How to Create Facebook Videos That Foster Meaningful Engagement

Worried that Facebook’s latest news feed changes will impact your video reach?

Looking for tips to create videos that generate meaningful comments?

In this article, you’ll discover how to create Facebook videos that generate the mindful interactions your posts need to stay visible in the news feed.

How News Feed Changes Affect Video Visibility

For video marketing to work, you need to use different types of video content to achieve specific goals, and then tailor each of your video messages to speak the language of each social platform. Marketers have spent the last couple of years learning the language and quirks of Facebook, but now the landscape has changed.

Facebook Zero (the latest platform update) has brought new changes to the very core of how we understand the place of videos in Facebook’s context. The update is all about encouraging meaningful interactions among people. As Facebook begins showing content based on people’s connections and that content’s ability to spark interactions, users will see more content from friends and less content from companies.

In this light, video is seen as passive because it doesn’t spark as many conversations as other types of content; thus it will be seen less frequently in people’s feeds. Does that mean that creating video for Facebook isn’t worth the investment anymore? Not at all. It just means that you’ll have to step up your game because the competition among companies will become far more fierce.

Here is what you can do to stand out.

#1: Choose Video Types That Generate Facebook Engagement

I spoke before about the specific Facebook language to address Facebook audiences. When it comes to video, that’s defined by the video types you use to reach those audiences. That’s why when you create videos for Facebook, these video types are a safe bet for generating conversation and engagement.

Live Videos

Facebook says that live videos are watched 3x longer and commented on 10x more than any other video type on the platform. With the news feed changes, those comments can go a long way toward increasing your organic reach.

You can use live video to stream events, arrange a Q&A, or present a new product.

Educational Videos

Exploring an issue your audience is having can spark a back-and-forth in the comments section that will go a long way toward demonstrating engagement with your brand. As you publish each video, people will start seeing you as an authority and their trust in you will grow.

Use educational videos to explain the problems and concepts most often experienced by people in your field.

Company Story Videos

Facebook has always been about connecting people and creating communities, so showing what happens behind the scenes at your company is a way to invite your audience to feel part of it. Putting your team and their daily tasks in front of the camera humanizes your brand and shares your company’s values, things that your audience can always relate to.

You can use company videos to introduce new team members, show how a product is made, or follow an order from placement to fulfillment.

How-To Videos

Videos that teach viewers step-by-step how to solve very specific problems are some of the most sought-after on any platform. Because many people will have variations of the problem you tackle, the videos bring interaction in the form of questions and discussions in the comment section.

You can use how-to videos (or explainer videos) to show viewers how to place an order, solve an issue, or set up your product.

#2: Design Your Video to Capitalize on Engagement

All social networks have different languages for videos, but that doesn’t mean that certain things work equally well for videos on all platforms. There are specific technical and audiovisual aspects that have proven effective on Facebook and beyond, so incorporating them into your videos is a must.

Keep Your Videos Short

In the past, Facebook has said the important thing about video isn’t its length but its ability to tell a story. Telling the story is essential, but the closer you can get to keeping the video under the 2-minute mark, the better it will perform.

Why? People lose interest fairly quickly, especially on social media.

A short video forces you to keep your story simple and increases the chance that viewers will watch it to completion.

Open With a Bang

Given that Facebook autoplays videos on mute by default, your chance of capturing the eyes of your target audience rests heavily on the power of your initial visuals.

Use one of your best sequences as the video opener. To spark interest, consider including colorful or strange images, unconventional camera angles, or time lapses.

Subtitle Every Video

Thanks to muted autoplay, people have grown accustomed to watching videos with no sound. Subtitles let you emphasize the things that matter most in your message.

As you line out your subtitles, remember to use keywords to underscore the high points of your message even more.

Don’t Overuse Effects

The story (your message) is the most important thing about your video. Don’t get overly creative with editing and effects that might get in the way of that story.

To keep things simple, come up with an original story and let it speak for itself.

#3: Invest in News Feed Visibility

If Facebook Zero makes anything clear right out of the gate, it’s that Facebook wants businesses to pay for visibility. If you’ve not yet paid for exposure via Facebook ads, the ad system offers several features that make it well worth your time and money.

First off, you can define a series of key targeting characteristics to reach your desired audience more accurately.

You’ll also receive valuable performance data on your videos such as how many 3-second and 10-second views each video has, how much those views cost you, and the amount of watches for people who saw part of your video or the entire video.

You can even zero in on the performance of your videos with each audience segment. You might find that young people prefer short and fast-paced videos, while older audiences stick around for longer videos.

It’s all in the raw data found in the Facebook Ads platform, information that’s well worth the money you’ll put down for visibility in the news feed. The data can help you adjust and optimize your videos for further engagement and reach. And given how much Facebook takes those factors into account today, you can’t afford not to spend some money.

Conclusion

The Facebook landscape may have changed but the essentials that differentiate videos that engage haven’t. Use the advice above to create videos that get your viewers talking to and about you.

And because Facebook Zero is all about engagement and meaningful interactions, it’s safe to say that you’ll need that high-quality engagement more than ever (plus a couple of bucks to invest).

