How To Repurpose Your Video Content And Get A Lot More Views
There’s no subtle way to say it… video is dominating social media.
Check out these statistics compiled by Buffer:
- LinkedIn recently became the latest major social media platform to support native video content. Every major social media platform now supports native video.
- Over 8 billion videos or 100 million hours of videos are watched on Facebook every day (TechCrunch, 2016).
- Video views on Twitter grew 220X from December 2014 to December 2015 (Twitter, 2015).
- More than 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube every day (Business Insider, 2016).
- By the year 2020, online videos will account for more than 80% of all consumer internet traffic (CISCO, 2016).
Not surprising.
After all, video content has proven time and time again to be more engaging, and it converts better, than written text or static images.
So then, why isn’t everyone throwing themselves (and all of their marketing budgets) behind social video?
Well, for one thing, videos take more effort.
They require more creativity, technology, time, and planning than other types of content, such as written blogs or images.
In fact, according to Buffer, 83% of marketers said they’d create more video content if there were no obstacles like time, resources, and budget (Buffer, 2016).
Nevertheless, while the requirements are greater, they are not THAT much greater, considering the ROI (return on investment) of online video.
Fortunately, there are plenty of ways a business owner can reuse the same video content so that they get more return for their efforts.
Here are just a few ways entrepreneurs can repurpose their video content for various social media and online platforms…
YouTube
The most obvious place to start your video content campaign is YouTube.
YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine. It is second only to Google, who happens to own YouTube.
For this reason, having a quality video on YouTube, amplified with key words and phrases, will improve your ranking on none other than Google.
And what business doesn’t want to win the favor of the world’s greatest search engine?
A typical YouTube account will let you upload videos as long as 15 minutes, or even longer with verified accounts.
Nevertheless, keeping your videos shorter is better, as you want people to watch until the very end.
Research indicates that the best length for a YouTube video is about 90-seconds to 2 minutes long, as after that, audience attention usually tends to dwindle.
According to Wistia, videos up to 2 minutes long get the most engagement (2016).
YouTube is a great start for launching video content.
Your next stop is Facebook.
You might be tempted to share your video content on Facebook by simply posting a link to your YouTube video.
While this is a good idea, it’s not a great idea.
Facebook algorithms don’t generally favor link posts, so your link won’t get a lot of visibility on Facebook, and consequently, you won’t get many views.
Uploading your video directly to Facebook – so that your video is “native” to Facebook – will get you way more views.
Native video on Facebook gets 10X more views on Facebook than videos posted via links to third party platforms like YouTube (Forbes, 2017).
If you want to take things further, consider the fact that 85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound (Digiday, 2016), and provide subtitles by ways of an SRT (SubRip caption file) to get you even more views.
Transcribing videos is a tedious and lengthy process, and SRT files are a bit too “tech” (and boring) for most of us to handle. Fortunately, there are online services who will do this for you very affordably. I use Rev.com, and they have proven to be fast and efficient with my video projects.
Now that you’ve got a full-length video uploaded to YouTube and Facebook, your next step is to edit that video down to 60 seconds or less, so that it can be uploaded to Instagram.
60 seconds might feel like a very limited amount of time, but just focus on keeping the most important parts of your message in the shortened video. You can always include a call-to-action to click somewhere else to see the full video if necessary.
Uploading videos natively to Instagram is beneficial for many reasons. For one thing, the only clickable link you’re granted in Instagram is in your profile, so a native video is far more likely to get noticed on Instagram than a link.
Also, most people use Instagram to upload photos, so a video suddenly popping up in your audience’s feed really stands out.
The audio for Instagram video won’t initiate automatically – your audience has to select the video in order to hear what’s going on, which is why it is very beneficial to add subtitles to the video, in order to get noticed.
You can also provide a transcript of your video in the caption section of your Instagram post, but subtitles are really more eye-catching and will get you more views.
SRT file uploads aren’t currently enabled in Instagram (although I suspect this will change very soon), so you will have to use a video editing program to embed the subtitles into your Instagram video. (I use Premiere Elements for this, but there are many options to choose from).
And, last but not least, don’t forget to use hashtags to make your video even more visible!
Native videos on Twitter drive 2.5X replies, 2.8X retweets, and 1.9X favorites than third party players (Twitter, 2015).
When your audience comes across your video in their Twitter feed, it will automatically start playing for them without sound – just like in Instagram.
Because of this, it is once again in your best interests to embed subtitles into your video, so that you get more views.
The good news here is that Twitter permits slightly longer videos than Instagram – 140 seconds, to be exact (or, 2 minutes and 20 seconds).
Therefore, if you do things in the proper sequence, as I’ve outlined here, your Instagram video is already the right length (with seconds to spare) AND it already has subtitles embedded into it. In other words, you can repurpose your native Instagram video AS IS and enjoy Twitter native video success.
Once again, you can provide a link in your tweet to the full version of the video on YouTube, or elsewhere, if you feel it is necessary.
And – once again – don’t forget the Twitter hashtags!
LinkedIn was a little slow on the uptake, but it has finally embraced native video.
It will take a while for everyone to jump on the LinkedIn native video train, so if you take the leap NOW, your content will automatically stand out from the rest and get more views.
You can now upload videos that are anywhere between 3 seconds to 10 minutes long to LinkedIn.
Once again, the videos will automatically play without sound as your audience scrolls through their feed, so if you want them to stop what they’re doing and watch, adding subtitles will help you out a lot.
If you don’t want to do any extra work at this point, you can just upload that same shortened video clip with embedded subtitles that you used for Instagram and Twitter, and then indicate in your post that the full version is available on YouTube or on your blog.
Don’t forget that LinkedIn also has a blogging feature, and this is a great place to create a blog post using your embedded YouTube video and the transcript you used to create Facebook subtitles.
Blog
Speaking of blogging, if you have a blog (and you should, but if you don’t, you can download my FREE ebook “How To Blog Like An Entrepreneur” now and get started), remember that videos are a great way to increase the “dwell time” on your posts.
Dwell time is the amount of time a visitor spends on your post. Longer dwell times translate into better SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for your blog.
You can quickly create a post that consists of your video, followed by a transcript (edited somewhat for readability) and voila – you’re blogging too, without much extra effort.
Despite overwhelming evidence that video strengthens a business’s social media efforts, many entrepreneurs hesitate to make videos because of the investment involved. Thankfully, there are many ways to repurpose your videos across all the major social media platforms. Start with a YouTube video so that you gain an edge with Google. Then, use a transcription and captioning service to get subtitles made for a Facebook version of the same video. Create shorter, subtitled versions of the same video that can be used on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And then reuse the longer version on YouTube to create blog posts for LinkedIn and your own business blog.
If you’re ready to take your business blog to the next level, check out my FREE eBook, “How To Blog Like An Entrepreneur” here…