How and why you should take advantage of Facebook videos feature
Crafting captivating videos on social networks, like Facebook, hinges on leveraging their key features to capture attention and drive engagement. Whether guiding viewers to your website or enticing them directly to your offer, understanding and utilizing Facebook videos’ key features is essential for success.
In this article, we’ll take a look at how to leverage an interesting video feature, now available almost in all video social sites, and especially most importantly, available on the biggest social network – Facebook. As the social ecosystem and its interactions are constantly evolving, the way we used the internet one year ago is highly obsolete. If you are not an advanced internet user or marketer, the changes are very subtle and unnoticeable.
Exploring Facebook Videos: Unveiling Key Features, Marketing Opportunities, and the Power of Autoplay
If you say you heard it for the first time, I hardly believe it…, want it or not, you must have seen one of the videos that started to play automatically, the moment when you stopped scrolling inside Facebook`s news feed. Videos directly uploaded to Facebook start to play automatically when the user stops scrolling the news feed. Because Facebook’s main goal is the best user experience, its videos’ autoplay starts in mute sound, and only when you tap on the video does the sound activate. This is what I call an elegant and non-intrusive way to introduce a new feature.
After only one-quarter with the auto-play video feature in place, Facebook saw a 134 percent increase in video plays and a 58 percent increase in engagement – leaving YouTube and others who saw none of the benefits far behind. We can speculate on motives, but the user experience with Facebook autoplay video is improved and this is what in the end matters most. If you ask me or any other marketer, autoplay videos are the next marketing holy grail waiting to be exploited. The Autoplay video feature is the next marketing holy grail waiting to be exploited. Let`s see a few stats and facts from more influential marketers:
Brandon Friesen from “Just Media” said that
“when he looks at the click-through rates on Facebook’s autoplay video, it blows away anything you see from traditional banner ads or even in-banner video. Facebook`s autoplay video motion, combined with strong content, increases click-through rates up to 8 % compared to rates of around 0.1 % for the average banner ad.”
Derek Dodge, director of digital programming for Discovery Channel said:
“Facebook`s video auto-play feature changed the way they thought about using Facebook. In the past we saw it as a marketing platform—now it’s more of a pure media platform.”
And it doesn’t stop at Facebook, the autoplay video feature can be found on all the biggest social networks, from Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat and probably, from now on at every new video startup, you’ll see. One thing is for sure, social networks and their newsfeed compositions are changing holistically based on human behavior and the progress of informational technology. This is good news both, for marketers and consumers. This means you as a marketer have a big responsibility in helping them to take advantage of the autoplay Facebook video’s key features to catch people’s attention with short, visually appealing messages and let them then decide on their own. If you combine all the above with the fact that 24% of consumers say video is their “most trusted” source of brand content, then the message for marketers is simple – adjust to an environment of visual media platforms or stay behind.
If you jump on the autoplay video wagon soon enough, you can enjoy quite an advantage over your competition
Now you are probably thinking …man, but videos are super expensive. True, they can be. Thus, the beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.
One of the people`s favorite types of videos is normal, face-to-face tutorial videos, which you can take with any HD camera-supported smartphone. As mentioned at the start, the goal of any content is to engage viewers and lead them through your sales funnel, i.e., your website where you want them to perform a certain action (either to leave you their email, contact you, make a purchase, or something else). The best way to leverage autoplay Facebook video’s key features is to combine it with a call to an action link. This simply means, when the video ends, you can add your clickable link. So natural flow for a viewer would be, he is scrolling his newsfeed, he sees your video which starts to play automatically, he watches it until the end and then he clicks on a link with a call to action – learn more, sign up, etc. which lands him on your website. The same is also true if you decide to run video ads. Since Facebook was introduced, you can collect your users’ email addresses straight from Facebook’s news feed, but that is a topic for another blog post.
Let`s one of our client`s examples: Neumob created a short 15-second promo video with an end call to action – to download their app from iTunes.
Posted by Neumob on Monday, June 29, 2015
In their case, Facebook autoplay video is addressing its viewers to download their app. At this point, It would be interesting to split-test the conversion rate, thus, unfortunately, we don’t have this data. Thus, I would say, that with video compared to images, video`s conversion rate is way higher. The other example is a face-to-face tutorial live video.
Here Mehdi Toozhy is visually presenting a certain educational topic. From the user’s perspective, the viewer gets immediately engaged thanks to the autoplay video feature. Once the video ends, the viewer has an opt-in to click »learn more«, where he`ll land on Mehdi’s website. Since Mehdi is wise, he has a website retargeting cookie, which follows its visitors until they don’t perform a certain action. In this case, to sign up for a free chapter of his book.
Conclusion: Harnessing the Potential of Facebook Video key features
Here we go, I hope, this shared insight into a combination of autoplay video feature with a call to action will make your job of driving traffic from social networks to your website a lot easier. And if you combine with the above combo,no-cost Facebook Live video and retargeting, you’ve almost run out of excuses on why driving traffic is hard.
Here is a short recap:
Publish video directly on Facebook (and other video social networks)
Add a call to an action,
Put retargeting on your landing page,
Repeat and rinse with more videos.