Let’s get one thing straight: sharing blog posts is no longer enough to grow your social media presence.
Most social media users are slowly—but steadily—losing interest in reading full-length articles. Instead, they’d rather find the information they need and want from a video on Facebook, Instagram, or even TikTok.
That’s why over 99% of marketers used video content in 2021.
This year, people’s taste in social media videos slightly changed.
Rather than watching a 10-minute video on how to invest in cryptocurrencies, they prefer watching multiple “short-form” videos. Each of which explaining a specific tip or strategy rather than covering the entire topic in one go.
Today, we’ll discuss the ways brands can leverage the power of short-form video to grow their social media presence.
Let’s begin.
1. Get to Know Short-form Video Platforms
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you should be familiar with TikTok.
With over 1 billion users across 150 countries, TikTok has become one of the people’s go-to platforms for bite-sized clips.
TikTok is great for brands that need to humanize their brand and form authentic connections with the social community.
Here are some of the proven ways to promote your brand on this platform:
- Discover and participate in trends: TikTok makes it easy for brands to find trending effects, hashtags, filters, and sounds. Using these trends will help your profile become more searchable on the “Discover” page.
- Ask and answer TikTok questions: Using the built-in “Questions” filter allows brands to gather insights from the TikTok community. You can also answer existing questions posted by other users to build your credibility as an information source.
- Use the scheduler to post videos at the right time: You can use TikTok’s built-in post scheduler by creating posts via a desktop browser. Thankfully, TikTok also has an audience insights tool that will help you track your audience’s activity patterns.
Remember that there are loads of TikTok marketing tools you can use to augment your video marketing. You can use them to research trending hashtags, analyze competitors, create eye-popping videos, and more.
Aside from TikTok, there are two other short-form video platforms you should know: Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.
Both of these platforms have their own pros and cons. YouTube, for example, lets you take advantage of the massive community to maximize views.
Instagram Reels, on the other hand, has loads of stickers, filters, interactive backgrounds, and other features to spice up videos.
The trick here isn’t to choose a single platform to promote short-form videos on. What you need to do is learn to adopt as many platforms as you can to reach a wider audience.
2. Use Instagram Branded Content
Instagram branded content pertains to posts, including Stories, Reels, and Feed posts, that promote a product or service.
They are easily identifiable since they usually have the “Paid partnership with” tag.
With branded content, you can leverage the reach and authority of Instagram influencers to boost brand awareness. You can also feature branded content as ads, which will be published via Instagram Stories.
Just remember that Instagram video marketing is a whole new world of challenges that’s impossible to master overnight. Take your time, load up on Instagram learning resources,
3. Talk About Your Products on YouTube
Both TikTok and Instagram are great places to upload short videos about your products. However, most users who have purchase intent flock to YouTube to search for product recommendations.
Uploading product videos on YouTube is a proven visual marketing strategy because of the ever-increasing popularity of purchase intent searches.
The search phrase “which product to buy,” for instance, doubles in popularity each year. There’s also a 100% increase in watch time for “when to buy” videos.
This brings us to YouTube Shorts—AKA, Google’s response to TikTok’s rapid rise.
Feature-wise, YouTube Shorts doesn’t really offer anything mind-blowing that puts it over TikTok or Instagram. However, the massive YouTube user base allowed it to generate trillions of views since its launch.
To make the most out of YouTube Shorts, below are a handful of must-know tips:
- Create hyper-focused Shorts: Don’t waste your audience’s time on intros and background distractions in your actual clips. Get straight to the point and make it easy for viewers to focus on the video’s topic.
- Schedule your Shorts: Similar to TikTok, YouTube Shorts also has a scheduling tool baked into the platform. Use audience data from your main YouTube channel to tailor your publishing schedule.
- Use a mix of entertaining and informative content: With YouTube Shorts, you’re free to create videos about non-brand-related topics, like your breakfast to funny things at the office. Just balance it out with videos that tackle topics your target audience actually cares about.
4. Elevate Your Content Team’s Collaboration
Social media marketing campaigns have a lot of moving parts.
Without effective collaboration, it’ll be difficult to get content out the door on time. Not to mention that it’s harder to track whether or not your short-form video marketing is working.
To prevent your campaign from getting all over the place, consolidate your team’s day-to-day activities using workflow apps. Some examples are:
- Monday.com: Plan, schedule, and track tasks using visual boards. Thanks to its popularity, Monday.com supports various third-party integrations, from communication tools to file-sharing apps.
- Nifty PM: This platform lets you organize and monitor your social media marketing team’s objectives. It can also keep your members on the same page using the built-in chat feature.
- Process Bliss: Maintain consistency across all video marketing channels by tracking your team’s best practices. Create guidelines for writing post descriptions, video styles, hashtag strategies, and so on.
- Qntrl: This is a comprehensive workflow app with advanced features like automation, card-based task management, and visual process mapping. For social media marketing teams, it can help take your video planning and content tracking to the next level.
5. Go Live
Live videos aren’t necessarily short-form, but they’re a valuable addition to any brand’s video marketing arsenal.
Keep in mind that live videos, be it on Facebook or YouTube, unlocks new levels of interaction and urgency.
Live selling sessions, for instance, encourage viewers to act faster to avoid missing out. You can also host live Q&A sessions to communicate with your audience and build deeper relationships.
One of the best content software you can use for live videos is OBS—short for Open Broadcast Software. It’s a free streaming tool that can help you configure your facecam setup, plan scenes, apply filters, and more.
Conclusion
Whether you like it or not, video marketing on social media is here to stay.
The good news is, brands don’t need to invest in high-budget video production to keep up with the times.
Short-form video platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts—followed through with live streaming—will help your brand explode. More importantly, you don’t need expensive tools or time-consuming training to use them.
Good luck!
