scripting and simple stuff like video length. You need to make sure that whatever video you post, it does not interrupt the brand flow you’ve already established online – especially if it’s your first video, it has to feel like it belongs.

Setting Up Your Schedule

Planning out your releases allows for scripting and even last-minute tweaks. No matter who you’ve got shooting and editing, something will need to change, and you’ll need to format your videos for horizontal, vertical and square videos, and any new formats that come up. The actual posting is fairly simple through many apps, and having a team who can do this work for you will make that part even simpler.

Banking Video Content

Other than big trends that require a video in response, for the most part you can bank a lot of videos for the future, and you can repost them enough time has passed. You can even consider re-editing and “remixing” your own videos to get some more traction with very few tweaks. If you plot your videos out carefully, you can have everything from a few longer ads to a bunch of pretty short ones, down to some seconds-long blips that keep eyes and ears on your brand and increase organic engagement with new and existing customers.

Analyze the Results

You need to know if your videos are doing the trick. After all, focus groups and informed brainstorming can only go so far. Statistics on your videos can tell you a lot about how best to change up your approach to online videos, or tell you to keep going just as you have been. Getting stats can be as easy as logging in to each platform, or using a central hub. Using a posting app or service like Hootsuite also enables you to get detailed analytics about the results of your posts – who watched it, when, etc – you can get a lot of your engagement numbers this way.