10 Tips for Posting Video on Social Media

So you have a new video you want to post. You’ve probably spent some time and money on this video and want to get the most you can out of it. Below are some tips on getting the most views, engagement, likes and follows you can. This post will focus mostly on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

WHERE TO UPLOAD

First, and most importantly, always upload the video to the social platform you’re posting on. You probably want to post your new video on every social media platform you use. It’s always recommended you upload the video directly to each platform you use. Cross posting, for example posting a link to your YouTube video on Facebook is not helpful for you or your audience. By doing this you make it harder for them because there is now an extra step to watching your video.

Users want to watch videos, studies show 54% of fans want to see more video from their favorite brands. When you don’t post directly to the social media platform they will not favor your content. This is because Facebook wants users to spend as much time on FB as possible, so they’re not going to favor a post that will take users off of their site. When you post direct to the platform, you get the benefits of autoplay on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram which is your absolute best tool to get engagement on your video.

WHO SHOULD POST

Many of us work on projects that have a whole team and possibly several companies involved all of whom may want to post this video, and once it’s finished it’s tempting to post the video to all your accounts on each social media platform.

I recommend having one person or company who is the designated posting company and then have everyone involved repost or share that post, as opposed to everyone posting the video on their own. This allows all the views, comments and likes to aggregate on one post. Otherwise, you split those between several posts, this also makes the following tips more difficult.

WHAT TO WRITE

While your video will tell a story, it won’t tell the whole story, so you need to write a description to explain. Give your audience insight to your process for the video, even the most mundane details can be interesting for your readers.

There is also a functional reason to add a description. It boosts your SEO. The algorithms that determine when and where to show your video have a hard time figuring out what its about. When you add background information you provide more bread crumbs for your video to find people who like it.

Another tactic you should use is tagging everyone that is involved in the process. First, it alerts everyone that the video is up and shareable. And when you tag someone usually it will show up in their friends feeds drastically extending the reach of the post, and again it’s a breadcrumb that shows who is in your orbit. These are the most likely people to then watch and like your business.

This tip is a bit of sales related advise. As with a conversation with a prospective client you need to have an ask. For a video it should be a small ask, like comment or share? Subscribe? Sign up for our emails? Go to our website? Anything to get them drawn into the process.

Lastly, when you get comments, reply as often as you are able to. This builds a community and makes you look more popular.

CAPTIONS/SUBTITLES

Many people scrolling through Facebook or LinkedIn will likely start with the sound off, so having the option to view subtitles or burning in your subtitles is definitely a good way to get people engaged with your content.

Both YouTube and now Facebook have options for enabling automatic captions. Subtitles or captions are automatically created for YouTube, and for Facebook you need to turn the option on the first time you upload a video. From then on you won’t need to do anything.

You may want to consider burning in captions to a version of your video. I recommend this on Instagram because they do not have an option to generate or upload subtitles. The only option is burn-in. Your videographer will likely need to do this for you when exporting the video. There are also services to create captions for your videos that are quite affordable and accurate.

YOUTUBE SPECIFIC TIPS

If your YouTube video is long you’ll want to consider adding in chapters. These appear as separators in the progress bar in a YT video. This can be very helpful for videos where you have distinct separations in the video and you want to make it easier for your viewers to find a particular section or topic. There is a how to below.

What are YouTube chapters? How are they different from timestamps? How to add chapters to YouTube videos? If you are confused and want to learn how to use th...

Cards are also very helpful for viewers to find related videos or find more information about something you mention. Cards are one of the best ways yo get your viewers to watch more of your content, especially for how to videos.

Are you adding YouTube End Card or end screens to all your YouTube videos? If not, you are missing out on a lot of potential views. In 2019, the YouTube stud...

And last tip, add a location in your videos, if you’re a local business looking for local customers this can aid in the organic discovery for viewers. 

INSTAGRAM SPECIFIC TIPS

Many of us know you can upload videos of up to 60 seconds to Instagram, but there is a tip to get essentially any length video to show up in the feed. You can upload a video to IGTV and make sure the setting for post to feed is on. There is no need to upload the video in a vertical format, you can upload your video as is.

Hopefully you learned something new and can use some of these next time you post any content. You don’t have to be on every social platform but using the ones you’re already using more effectively can help your business and build your brand.

Please let us know any tips you have that we didn’t mention in the comments!