Video On Social Media – The Short And The Short Of It
January 26, 2018
26th January 2018 by CH
If you read stats around video on social, you’ll know it’s becoming an ever-decreasing circle of time vs. value vs. return vs. time vs. value vs. return vs. value and so on!
Check out the graph below. It’s clear that capturing your viewer in the first few seconds is critical.
Reference: https://wistia.com/blog/optimal-video-length
Alongside this, the growth of super-short social media broadcasts from Instagram and Snapchat have resulted in a viewer base demanding that if you have something to say, say it creatively.
Here’s an example
of a creative video we spotted. It’s simple, it’s unhindered by endless exposition and captions, voice over and even music, and most importantly it keeps you watching.
Storytelling is paramount
There’s so many channels that can be used these days and they all have their particular attitude and customer expectation. But they all expect you to weave a story – nothing new of course – but it’s the most important element of any production.
In the rush to deliver ‘content’, build ‘strategy’ and create ‘engagement’ , people are starting to lose sight of the story. Everything has one and it’s a case of interrogating your aim and finding it.
A video that won’t ultimately see customer engagement often forgets that we’re all customers and want to know if our viewing time is to be rewarded, rather than ask us to sit and dutifully watch through what amounts to a Powerpoint presentation in motion.
Yawn-free videos
Generally, the most memorable videos and those with more creativity focus on a single message. It might be an evolution of online video viewership, but none of us want to receive multiple messages in one hit. Attention spans are often, hello! and you’re back in the room.
Don’t be afraid of using humour and emotion too. We all connect with it. Corporate companies are often too anxious to show a personality, so make hearts beat faster if you can.
Effective use of video on social:
- Keep it short
- Interrogate the brief and identify the singular message you want to get across
- Make it a story as the viewer always asks, ‘what will I get out of watching this?’
- Consider the square format – Your producer will accommodate this
- Upload them directly to the channel (LinkedIn, Facebook etc.) so they auto play as people scroll down
- If you don’t upload directly then THINK OF THE THUMBNAIL!
- Subtitle them (sound is often a luxury)
- When you subtitle them be more creative with the typography and colour
- Go straight into the content – avoid the logo up front, this turns people off instantly
- Link to the ‘long form version’ too (if there is one)
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When Euronics came to us with a brief, it was a good one: take a true story about an extraordinary delivery and turn it into something worth watching. The Brief Joe, a Euronics delivery agent, had been tasked with getting a chest freezer to a customer in rural Wales. The road ran out. He carried on anyway, on foot, through fields, across rivers and over hills. The customer was delighted. The story deserved to be told. Euronics asked us to produce a short comedic video retelling that journey. The challenge was finding the right visual language to match the scale of the tale. The Concept We pitched several approaches centred on a comic-book aesthetic, bold, energetic and a little tongue-in-cheek. It felt like the right fit: a story that was equal parts heroic and absurd, told in a style that leaned into both. The concept paired real interview footage of Joe with AI-generated visuals to bring his journey to life. Where a traditional shoot would have required location days across Welsh countryside, generative AI gave us the tools to illustrate the story scene by scene. Creative Wrangling We filmed Joe against a studio blue backdrop, letting him tell the story in his own words. His delivery did a lot of the heavy lifting (puns intended!), dry, matter-of-fact and quietly brilliant. The AI-generated visuals were built around detailed multi-angle reference sheets for Joe, the Euronics van and the chest freezer.
