Video has proven itself an incredibly effective marketing tool, overtaking blogs and infographics as the premier form of media used in content strategy.
The demand for it is spiking; 86% of consumers surveyed said they wanted to see more video content from brands, and on social media video ranks among consumers’ favorite types of content.
Additionally, 91% of marketers surveyed said they were satisfied with the ROI of their video marketing on social media. It should come as no surprise, then, that social media marketers are relying on video content more than ever.
However, some brands aren’t optimizing their video strategy for social media.
Why Video Needs to Be Part of Your Social Media Strategy
As one of your most valuable media assets, video needs to be a central focus of your social media strategy. Explainers, promos, interviews; they should all be front and center when posting on social.
Short videos are ideal attention grabbers. A quick explanation or a catchy, bite-sized piece of useful information can sway users in your direction far better than a lengthy manifesto – there is room for that further down the sales funnel!
You can also use videos on social media to creatively broadcast your brand’s story and build an emotional connection with your followers. The video format offers endless opportunities for re-editing, repurposing, and revisiting your brand’s most memorable moments.
Ultimately, this gives you an impressive ROI for each individual piece of video content. Including videos in your social media content can increase views by 48%, according to research conducted by Adobe. Maximizing the visibility of each individual video results in a clear competitive advantage.
Level Up Your Video Content With Social Media Video Analytics
How Long Should Social Media Videos Be?
Before we get down to how you actually go about scheduling your videos on the various social media platforms, it’s important to address two important questions:
When is the best time to post on each site?
How long should each video be on each social media platform?
Let’s break it down per website:
How long can a video be on Facebook?
While Facebook videos can last up to four hours(!), the optimal runtime for a marketing video should be significantly shorter. According to Animoto, if your video is an ad, aim for it to be as short as possible. If that means it lasts just 15 seconds – great. If you hope to convey more complex messages – aim for the 3-minute mark.
Socialbakers data recommends posting on Facebook during the week from 8-10 a.m., which is right before the highest activity of each day.
No matter how long your video is, go in understanding that most people simply won’t watch all of it. According to Socialbakers data, the average watch time on Facebook videos is 4.57 seconds.
Average Facebook video watch time
Chart time range: Oct. 1-Dec. 31, 2019; Sample: 19,622 Facebook brand pages worldwide; Source: Socialbakers data
How long can Instagram videos be?
Standard videos on Instagram can run up to a minute, but experts recommend cutting it significantly shorter. Aim for 26 seconds; videos with that runtime average the highest level of engagement on IG.
While Instagram boasts a considerable level of engagement during Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m, the best time to post videos on Instagram is actually overnight.
How long can a Twitter video be?
Twitter videos were limited to 30 seconds. Since then, Twitter has extended videos’ permissible runtime to 2 minutes and 20 seconds. However, users became accustomed to the original runtime. It would therefore be best to keep Twitter videos to 30 seconds or less.
The best time to post on Twitter is at noon and 6 p.m., which is when you’ll generally see the highest click-through rates on your content.
How long can a LinkedIn video be?
According to HubSpot, you should try to keep your LinkedIn videos to 15 seconds or less.
Socialbakers says the best time to post on LinkedIn is Tuesday through Thursday, typically between 8-11 a.m.
How long are TikTok videos?
Similar to Twitter, TikTok launched with a more limiting minimal runtime for videos (15 seconds) before eventually allowing 60-second videos.
Keeping things nice and short is highly recommended on a platform that has surged because of its 15-second video pattern. Socialbakers data suggests that the best times to post on TikTok are 6-9 a.m. and 10-11 p.m.
Additionally, Iconosquare found that the days with the highest engagement were Tuesday morning, Thursday midday, and Friday early morning.
Make the Most of Your Video Content: Spread It Far and Wide
It’s evident that video has a lot to offer on social media. There is no reason to limit every video to a single social media platform. You have much more to gain by sharing your best-performing videos to your audiences along multiple channels.
But the greater the number of platforms you use, the more time it takes to maintain an active video presence. Social media management tools can help you to easily automate the process, but many native tools allow you to schedule your video posts, too. Here’s a look at how to do it:
How to post and schedule a video on Facebook
Facebook makes it easy to schedule posts. First, you’ll need to find the Publishing Tools section of your Page controls.
Publish posts on Facebook
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Under the Posts section on the left-hand side, you’ll see a Scheduled Posts button:
Schedule posts on Facebook
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From here you can select the date and time you want your video to show up on your Facebook page.
How to post and schedule a video on Instagram
Unlike Facebook, Instagram doesn’t offer users a direct scheduling solution through the app itself. Instead, Instagram Business users can schedule posts up to six months in advance through Facebook’s integrated Creator Studio.
You will have to link your Facebook and Instagram accounts on Facebook to do this. Simply enter the Creator Studio and click on the Instagram logo on the upper right corner of the screen.
Creat a post in creator studio
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Sign in to Instagram through the popup and your accounts will be linked.
One benefit of this approach is that you can schedule content on both platforms through a single dashboard. With the right social media management solution in place, you can deploy this kind of functionality on all platforms. Schedule Instagram stories with ease.
Create a post in creator studio
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How to post videos on Twitter
Twitter users with an advertiser account can schedule posts by opening up the Creatives tab:
How to post videos on Twitter
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Select Only Scheduled Tweets from the following menu and then click on Compose a Scheduled Tweet.
How to schedule a post on Twitter
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This opens up an editor with additional date and time functions beneath it. Use these to schedule the promotion of blogs, images, and tweets at specific intervals.
LinkedIn doesn’t allow users to schedule posts as a native functionality. Instead, you have to integrate a third-party LinkedIn scheduling tool to do so.
Integrating one of these tools to your LinkedIn account is simple. Once you sign up for a social media management solution, you authorize your LinkedIn account and grant the vendor permission to use the account in your name.
From there, you can create and schedule posts for all of your accounts from a single dashboard. This allows marketers to optimize the efficiency of their social media tasks and makes posting an efficient, scalable process.
TikTok
TikTok has exploded in popularity over the past few years, making it a valuable platform for your social media videos. TikTok does not allow users to schedule posts, though, so you’ll need to authorize a third-party social media management app like SocialPilot to do it for you.
This will let you optimize your video content strategy by publishing new videos when your users are the most active. This is especially useful for marketers managing brands with global reach, since you can post according to your users’ timezones and use analytics to accommodate their behaviors.
The Takeaway
Managing a single social media account is easy. Managing a dozen is not. The more your brand relies on social media, the more time you will spend on simple, low-value tasks like copying videos from one platform to another – and resizing or reformatting them to fit.
Smart marketers understand the need to streamline these tasks with automation-friendly toolkits. If you use a video hosting solution that supports social media, you can easily and quickly configure your video content for each platform.
As your work volume increases, social media management and video hosting solutions become an integral part of your workflow. They automate the most time-consuming parts of your job so you can focus on higher-impact tasks – like making more (and better) videos for your audience by following social media video best practices.