Getting Started with Micro-Video Content to Improve Your Social Media Strategy
It’s no secret that video content continues to dominate on social media. In one of our latest posts, we talked about five trends to keep an eye on for the coming year. In this post, we are going to dive into how you can leverage video content on social media – without dishing out a ton of money or time.
Focus on Micro-Video Content
This was our featured trend in our previous blog post. Micro-content is simply micro (short) videos that are designed to be consumed quickly and easily. TikTok and Instagram Reels are great examples of mediums using micro-video content. The key to creating great micro-videos is making sure you:
Don’t spend a ton of time creating them
Keep the videos between 10-30 seconds
Don’t overthink the content – but do think through it!
Showcase content people find interesting
Some of the greatest (even viral) videos on social media are raw – meaning the person behind the camera is an average Joe, just like you and me. They aren’t professional videographers with fancy cameras. Now, you do want to make sure your phone camera lens is wiped clean and you have good lighting, but at the end of the day, you don’t need an $8,000 camera to show the behind-the-scenes or a fabulous before and after.
And trust us, people LOVE before and after videos!
Make Time to Get Involved
One of the hardest parts of outsourcing your social media management is that many companies think they can 100% offload it and never be involved. For us to really capture your company, people, and culture, we need at least one person to be a point person for us. Someone who can be in the videos. Granted, agencies like us take on the bulk of the planning and strategy behind your videos, but if you want to jump in on some of the trending videos (which we strongly recommend), you’ll need to make time to get involved. Or at least make your summer intern be the one to get in front of the camera!
Trending videos don’t always have a long lifespan. They usually last a few weeks before another sound, dance, or challenge hits the charts. So, make sure you can act quickly. If you’re working with an agency, ask how they keep track of these kinds of trends and how they plan to do a quick turnaround time. Strike while the iron is hot and even YOU could go viral!
Plan Out and Batch Create Video Content
This isn’t a foolproof concept, but it does work most of the time. For instance, schedule a content creation day – or even a few hours a month – to work with your social media team in batch-creating Reels and Stories. Save the content for later, and your social media team can schedule and publish the content when they know the time is right. Bring a different outfit and you’ve fooled your audience into thinking you dedicate loads of time to creating content they love. Since most of your micro-video content should be under 30 seconds, you should be able to jam out 5-10 videos in a couple of hours (providing you’ve thought through your approach).
Even better, you can schedule your Facebook and Instagram Stories through Meta’s Creative Studio. Which means you can automate your process even more. Unfortunately, there is not way to schedule your Reels, so it’s important to make sure your Reels are created and saved as a Draft in Instagram on the mobile device you plan to publish it.
Looking for someone to hand off your social media work?