Four essential tips for Facebook mobile video marketing success

Buffer

If you are publishing images and videos to Facebook for your business, you might be intrigued to know the details of specific settings and requirements for your content. And if you are using Facebook ads you might want to check out the Facebook ads guide for media requirements.

There is a helpful resource from Facebook you may wish to access – you can find a PDF of the specific Facebook requirements for video updated August 2017 here – download the PDF.

How To Check The Size And Pixel Count Of Your Images

If like me you create content on your mobile phone, you may want to download one of many apps that are available that allow you to check the size of the media file and resize it.

If you are on desktop you can check the size for the media file for the image – on a PC, right-click and on a Mac, use Ctrl-click to get to the Properties or Get Info tab from where you will be able to see the image dimensions and image file size.

Tips For Successful Video Posts On Facebook

Facebook recommends that we design for mobile first and maximise impact through vertical video. It has been reported by Buffer that square video is the most popular format for social video versus landscape or letterbox (meme style) – see an example here. They identified that square video outperformed landscape video on each social media network in terms of video views, engagement (likes, comments, and shares), and completion rate (%). In some cases, square video resulted in 30-35% higher video views and an 80-100% increase in engagement.

Note that the tests were done using the video ad format for Facebook and Instagram and organically on Twitter. Also the Buffer Twitter audience size is significantly larger than Facebook and Instagram, which would help to explain the skewed results towards Twitter in the image below.

Hopefully they may do research including portrait video the next time.

Consider the length of your video – Facebook report that short videos (15 seconds or less) project your full message across on mobile and News Feed most effectively. However the same research from Buffer mentioned earlier explored engagement rates across videos of 30-seconds, 60-seconds, and 90-seconds. The results showed that the longer the video, the more engagement it got. My recommendation is to test variations to identify what works for your audience and topic. Learn about how you can split test your Facebook video ads in this article.

Make sure that the first image in your video makes it easy to understand and design with the sound off. You can do this by using captions on Facebook or by adding text overlays to your video or hard coding captions into your video as I did in this video on Facebook. Make sure your video’s message is understandable without sound (by enabling captions), but include sound in your videos to enrich the experience of those who have their sound on.

Buffer research tested the effect the opening image or “cover image” had on overall watch time of a video. They looked at image plus text, text-only, and video plus text. They discovered that the best way to increase viewership on your videos is to include either a video or an image along with descriptive text. Text-only intros seem to dramatically decrease views to your video.

Facebook has provided some helpful tips in relation to aspect ratios:

When developing video ads on Facebook without links, they recommend full portrait (9:16) and ensuring the most important parts of your video also display within the 2:3 aspect ratio and this is how your video will render within Facebook’s mobile News Feed.

On News Feed, video carousel link ads render as square (1:1). Non-link ads render as 16:9 up to 1:1.

360 video renders in 1:2 in News Feed, then full screen when clicked.

When developing video for Instagram, Instagram supports 1:91-4:5 for all feed videos across all objectives.

Instagram Stories only display in full portrait (9:16).

Animoto surveyed 1,000 consumers and 500 marketers to find out how video is making an impact in today and they found that:

64% of consumers say watching a marketing video on Facebook has influenced a purchase decision in the last month
39% of consumers are more likely to finish watching a video with subtitles and yet only 51% of marketers are using captioning most or all of the time on their videos
43% of consumers will decide when watching on desktop to watch a video to the end withing 15 seconds and 73% will have made up their mind in 30 seconds
26% of consumers will watch between 1-5 minutes of video on mobile versus 37% watching for that same duration on desktop

Five Tips For Successful Video Content On Facebook

Here is a summary of five tips you can out to use in your video marketing on Facebook (find examples of these in this article on Facebook):

Capture attention quickly by starting with the most compelling element of your video
Make your video more visually engaging by using a format better suited to mobile, such as a vertical or square
Capture attention in the first few seconds of your video by featuring your product or brand message early – do not leave your call to action to the end of the video – instead, intrigue your viewer to keep watching
Use text or captions with your video so that viewers can understand what the video is about if they choose to view with the sound off.

If you have questions about mobile content creation make sure that you check out my previous articles and tutorials and you can schedule a conversation with me to ask me your mobile content creation questions. And if you are wondering if I have any experience of using mobile for content creation, 80 percent of the content I create and edit is done on my mobile phone!