When was the last time you watched a video on social media?
Videos are becoming increasingly popular on social media, especially on mobile. Over the past year, the time people spent watching Facebook Live every day has increased by four times and Instagram videos by 80 percent1.
To create engaging social media videos, Facebook recommends creating videos as short as 15 seconds2. Sounds easier? But where do you start?
In this guide, you’ll learn step-by-step how to create short social media videos — anything from a few seconds to a few minutes. We’ve also included many tools and examples to help you get started.
How to create engaging social media videos
Creating videos can be more challenging than writing a blog post or designing an image. But it isn’t as difficult as you might have imagined. Here’s how you can create effective short social media videos easily:
1. Ideate
The first step is to brainstorm ideas for your videos. Here are three quick ways to generate a ton of ideas:
Look at your top blog posts
If you write a blog, like us, you’ll likely have a treasure trove of content ideas on your blog. The blog posts that resonate with your audience is probably great content for your videos. This strategy has helped us create well-liked videos such as this and this.
You can use your Google Analytics to find your top posts. Go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. You should see something like this:
In the upper-right corner, increase the date range to a month. A quarter or a year is fine, too.
Scroll to the bottom of the page and change the number of rows shown to 100.
Voilà! Now you have your top 100 blog posts for the past month (quarter or year) — and tons of content ideas for your video.
Study the most shared content
Sometimes, your top blog posts are also your most shared. But sometimes, they aren’t. Using a tool like Buzzsumo, you can find your most shared content. You can also find the most shared content for any topic!
To find your most shared blog posts, enter your blog URL on Buzzsumo.
You’ll get a list of your most shared blog posts, ordered in terms of the number of shares.
You could also sort the results by the various social media platforms. For example, if you plan to create a Facebook video, you can sort the list by Facebook engagements. Now, you’ll have a list of blog posts that generated the most shares, likes, and comments on Facebook.
Check out popular videos from similar brands
Finally, you can also look around on social media to see what topics are popular at the moment. With Facebook’s Pages to Watch, you can easily check out the top posts from your favorite or similar Facebook Pages.
To access Pages to Watch, go to your Facebook Page > Insights. You’ll find the section at the bottom of the Overview tab.
When you click on any of the Pages, you’ll see its top posts for the week. The posts should give you some video content ideas. It’ll be great to keep an eye out for video posts specifically.
For Twitter, Social Bearing is a great tool for finding any Twitter account’s top tweets. For Instagram, you could try using the Explore feature, which shows you popular posts that are relevant to your account. On LinkedIn, you have the Companies to track feature in your Company Page analytics.
2. Plan
Once you have brainstormed your content ideas and picked one to work on, you can start planning for it.
The two ways I like to plan for a video is to either write a script or create a storyboard. Both encourage me to think through the entire flow and important aspects of the video. A storyboard also helps me visualize how a shot would look like, which will be handy for the next step — recording.
If you are not familiar with storyboarding, here’s a quick guide to get you started.
To help you…
