Whether you sell B2C or not, the reach and the power of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are too immense to ignore. But almost every brand makes the same rubbish posts for their content: link, image, repost 2x a week and call it done.
Consumers see too much of that, and it all gets lost in the noise.
Fortunately, there’s a way to make high conversion and eye catching content for just a tiny bit more effort on social media. One thing you need to keep in mind is that video ads—or animated ads, they’re effectively the same—perform 2 or 3 times better than a still image.
So for every dollar you spend or post you make, you’d make 2 or 3 dollars more back on these ads vs. traditional ones.
Traditionally people think that video is expensive and hard to do well. And they’re kind of right: shooting video that’s high quality is really expensive and most companies don’t have the resources to do that.
So you use someone else’s video.
I don’t mean steal stuff. I am talking about services like Promo.com and Ripl.com that, for very low fixed monthly fees, give you the tools to make video / animated ads that will attract the eye way better than a static one.
Our example here is pretty simple: take 1 or 2 really relevant pieces of info from your newest piece of content, lay them out over a video or as part of a Ripl animation, and use those as your post for social media.
If you have video of you speaking—like if you’re making LinkedIn video content, for example—you can easily grab the key 30 seconds of your video content, toss in subtitles and maybe add in a cut to some B roll footage from Promo, and then use that as the post on social media. If you have product videos, you can use those.
If you have stock footage that looks kind of like a product demo, it’s great to have.
A good template for the kind of video we’re aiming for is the viral geniuses at NowThis:
There are a few things they do which work so well for them:
- Audio is entirely unnecessary for their videos
- Lots of relatively short cuts to keep the energy up
- Short, clear, declarative statements in eye-catching contrast colors
- Mobile-native formats: vertical video or square ratio so they share well on Twitter, Insta, and more.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could make similar videos to help promote all of the content that you want to share on social media?
Of course you can, and it doesn’t even take all that long to do.
Let me show you how to do it. All of these videos should be <45 seconds long, audio optional, and can include a mix of appropriate footage from your own team member speaking as well as stock footage.
Let’s walk through the steps:
- Extract your best 3 – 4 takeaways from the new anchor content you’ve written. Each takeaway should be 5 – 9 words. Be brief!
- Search on Promo.com for good clips that can work as background footage for that text.
- Keep in mind that what matters is that you have strong visuals that are eye-grabbing more than having a strict 1:1 match of subject matter and background video.
- Keep in mind how many takeaways you’re sharing in this video; you’ll need that many clips + an intro and an outro clip
- Put all of the clips in order on the stage in Promo
- If you have video that’s relevant from your own business—you talking to the camera, product shots, team members, etc., upload those to use, too.
- Add in the text as needed over the video clips.
- Save out your videos in the right format for the channels you want to advertise on
- Upload as the rich media part of your tweets, Facebook posts, or Instagram
- When you’re sharing, do make sure (on FB and Twitter) that the text of the post links to your main anchor content. On Insta you should have a link to your blog in your bio.
On Ripl, the process is quite similar. As an added bonus, Ripl works natively on iPhone and Android, so you can create your video content on the go.
In either case, the goals are the same: use the fact that auto-playing videos get way higher attention and engagement on someone’s timeline. For $50 a month you can use both tools to maximize your engagement of your posts. That’s a bargain!
