When it comes to producing great videos for social media that drive engagement and audience growth, there’s no perfect formula. But there are certain ingredients that can go along way to achieving success.
In this guide we take you through Hootsuite’s own 10-step video creation process and tell you how we made one of our most successful videos to date (below).
1. Repurpose top-performing content
Creating high quality social videos isn’t cheap. That’s why we use our top-performing blog content as a jumping off point for our videos. It’s an efficient way for us to repurpose content rather than invest resources into something that hasn’t been tested.
We share similar audiences across our blog and social channels, so we know that if a blog post performs really well, there’s a good chance it will make a popular video. That was the case with our TED Talks blog post, which was a top-performer in its first week live.
If you don’t have a blog post to repurpose, you can choose another piece of content, but it must have good visual potential. ount.
Any piece of content that becomes a social video needs to meet this criteria:
- The content is easily digestible (often in ‘listicle’ format)
- Information can be condensed into a one-minute format
- Opportunity for graphics and/or visuals
Since the TED Talks blog post includes videos itself, it was a natural fit for a video format. And it was easy for the team to source images and audio clips that would accompany the text.
2. Write a short script
Once we’ve decided on what blog to use, we take a small, impactful section of the writing as the basis for the script. With the TED Talks video, we chose to feature three out of the seven listed talks in the original article. We felt they would translate best on social and entice the viewer to click to the blog post the complete list.
Our social video scripts are never more than half a page for a one-minute video. In the case for TED Talks and other short listicle videos, the scripts are usually around 100 words. If there’s too much text on a frame, it’s hard for the viewer to follow along.
3. Choose the right platform(s) for your video
Each social channel offers unique opportunities for video. Depending on the topic and audience, we make decisions about which channels will work best. That way, we can optimize the viewing experience specifically for each network.
We decided to share the TED Talks social video on Facebook and Instagram. We chose Facebook and Instagram because they have a strong social media practitioner audience that is interested in advancing their careers.
4. Choose the proper video orientation
There are several options to choose from when it comes time to capture or create your video: portrait, landscape, square, and fullscreen. Each orientation has its own advantages depending on the type of video you’re creating and where it’s being published and shared. For example, if we know our audience is split across desktop and mobile, we’ll use square because it looks good on both.
We chose the portrait format for the TED Talks video because we wanted…
