Quick and Easy Ways to Optimize Video on Social Media

Quick and Easy Ways to Optimize Video on Social Media Main Photo

10 Feb 2023


News, Marketing, Video

You should be optimizing your video on social media because you already invested in quality video. You know it’s the most effective medium for telling your story. Not only is it compelling, but it’s also an easy experience for your audience to engage with. Now it’s time to optimize video to get the best ROI possible by drastically increasing your content output while grabbing attention and gaining followers. Studies have shown that people are twice as likely to share videos than other visual content. Thanks to social media, there are a lot of ways to engage viewers.

Things to Consider When it Comes to Ways to Optimize Video on Social Media

First, you’ll need to create a strategy to optimize your videos. In this context, optimizing video is the process of turning long-form video content into shareable clips, and formatting those clips to be repurposed on each social media platform. Choose clips that will provide value to your audience. Out of one piece of long-form video, you might easily find twenty or more valuable clips that can be used on social media. You’ll probably find that most of your clips aren’t time-sensitive. Those can be considered evergreen content and can be posted on more than one platform at various times.

To compile your clips, you’ll need to understand the lengths and aspect ratios for different formats. (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc.) On shorter form mediums, every second counts, and every second has to help move your story forward or drive your point home.

Remember that most social media platforms don’t automatically play the audio of the in-feed video, and a huge percentage of viewers watch online videos with the sound off. This may make captions necessary. In addition to the captions, you should add hashtags.

You’ll also need to curate your thumbnail images. Thumbnails are static images that represent your video when it’s not playing. A compelling thumbnail has just about everything to do with drawing viewers in. If the thumbnail begs for a compelling title, headline, or question, add the text.

Of course, you’ll need to learn to select thumbnail images and clips that will look great and communicate well on mobile devices. On small devices, square videos take up more screen space, meaning they’re more likely to grab your attention, and captions will be easier to read. Not every post that provides valuable information needs a call to action, but add one whenever it’s appropriate. 

When you have a clip that features another person, business, or location, provide them with that clip and ask them to post it to social media, along with a link back to your EDO.

Last, but not least, don’t forget that you can, and should, re-post some of your strongest evergreen clips after 30 or more days. However, to do this, you’ll need to create a system to keep track of your clips by title, length, aspect ratio, storage location, suitable platforms for posting, platform, and date of posts. That can be done with a simple spreadsheet.

For help with creating a quality video or implementing ways to optimize video on social media, contact us today.

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