What do you think? Will you continue to use video in your Facebook marketing? What other tips can you recommend? Share your thoughts and questions in the comments below.

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4 Quick Strategies to Make Your Facebook Custom Audiences More Effective

It is its ability to enable advertisers to create such specific, segmented, well-defined audiences that makes Facebook advertising so successful. By being able to more finely target based on demographics, interests, and behavior, Facebook Custom Audiences ensures you are getting the right message to the right user.  

In short, Facebook Custom Audiences is the crown jewel of eCommerce Facebook marketing. The key, however, is in being able to harness this PPC superpower to ensure you’re converting like a pro for as little advertising spend as possible.  

Something that is now even more vitally important as Facebook’s implements its new newsfeed changes.

As Facebook tries to make newsfeed content more meaningful to users, content will now be ranked based on engagement, which we believe will decrease organic reach and therefore increase ad competition, which in turn could see a rise in ad cost. To get a handle on this as soon as possible, hacking your custom audiences and using them at their full potential is a good place to start.

This week we look at 4 strategies you can use to turn your Facebook Custom Audience Targeting into a well-oiled (selling) machine.

Facebook Custom Audience Hack 1: Segment Your Lookalikes

You may already know that with Facebook Lookalike Audiences you can target new potential shoppers who have similar traits or behave similarly to your current shoppers.

Before we get into how to improve your Lookalike strategies, let’s recap how Facebook allows you can create these audiences:  From custom audiences, from website visitors and from your Facebook follower.

The thing with Facebook Lookalike is that it will find potential shoppers to reach who are just like your converting customers; but as we know, not all customers are the same. What about all those things that your potential and current shoppers don’t have in common?  

The key to any successful marketing platform is in segmentation and therefore relying on the broad Lookalike Audience, without drilling it down further, is costing you! You will want to have more control of this to ensure you’re not missing out on valuable leads, finding similar customers who have not so similar interests. To do this, follow these two steps.

Step 1: Create a new ad and select your created Lookalike Audience.

Step 2: Add Specific Interests relevant to your eCommerce brand target audience under ‘Detailed Targeting.’

Why is this strategy so important? This will help you segment your Lookalike Audience even further, and therefore enable you to fine-tune your ad for a smaller portion of this custom audience thus increasing your chances of converting.

Pro Tip: Repeat this process for a few campaigns you will create segments of your Lookalike campaigns.

Facebook Custom Audience Hack 2: Kick Duds to the Curb  

This may seem drastic, but when budget is tight, concentrate on converting campaign audiences. Take a look at your custom audience insights and make a list from those that are winners, right down to the duds – the campaigns that just aren’t giving you the ROIs they should be. Then say goodbye to the duds and pause those campaigns or delete the non-performers from your targeting.

Why? Because they are bringing down your whole average. You can easily spot these duds by using Facebook insights. Facebook ads cost money, and your objective is to get the highest ad engagement for your budget.

Let’s use a hypothetical situation to explain:

Say you’re running a sock promotion campaign to a mixed gender custom audience and you see women aged 18-24 are engaging with your campaigns, while men of the same age within that audience are engaging considerably less. Those ‘men’ are bringing down your whole campaign average and lowering your ROIs. So what to do? Exclude your low engagement duds, which in this example would be men aged 18-24, from your targeting!

Facebook Custom Audience Hack 3: Retargeting Timelines

So you’re using Facebook remarketing ads! Awesome! But are they as effective as they could be? Here’s a little hack to improve your chances of converting:

Don’t market to your most recent customers. Someone who has just spent dollars on your store is less likely to buy from you again from an ad they see the next day – when their product hasn’t even arrived yet – than someone who bought, received great service and is ready to shop again in, say, a month’s time. Alternatively, you may want to ensure that the ad you show someone who has just bought, verses the ad you show someone who bought a month ago, is adapted accordingly.

There is an easy fix for this when creating your custom audiences and that is to use the ‘exclude’ option. Say you are creating a custom audience based on people who have visited your ‘Thank you’ page, i.e., people who have bought on your store. If you want to them to be reached 30 days after purchase but before 60 days, you could do the following:

Facebook Custom Audience Hack 4: Clone Your Winners

If you have a Facebook custom audience that is performing like a superstar, there is so much you can do with those insights to increase your marketing ROIs across other platforms.

What do we mean?

Say you’re an online T-shirt seller, and your superstar audience insights for that specific audience shows you that those potential shoppers are big fans of ‘Sharpie’ – you could use that interest to create a series of how-to videos to design t-shirts for events such as Valentine’s or Halloween, using only a Sharpie.

Or if you’re selling electronics and your audience is older and favors more conservative news publications, you can ensure that your Google Display Networks are not displayed on liberal-leaning websites.

The point is, Audience Insights has a host of valuable data you can use to get into the mind of your potential shoppers to plan higher-converting ads, content and even products.

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Ultimately, like with most marketing, segmentation and optimization is key to make your Facebook Custom Audiences more effective. What works for one audience, product or even time of the year, won’t necessarily work for another. If you want to hang onto those dollars and ensure you get the absolute best results for your spend, keep a watchful eye on your Facebook Custom Audience Insights and ad results. 

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