In this blog, we’re going to dive into how you can make better videos for Facebook. And we’re going to really focus on three main things. Formatting, algorithm, and my tips to help you find success.
Formatting
Now, when it comes to creating videos on Facebook, it’s important to have the right tool, which is why I’ve partnered with Kapwing to put this video together for you. Kapwing is my go-to tool and resource for creating all of my videos that I use for social media, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, all of that. They have a fantastic and vast workspace that allows for me to create so many social specific videos out of my existing content. I’m able to resize video, autogenerate, and embed closed captions into my videos, add images, add text, do the different bars, all kinds of stuff. Kapwing just makes it super easy and super quick, and my favorite part about this tool, it’s free. So, when it comes to formatting, we’re going be talking about two things. How long should your video be? And what size should your video be?
- How long should your video be?
I get asked this question all the time when it comes to anything really related to creating video content. And my answer to you when it comes to Facebook specifically is, it’s as long as it needs to be, but not one second longer than it needs to be. 59% of video consumers will stop watching your video or scroll past it if they think that it’s too long or has too much extra unnecessary pieces of information. So you really gotta get to the point no matter how long your video is going to be for Facebook. So, when it comes to length, I want you to focus on two different kinds of length of video. Long binge worthy content and short thumb scrolling content. When it comes to binge worthy content, these are going to be longer videos that are over three minutes, probably somewhere in the vicinity of like three to seven minutes that people are going to keep expecting from you. It’s where you’re going to be showing up on a regular basis. Maybe it’s a series or something that you’re doing on a continuous basis. Some of my favorite creators that do this is the Holderness family, or a scary mommy, or even people like Kristina Kuzmic, who are creating really great engaging content on the regular, and consistently to engage with you. By creating that longer content, you’re also going to have the added bonus of qualifying for Facebook ad revenue. When you hit a thousand likes on your Facebook page, as well as you hit a certain milestone of watch time, over ten thousand minutes of watch time, you can start earning money on your Facebook page just like you do with ad sets, so when you create binge worthy content that is engaging and long lasting on the platform, Facebook will ultimately reward you for that. The second piece of video content I want you to focus on are the videos that are shorter in length. These are going to be the videos I’m going to encourage small business owners to really focus on. They’re quick, they’re easy, and they’re to the point. In fact, Facebook recommends that small businesses create videos that are 15 seconds or less. But the most important piece of content being in the first three seconds of the video. They want you to get to the point, get in and get out, ’cause again, I call this thumb scrolling content. This is stuff that can be easily consumed in a thumb scroll. Now, the kind of videos that you’re gonna want to create for something like this are going to be teasers for other bigger things that you have going on, but also text based videos as well where you have like text on the screen and video animations or photos in the background, or informative videos as well, which of course you can see on the screen some examples of what I’m talking about. I think the most important thing for you to remember when it comes to creating your videos, the most important thing is not to have information or video or clips that don’t serve a purpose. Get in, get out as quickly as possible and don’t waste people’s time. All right, now let’s talk about the size of your video. Now, over 500 million people are watching videos daily on Facebook, but 65% of them are watching them on mobile, so what’s the right size that you should that you should be using for the videos that you’re trying to create to have the best success for you in that watch time on Facebook.
- Formatting
So, this comes back to us wanting to focus on two different things. We’re going to focus on, again, the binge worthy content and that short content. If you’re creating long episodic content, you want to be using that horizontal format. You’re going to be creating your videos with the dimensions of 1280 x 720. This is pretty standard across the board for most platforms. LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook all use this as their standard. And the reason they do that is because it’s the average size of your computer screen or a TV screen. So, when it comes to the size of your short form videos, you’re going to want to think, how much of that phone screen can I take up? The best thing that you can do is create square or slightly bigger videos that are at a 5 x 4 aspect ratio. This is going to be really important for grabbing their attention because it’s taking up so much of their phone. This is especially going to be helpful if you’re doing what I suggested to you when we talked about how long your videos should be about using that first three seconds to put the most important and powerful information to grab their attention there in the beginning. Now, the best short form videos that perform well on Facebook are not only going to be square or that 5 x 4 aspect, but they’re also going to be quick, and usually will have text on them. So, using Kapwing I am able to come into my workspace, and I’ve uploaded a video that I want to turn into a social video, I am able to trim it, resize it, and add text.
Using Kapwing for a Teaser
What I’m first going to do is I’m going to select Trim, and I’m going to listen to where I want this to stop. I will select the clip in the Trim feature, listen and make sure I have the clip that I want. Next, I want to crop and it gives me these different sizes that I can pick. And what’s really awesome is it kind of guides the cropping for me. You could do Facebook and Twitter Portrait, Facebook and Twitter Landscape, Facebook Cover, Instagram, all that, but we’re going to be focusing on portraits. I want, again, that 4 x 5 ratio that we talked about earlier, and I’m going to hit Done Cropping. The other thing that I want to do is I want to add padding on the top and the bottom. Clicking on the background, I’m going to expand my padding. And what it’s doing is it’s keeping the ratio I have for my video, but giving me the padding that I want, you can adjust how you need to.
