What content formats to prioritize for social media?
The current context demands an increased presence on social media, seen as the best way to reach your consumers on an international scale.
Sharing high-value content proves to be the quickest and most effective method to support your role in the community, make your presence felt, and attract the attention of internet users for engagement or conversion purposes.
There are several ways to go about it depending on the types of content you focus on: entertainment, promotion, inspiration, education, conversion, and connection.
Motivate and leverage User-Generated Content
User-generated content refers to the content that your subscribers post about your brand/company. This includes visuals, videos, or texts, etc. When you share and interact with this type of content, you ensure more reach and strengthen your relationships with creators.
This generates huge engagement because people love to listen to and interact with each other, which is why they worry about commenting. Remember that there is a lot of user-generated content on social media that is both positive and negative. You need to be on the lookout to find those that work in your favor.
Here’s a breakdown of how to find and use UGC:
- Monitor your social platforms (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).
- Find content featuring your brand/product (check your tags and hashtags).
- Re-post, re-share, re-tweet (make sure to give credit to the original poster)!
Dare to do podcasts
Podcasts have gained huge momentum. Almost everyone, regardless of age, follows their favorite podcast. At the same time, there are fewer podcasts than social media accounts to follow.
That said, consider creating a podcast to get more listeners and, of course, more brand exposure. Your podcasts generate original content to post on your social media accounts.
Some social media platforms do not allow direct audio downloads.
Thus, you have 2 options:
- Share the podcast link in your caption or post.
- Create a static image, overlay the podcast audio on the image, and upload the final content as a video.
Even better? Cut your podcast into clips for social media. This way, your subscribers can enjoy it without getting discouraged or redirected to an external page.
Captivate attention through video
Social videos have been trending for a few years now, and for good reason. Regardless of your goals, video can help you achieve them. If your goals are more focused on community engagement, this type of content can be a valuable resource to rely on.
On Instagram, videos get 49% more engagement than photo posts. Tweets with video receive 10 times more engagement than those without. People are also twice as likely to share videos with their friends as any other type of content.
The popularity of TikTok and Instagram Reels is concrete proof that successful videos do not require unlimited time or resources. Creator-style videos can add authenticity that viewers appreciate. Besides being able to produce relevant and original videos without major investment, video content can also be reused and spun into other content formats.
Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram are the top three social media platforms consumers use to follow brands. Instagram, in particular, has a variety of tools to create both long and short videos, making it an excellent arena to test different video concepts and styles.
You may wonder, what about TikTok? Individual creators rule the platform, and brands have not yet found the right position, but there is much to learn from TikTok trends.
1) Instagram
Instagram entered the video scene in 2013 and quickly gained success with its desired success to introduce advertising to the platform in 2015. Since then, Instagram videos have continued to grow as an engaging social format. It goes without saying that Instagram videos are worth the investment. Here are the most popular types of Instagram videos:
- In-feed Video: landscape, square, and vertical
- Carousel Video
- Stories
- Reels
- IGTV
Note that the minimum length of Instagram videos has been increased from 15 seconds to 30 seconds and the maximum from 60 seconds to 10 minutes based on upload and account specifics.
2) Facebook
Facebook video is consumed at higher rates each year, so it’s no wonder that many brands are looking for the right video specifications.
The challenge is that there are simply many types of videos that you can share on Facebook and the platform frequently updates its design. Each video format has different dimensions and specifications, making it difficult to know if you are uploading the right format for organic or paid posts.
- Standard Video: landscape or portrait
- 360 Video
- Carousel Video
- Collection Video: paid posts only
- Slideshow Video: paid posts only
- Stories
- Etc.
3) YouTube
Known as the second largest search engine behind Google, YouTube is an essential network for video content. It is a great space to promote, educate, and share video content about your brand.
As YouTube continues to grow as a destination for video content, it hosts everything from short promotional videos to feature-length films. This means that users stream content on all kinds of devices, which can have different levels of zoom or overlay.
By the end of 2020, YouTube introduced its Shorts video feature. These videos are a new way to watch, create, and discover short-form content. Shorts can be captured and edited from a smartphone or uploaded standard from a desktop or mobile. Because short videos are invading the web worldwide, using Shorts is a new way to reach a wider audience to entertain, educate, or make them feel good.
4) Twitter
Twitter is a popular space for sharing and interacting with different social media videos. For brands, it’s about keeping a user’s attention with captivating video content that’s worthy of clicks and retweets. In the sports and entertainment industry, Twitter is often the go-to for sharing video content.
The platform offers two integrated video content formats to share with your subscribers: landscape and portrait. These specific formats are only available for uploading videos directly to Twitter, rather than sharing YouTube or other links.
5) TikTok
TikTok quickly captured attention in the social space, but brands may feel caught off guard by the rush to understand what works and what doesn’t on the platform. Fortunately, TikTok videos are built on ease of creation, editing, and sharing, so it makes sense that specifications are more or less oriented around typical mobile phone dimensions.
A key feature to keep in mind if you’re trying to reuse video content across multiple platforms is that videos uploaded from another file source, rather than recorded on the app, can last longer than 60 seconds.
6) LinkedIn
While LinkedIn is still in the early stages of adopting video content, the network remains a valuable source for sharing.
It is still common for many brands to upload to a video hosting platform such as YouTube or Vimeo, and then share the link on LinkedIn. Unlike embedded videos, native LinkedIn video automatically plays in the feed, making it more likely to catch attention.
Harness the power of imagery
This is the most frequently posted type of content on social media. Unlike most videos, still images can be absorbed and appreciated in an instant. Colors, composition, text or lack thereof, and other details give social users an immediate impression of your brand.
These days, mobile devices come equipped with high-definition cameras and editing tools, so everyone can unleash their inner photographer. This means that brands can take the reins of image creation for their content strategy without engaging a ton of resources.
This has also opened the door for consumers to contribute high-quality user-generated content (UGC) for their favorite brands. UGC images add another dimension to a brand’s visual identity while strengthening community and the relationship between a brand and social users.
Also consider producing memes. They are short, simple, and hilarious. In other words, memes are perfect entertainment for the busy, stressed consumer. After all depends on your target.
Varying formats and content will breathe new life into your social enclave. Good content = honesty + added value.
No matter the format, irrelevant content or content aimed solely at marketing your products/services will not work.