If a picture says a thousand words, how many do you think a video conveys? With an average of 1,500 news stories a day showing up on Facebook news feeds, it is absolutely essential that you display the content most relevant to your audience if you want your content to stand out from the crowd. With Facebook’s automatic play feature for videos, the possibility of making a lasting impression on your target audience has been optimized like never before, so long as you have the right video strategy in place. Read on and discover how to post a video on Facebook following these strategies.

How to Post a Video on Facebook

How to Post a Video on Facebook

Follow these five guidelines below on how to post a video on Facebook, recommended by Facebook itself at the recent Boost Your Business event in San Francisco. These strategies will make your video topnotch, according to Facebook experts, so that you’ll rise above all the news feed noise, every time.

1. Learn from the Silent Films of the Past

There was a time when the audio component of films was non-existent, which meant that the visual content of the film had to be truly creative, imaginative, and powerful. A common error with videos made for Facebook posts is that they’re optimized for audio, not visual. All those bells and whistles don’t mean squat if the person watching has their audio turned off.

Considering that the majority of Facebook users are accessing the social media platform from their mobile devices, the odds are that the audio is more than often set to silent mode. This is why it is crucial that your videos make sense without sound. Focus on the visuals and even adding text if you want to convey a specific statement, but don’t rely solely on sound to get your message across.

Pro Tip: Audio is still important. You don’t want to scare people away with disturbing background music. For ultimate video optimization, have dynamic visual and audio, so that your video makes an impact regardless if the sound is on or not.

2. You Only Have 3 Seconds

Facebook statistics indicate that a video has to make an impression within the first three seconds or else people keep scrolling. Before you start having an anxiety attack at the thought of conveying your entire brand message or sales pitch within three seconds, think of the phenomenal success of the Vine social media platform, known for their five second videos. Think of it this way, if a five second video of a dramatic groundhog mislabeled as a chipmunk can garner over 45 million views on YouTube (and that’s just the original video), then we believe you’re fully capable of capturing the attention of your target audience.

Pro Tip: Unless you already have an established following, wait a few seconds before displaying your branding intro. Captivating three seconds + branding intro + captivating rest of video = Facebook video post success.

3. Capture the Moment

Here’s some fun news: Facebook recently expanded their Moments photo-sharing app to include a video component. With this app, you can turn a series of photos into a story. The photos play as a video slideshow and can be optimized with captions.

Facebook promotes the Moments app as a way to “get photos from friends and give photos back” but companies are taking full advantage of the app to create stories about their products, customers, and brands. This type of photo slideshow is a great way to showcase a start-to-finish process of a product, display a case study, and even create a music video by using the audio feature. Plus, the slideshow automatically plays in real time, just like standard Facebook videos.

Pro Tip: Be sure to organize your photos into a storyline so that the photos are not displayed out of order.

4. Uploading vs. Linking

The autoplay feature of Facebook video posts is what makes the post optimized for reaching your target audience, but this feature is only available if you upload your video directly to Facebook. If you copy and paste a link from YouTube or another site, the video will not autoplay in news feeds, but will instead display as a static click-through link.

There are some tricks to getting the most out of uploading a video to Facebook. If you’re a business, upload the video to your business page, not your personal account. Once the video is uploaded to your business page video library, you can choose nifty features like pinning the video to the top of your page, boosting the video post, and placing the video at the top of the library as the featured video.

Pro Tip: Don’t forget to add text to the post in the video description area. This is also where you can include a link and a call to action for the content the video is promoting.

5. Create a Video Ad Campaign

It’s no secret that Facebook wants you to pay to play, or in the case of videos, pay to be played. If your page already has a high volume of engaged followers, creating a robust ad campaign may not be necessary. Although, even in these cases we recommend putting a small amount towards boosting the video to increase the odds of hitting the viral video jackpot.

If you don’t already have over 100,000 followers (yes, you really do need that many if you want to see substantial conversions), then your best bet for getting your video in front of your audience is to create a video ad campaign. This is different than boosting the video post, which optimizes for post engagement. A video ad campaign, on the other hand, optimizes for video views. You can find this ad option in the ads manager section of your Facebook account. The beauty of Facebook ad campaigns is that you are in full control of your advertising budget and can spend as little as $5 a day.

Pro Tip: Read up on Facebook’s advertising guidelines so that you can ensure all components of your video (text, visual, audio, call to action) are within guidelines and completely optimized for capturing the attention of your target market.

A Video Is Worth a Million Words

By using the strategies outlined above, there’s a possibility that your video can achieve a million views or more. We’ve seen it happen, and it could happen for you. Dynamic viral videos make lasting impressions and convert viewers into customers. This should always be the end goal with your videos. Take advantage of the optimization features offered by Facebook video posts, and capture the attention of your viewers.

Need help creating or optimizing a video for Facebook? Schedule a complimentary digital marketing strategy session! Our team of social media experts at Colibri Digital Marketing are happy to help you learn how to post a video on Facebook, or with any of your other digital marketing needs.

It’s fun 🙂