Even if you’re maintaining and using social media only for your business, you’ll have seen the steady increase in the use of video there (it is, of course, ubiquitous on personal accounts). Creating videos for business social media is something we should all be doing now.
I’m not talking big production value content here; a slideshow can often work perfectly well. Although different social media platforms require different presentations, we only have a narrow subset of platforms which work well in B2B markets, so it needn’t be beyond the capability of most companies to give it a go.
For LinkedIn, power users report that very short videos (perhaps only 15 seconds) work best. On Twitter, people who know aren’t recommending much past 30 seconds. And on Facebook (which allows videos of 4 hours!), it’s something similar. In other words, if you want to get noticed, make something the length of an advert.
The reason that a 15- or 30-second message will work better than our wonderful 45-minute seminar presentation, even on a professional network such as LinkedIn, is that people look at social media sites to scan through the latest material, and are not prepared to devote their entire session to a single post. Once we understand that, we can compete with even the most successful brands.