I was scrolling through Facebook a few days ago looking at dog videos, cat videos and random political posts when I noticed something pretty incredible. A recent video of Bernie Sanders, who ran in the 2016 Presidential primaries and is a current sitting U.S. Senator, had 1,752,234 views on Facebook. Holy crud!
Whatever you think of his views, you have to admit that many views on anything that is not a cute kitten/puppy/goat is really impressive — especially when it’s a video of a 75-year-old dude talking politics.
So I started wondering, how exactly does Sanders do it, and what can we learn as business owners, authors and coaches about building our own brands? As I dug into his Facebook page, I discovered five specific things that can that can help anyone build their brand effectively (especially on Facebook).
1. Video is king.
On social media, video gets more shares and more engagement than anything else. And that means it gets more eyeballs. Which is, of course, the thing you really, really need to build your brand.
According to Cisco, “Globally, IP video traffic will be 82 percent of all consumer internet traffic by 2020, up from 70 percent in 2015.” That means that in just 2.5 years, 8 out of 10 minutes spent on the web will be spent watching videos. So when Sanders puts mostly videos on his Facebook page, there’s a reason for that. Videos are where most of the eyeballs are.
2. It’s hip to be square.
As I was looking through Sanders’ page, something really stood out to me. So I talked with a couple of my other marketing guru friends, and it turns out that this is a Facebook truth — most of the time, square videos perform better than rectangular ones. And the results are really astounding.
My friend Heather, who runs about $10,000 worth of Facebook…
