With so much competition, social media videos need to be attractive and catchy while also conveying your message. Simply put, your videos have to capture and keep the attention of your audience.
Each platform requires different formatting, which can be costly and time-consuming. This leaves many companies wondering where to focus their energy. Should you be focusing on Insta? Or is TikTok the way to go? Maybe Facebook is better?
In this post, we’ll cover all the bases on how to format videos for social media by platform, the benefits of each, and which platform is our personal fave.
Posting videos on Instagram is completely different than posting on YouTube. Each social media platform has varying length limits and aspect ratios. Remembering how to format videos for social media can be dizzying.
But, social media video is critical for most businesses, so it’s important to learn how to format videos for success.
We’ll break down the requirements and specifications for video for each platform:
However, in our opinion, there’s one platform that rises above the rest (ahem… Instagram Video), but don’t worry, we’ll share our tips on the others as well.
Ridgeline Media Marketing are social media video experts. We understand both video format rules for social media and how to get your video noticed.
If learning how to create, format, and edit your social media videos has your head spinning, give Ridgeline a call.
We believe that the best form of marketing for any business is through organic growth with Instagram Reels. Educating and adding free value while getting people to know your personality and passively building trust with your audience, is KEY to scaling your business.
Instagram Reels can be a gold mine if you’re trying to grow your following. Reels have become the fastest-growing feature on the platform for this reason.
The short videos allow the creator to focus on the value of their content because they’re easy to make, edit and share. For this reason, businesses can create a lot of relevant content easily and in a short amount of time.
Not to mention, 86% of consumers say they would purchase, try, or recommend a product when content is rated as share-worthy.
We’re going to start with Instagram since this is what we believe has the highest ROI of all the different platforms when it comes to video content.
Instagram Reels come with an extensive library of:
Reels stay on Instagram until they’re deleted by you, so spending a little time to make your Reel engaging to your audience is going to be beneficial. Here’s what you need to know to format your Instagram Reels:
The key to successful Reels is to film everything vertically and always use captions.
TikTok has gained serious popularity in the last couple of years. With the best average session length, it’s no wonder users are flocking to the platform.
TikTok may allow more views, but the quality of the views and the ability to build a loyal following is significantly harder to do.
Because TikTok has a more casual and lighthearted approach to content sharing, it’s a great platform for behind-the-scenes footage or humorous content.
Falling just behind Facebook in terms of user engagement, TikTok has 50 million active users every day in the U.S. alone. The average time spent per user is 33 minutes a day.
The in-feed option for paid TikTok has similar formatting to the existing organic content. Here’s how to format videos for TikTok feed ads:
Facebook ads have been designed to quickly grab the attention of your intended audience and increase user engagement. With almost 2 billion active users, Facebook videos can significantly increase your brand awareness.
Another compelling benefit to using Facebook videos is that you can show your ads in the Instagram feed. You can promote your videos in-stream, in Instagram stories, or on your Instagram feeds.
But, you do need to choose the right format to best connect with your audience.
Facebook News Feed can be shown to display your product, service, or brand in unique ways.
Sound and movement capture the attention of your audience quickly allowing you to showcase the features of your product or to tell your brand story.
Here’s what you need to know for formatting:
Facebook’s Stories feature allows users to post video updates that remain available for 24 hours. These can be effective when you want to share organic updates or immediate content without having to worry about video specs.
Here’s what you should know about formatting:
YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google and has a higher retention rate than most other social media sites. With nearly 250 million hours of videos watched every day, there’s no wonder so many marketers use YouTube to promote their brands.
The platform is user-friendly and makes sharing information easy. YouTube also allows you to post stories, polls, or updates to help engage your audience.
Putting up a poll to determine what topic your viewers want to see next promotes involvement and gives you insight into what people want from your channel.
Users can upload a variety of media formats using different dimensions, but there’s really only one format for the video player. Here’s what YouTube recommends:
Making videos is one thing, formatting videos for success is another. So many of our clients have come to us because they simply don’t have the desire to learn what it takes to make awesome videos.
That’s why we’re here! We create videos that increase traffic, engage your target audience, and ultimately increase sales.
A lot of video production companies are focused on making a video look cool, which is great for social media. But, if your video isn’t high performing, all that flair is for nothing.
Ridgeline Media Marketing is focused on creating videos that do both by:
We take care of the entire process from marketing strategy to scripting, production, and distribution.
For social media videos that look cool AND produce results, contact us at Ridgeline Media Marketing.