and what you can do to increase video engagement and memorability

“I think it’s very healthy to spend time alone.” – Oscar Wilde

Spending time alone may have been good for Oscar Wilde, Ireland’s revered playwright, but it has become quite a nuisance in the age of Covid-19. 

That’s why – with quarantining, remote work, remote learning, remote living – our social media consumption habits have changed. According to a recent survey, approximately 45% of respondents reported that since the outbreak they have spent more time on social media.

It has also been reported that social media users feel that they can interact safely and be entertained without risking infection. 

In the age of social distancing – the great escape is social media.

How captivating it is

What’s the most captivating form of format the networks have to offer when it comes to social media content? Video, of course!

According to SocialMediaToday, video is the most engaging type of content, regardless of the social media platform. It holds viewers’ attention 5x more than images, and both long-form and short-form videos are among the most shared pieces of content on social.

During the pandemic, social video has become essential to overcoming the boredom and loneliness of quarantine and lockdown. This factum is affirmed by the well-known data measurement company Nielsen, which shared results from its study on how being home-bound has led to a 60% increase in the amount of video content watched globally. 

Home alone?

For better or worse, we’re home. We’re more alone than we ever were pre-Covid, and we want to be social and have fun. 

This is where social videos come into play, and where it becomes even more essential to create videos that stand out in an ocean of social content. We can’t afford to have our content be anything less than engaging, captivating, and memorable.

To help achieve this goal, we gathered the following key tips and best practices.  

1.    Be mobile-first and create your videos for consumption on mobile devices. According to research commissioned by Facebook IQ, people surveyed found it easier to pay attention to video when on their smartphone vs. a computer. And in a separate study by Facebook and MetrixLab, ads created for mobile perform better across a range of KPIs.

2.    Open with the main message. We’ve all probably heard that human beings have a shorter attention span than goldfish (with humans coming in at eight seconds and fish at nine). 

A study from researchers at the Technical University of Denmark supports the claim that global attention span is indeed narrowing, postulating that this is due to the deluge of information that is overwhelming consumers.

Whether you think that’s hyperbole or not, either way – your best bet is to make sure your key messages and visuals captivate within the first few seconds of the video. This way, you can be confident that they won’t get missed even if the viewer decides to tune out or drop off.

3.    Leverage and ‘bookend’ your brand. According to another insight from Facebook IQ, more than one in three people surveyed say that seeing the logo of a brand they like may catch their attention and inspire them to watch the video.

To capture attention quickly and stand out from the many brands on your target audience’s feed, ensuring brand presence within the first few seconds of the video will significantly improve engagement and recall. 

It is recommended to display your logo both at the very beginning and at the end of your social video – i.e. ‘bookending.’

Moreover, using branded colors, themes, and imagery will further drive brand awareness and memorability.

4.    Make it fun! As noted earlier – we’re home more than ever and are seeking fun entertainment more than ever. To capture and keep attention, we should create content that is differentiated and innovative. We can create visual “fun” by delivering unexpected combinations of assets, by moving between the foreground and background, and using animation in subtle yet unpredictable ways.

According to business.com, in our challenging pandemic-ridden reality: “One of the biggest factors fueling the recent rise in social media usage is a desire for pure fun that can distract people from the seriousness of their situation.”

So if you can tap into that escapism ethos, you will increase the chances of not only capturing the attention of viewers but of having them proactively seek out more of your video content.

5.    Create for sound-off. Most social videos are watched with the sound off. As much as 85% of Facebook videos play with the volume dial turned down. To make sure that your message and purpose don’t fall on deaf ears (so to speak), make sure to use text overlays and other typographic treatments to convey the information that is otherwise missed when the mobile device is muted.

6.    Go vertical. Social videos are primarily consumed on the viewer’s mobile device, which people hold vertically 94% of the time. Vertical alignment is so overwhelmingly the global preference that 90% of the videos watched vertically get higher completion rates than those watched horizontally.

How Wochit can help

To help you create engaging, captivating, and memorable social videos, Wochit offers a cloud-based video creation platform that empowers anyone and everyone in your organization with spectacular video creation capabilities, regardless of whether they have any background or knowledge in video editing.

With Wochit, you can:  

Make it fun: users can select from a pre-licensed library of 200 million ready-to-use images and videos that you won’t find in most repositories. And smart editing features enable extensive freedom in creating differentiated and fun video stories.

Leverage your brand: Wochit enables you to use your fonts, brand colors, logo, and any other brand asset you want, and put them anywhere, including customized transitions, intros, and outros (so you can bookend your brand).

Create for sound-off: you can easily add text overlays, including listicles, quotes, and multi-lines for an additional dimension of content that conveys your most important messages. 

Formats for any channel: every video you create with Wochit can be swiftly resized or verticalized to meet every social channel format and spread your story further, faster. 

And that’s just the tip of the social video creation iceberg.

So, stuck at home? No worries – you can create jaw-dropping social videos that deliver differentiated fun to your audience and secure the kind of brand engagement that turns into long-lasting brand loyalty.