How to Repurpose a Video for Social Media
Every website that wants to see any success should certainly consider the power of video marketing. Video marketing is everywhere, and in an economy dominated by the online presence of both specific e-commerce sites and other businesses, video marketing serves a particularly important purpose.
When it comes to the online presence of a brand, video marketing can serve two distinct functions. Videos can be found on the websites of particular companies, and their job there is to tell the visitor all about the brands and the products available. But even more importantly, a video on a website is there to keep traffic on the site.
The other function of video marketing is to attract traffic to a site and towards a brand. Naturally, such videos do not appear on the site, but are spread far and wide across the internet, and serve to advertise the site, brand, or product, thereby driving traffic to the site. Furthermore, while such videos can of course be posted anywhere, it is social media that is, unsurprisingly, where most of the emphasis is.
The Power of Social Media
We Make Videos, a company out of Nashville offering video production services, recommend that any successful video marketing strategy will prioritize a wide presence on social media.
Social media, whether that is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or the YouTube, is a massive reserve of potential customers.However, social media video marketing is a distinct discipline, and videos need to be geared towards their purpose – and they also work best if they are spread across all the major social media sites.
Repurposing Videos for Different Platforms
However, in order to be spread across all available sites, social media videos need to be tailored to the specifics of each site. People use different social media sites differently – Instagram is naturally more visual than Facebook, where long text posts under videos are common, to give one example.
But of course, you do not have to the make a new video for each individual site, you simply need to repurpose the ones you have to work best on each target social media platform.
Here follows some tips and best practices for a few of the major platforms:
There are two ways to share videos on Facebook, either through Facebook stories or on news feeds. News feed videos can be up to four hours long so are excellent for reusing content. The algorithm tends to favor this length too. For stories, you will have to get to the point, as these are maximum 20 seconds long!
With Instagram, one of the most important things to be aware of is the aspect ratios which are uncommon elsewhere. You will need to make sure you have videos that look well in such dimensions and orientations. Take care here or you might cut something off.
With text-heavy Twitter, and the ephemeral nature of tweets, this is another place to make sure you get to the point in your videos. You will probably find yourself editing down a lot.
As you probably know, LinkedIn is hardly the place to find amusing or sillyvideos. The most important thing to keep in mind here is the overall sober and professional tone of the site. This makes it particularly good for B2B video marketing.
These are just some social media marketing tips to help get you started. The most important of all, however, might be to make sure you know how to repurpose what you already have, saving you time and money making entirely new videos for different social media platforms.
