Time and time again you are likely to hear people tell you that it is important for your social media videos to engage viewers. That part is true – but what exactly is engagement in the first place?
As you can imagine, before you start to create social media videos that engage viewers, you will first need to understand exactly what that means.
Understanding Engagement
Engagement itself is a very loosely defined metric that basically measures the actual impact your videos have on viewers. Often it does that by tracking metrics such as:
- the completion rate,
- average time watched,
- replays,
- shares,
- as well as other reactions such as likes,
- comments,
- ratings,
- and so on.
Based on that, it should be clear why it is important to create social media videos that engage viewers. Simply put, they will be able to more effectively fulfil their goals. And are likely to gain more exposure due to the fact that social media platforms use algorithms that prefer videos that have an impact on viewers and are shared, commented on, liked, or reacted to in other ways.
Additionally, while there are a lot of ways in which engagement is measured – the main goal of engaging videos should be to keep viewers watching and encourage them to react.
Ways To Improve Engagement
Now that you understand engagement, you should have a rough idea how to improve it by creating interesting videos that are able to hold the attention of viewers. That being said that is still too general, and arguably is what you’re already doing anyway.
If you want to actually improve engagement, you should focus on areas that have been proven to have a direct effect on it. To be more specific, there are several ways in which you could start:
Create Short And Direct Videos
Social media videos that are short and direct tend to be more engaging, as there is less of a chance that viewers will lose interest and click elsewhere. That is why, nowadays, you’re likely to encounter lots of videos on social media that are anywhere between 15 to 60 seconds in duration – and you should emulate that.
Needless to say, it is important that you are direct in short videos and frame your message as succinctly as possible. Every second counts, and should be designed to keep viewers interested all through to the end.
Hook Viewers With Benefits In The First Few Seconds
Most viewers on social media scroll through videos quickly, and normally decide within the first 8 seconds (or less) whether to keep watching a video. As such, you need to make that time count and ‘hook’ them right from the onset.
The best way to hook viewers in the first few seconds is to be direct and tell them what the video is about as well as how it will help them. By highlighting its benefits, you stand the best chance of convincing them to keep watching.
Focus On A Single Message
Considering you are going to be creating short videos, it is crucial that you focus on a single message. More importantly, however, this will enable you to effectively deliver that one message as opposed to distracting viewers with multiple messages. This, in turn, will help keep them engaged.
It is best to consider this factor when planning your video topics. If your topics are too wide or general, you may want to break them down into more focused topics that have a single message, as that will make it easier for you to create short and direct videos around a theme.
Play On An Emotional Angle
Overall, the social media videos that are most effective at keeping viewers interested and encourage them to react all share one thing in common: An emotional angle. Odds are you’ve seen this for yourself in the popularity of funny, inspirational, or touching videos.
Ideally, you should try to use this in your videos, and play on an emotional angle in order to prompt a reaction from viewers. The exact nature of the emotion that you use is secondary, and what is more important is that it is intense but genuine.
Even something as simple as being passionate when presenting your video can help to make it more engaging for viewers.
Plan Out Videos So That They Are More Visual
One of the best things about videos on social media is that they are naturally engaging due to their unique visual nature. That is why one of the most frequent pieces of advice you’re likely to encounter to make videos more engaging is to ‘show, not tell’.
To pull that off, you need to start planning out videos that are more engaging. When you’re planning your video try asking yourself, “What is the best way to ‘show’ this message?”
Keep in mind that there are lots of ways in which videos can ‘show’ a message. Sometimes live video footage may suffice but with some, you may want to look at other options such as screen recording, animation, or even illustrations and graphics.
Add Subtitles Or Captions To Social Media Videos
Increasingly, there are a lot of social media platforms that automatically start to play videos on mute. On top of that, a significant amount of viewers on mobile devices in particular tend to watch videos without audio.
To stand a better chance of engaging these viewers, you should make it a point to add subtitles or captions to your videos so that they aren’t overly reliant on their voiceover. The aim should be to ensure that viewers are able to follow the video and its message even without any audio.
Each of these measures should help you to engage more viewers individually, and if you implement them all you should start to see compelling results.
Still, that isn’t all that you can do to create more engaging social media videos, and arguably the most important part is yet to come.
Learn From Every Video
At the end of the day you should keep in mind that no two social media platforms are the same, and every niche as well as target market demographic is slightly different as well. Because of that, while everything outlined above can help you to create more engaging social media videos, it will take a bit of tweaking before you get it right.
In other words, if you want to create social media videos that engage viewers, you should make it a point to learn from every video – constantly. Be sure to track how each video performs, and analyze that performance to find out why it could have done better (or worse).
Additionally, you should try new things, such as:
- different video lengths,
- types of topics,
- visual styles,
- and other factors.
Each new video should experiment with some small change, so that you can analyze its performance and learn from it.
Assuming you pull this off, you should be able to continually improve your videos and make each one more engaging than the last.
Engage Viewers With Social Media Videos – Final Words
It is important to note that contrary to popular belief, engaging social media videos don’t need to be complicated or expensive to produce. In fact, some of the most engaging videos on social media right now are recorded with nothing more than a smartphone camera and a bit of editing.
Based on what you now know, you should know the areas that you need to focus on in order to improve your video’s engagement. While you should have everything you need to do so, the one exception may be the software that you can use to record, compile and produce engaging videos for social media.
If you’re not sure which software to use or feel that they seem too complicated – try Movavi Video Suite. It has an intuitive approach that makes it user-friendly, and will allow you to quickly record, compile and edit your social media videos without any difficulty. Make no mistake, you don’t need any prior experience to use it at all.
All it will take is a couple of minutes for you to familiarize yourself with the features in Movavi Video Suite. When you do, you’ll see that it enables you to not only import videos from various sources, but record them via screen capture, a webcam, or other options.
With the editing tools in Movavi Video Suite, you can then take the raw footage that you record and transform it into engaging social media videos. Its features will let you merge clips together, arrange them in the right order, trim out unwanted parts, enhance the video quality, and fix any issues. Additionally you can apply effects and filters, add audio, insert captions, and more.
Simply put, Movavi Video Suite is a complete video making software that will quite literally provide you with everything you need to create social media videos of any kind. That makes it a great place to get started, especially if you take advantage of the ways listed above to make your videos as engaging as possible.