Adding Text
Now, I want to do static text at the top, resize it for Facebook, now I want to add in my subtitles down here at the bottom. So I want to go into the Subtitle feature, and what it’s going to do is actually auto generate it for me, so I have my clip and I’m going to hit Auto Generated. Now, this can take a minute or two depending on how long your video is, but this is one of my favorite newer features that Kapwing has. Kapwing is doing a really good job of taking the things that everybody really, really wants when it comes to social video, and putting it all into one place very easily and very affordably, which is why I’m such a big fan. I don’t have to go do all these separate tools anymore to accomplish the things that I really want, which is why I wanted to share it with you because it will solve a lot of your problems when it comes to creating better videos for Facebook. Once your captions are auto generated you can go in and you correct anything it translated weirdly, like, sometimes I talk to fast and it makes jumbled words on auto generated captions. Kapwing is so easy to use. I want to make sure that I share everything you can do with it, like I can turn off the background and have none. I can just have the white text. I can change it, the color of it, if I wanted to. It’s just really, really handy and easy to use.
So my video is finished. I have cropped it. I made it shorter. I cut out the parts it didn’t need. I formatted it so that it could take up as much of the screen on that thumb scroll as possible while also being engaging. I have my text at the top and the bottom, I have the closed captions, which I’ll go over as an important tip, and it’s short. It’s a little over 15 seconds, but I think that I’m accomplishing what I want it to do. Then I just hit Publish. It downloads it for me. And then I have a video to add to my content calendar for doing all my sharing.
Facebook Algorithm
Okay, so now let’s talk about the Facebook algorithm because creating great videos that are the right size and the right length aren’t going to do much for you if you don’t know what Facebook wants. In the beginning of 2020, Facebook came out and said we have three things that we’re going to focus on for organic video when it comes to the newsfeed, and that’s going to be loyalty and intent, video views, and originality. So, based on those three things, what exactly does that mean? What are you supposed to do with that? Facebook is going to basically reward you for people watching and completing those videos. That’s why it’s important to really define what the two pieces of content are that you really want to make. Binge worthy content or social video.
If someone’s going to watch your short social video clip, Facebook’s going to be like yes, this page creates content that people want to watch and complete, so we’re going to keep putting it in front of their followers and find new people to put it in front of. When it comes to the loyalty and intent thing, that’s what that binge worthy content’s about. If you’re creating episodic content that people want to watch and they’re seeking out, they’re searching it. They’re making that video or your page seen first on their newsfeed, it’s going to really help you with what you have going on because that’s what Facebook really cares about right now. So, really figuring out what kind of video you want to create so that you can make Facebook happy by making the viewers happy. You want people to watch as much of the video as possible.
Facebook Watch Times
When it comes to Facebook video watch times, there’s three different numbers you gotta pay attention to. 3 seconds, 10 seconds, and one minute. These are the three measurements that Facebook uses mainly when it comes to the algorithm, and it says how many people watch the first three seconds? How many people watch the first 10 seconds? How many people stay tuned to a minute? The reason these three ones are important is based, again on the kind of video. Did you create a binge worthy content video? Or a social video? With a social video, that first three to 10 seconds super important, which again is why you want to put those important things first. And when it comes to that longer binge worthy content, that one minute video means the most. Why one minute? Well, because that one minute, that’s when Facebook is going to put an ad on your video. That’s why those three markers are really important. You can see that in your Facebook analytics.
Facebook Loyalty
Now, when it comes to loyalty, how are you creating loyalty within your videos? Well, that’s when you want to create videos that give value. What can you do in your video that’s going to add to someone’s life? Are you going to make them laugh? Are you going to entertain them? Are you going to educate them? Are you going to inform them about something? Are you going to make them aware of who you are? That loyalty is going to respond, and the other thing that Facebook wants, is engagements. People hitting like, commenting, and sharing your video. The more value you can give that person, the more they’re going to want to give your video that has value to their audience to give value to the people that are watching them. So, if you give value to them, they want to take your content and give value to their people. So, it’s really just this balancing act of creating really great content that’s really engaging, that’s either binge worthy, or short social video.
My Best Tips For Video Success
Alright, so I promised you my tips to help you get your videos to have the most chance for success, so here we go.
- You only want to include the information that you absolutely have to have. I’ve gone over that quite a few times, and I think that it’s important to re-say it because you want to make sure everything that you have is going to give value, get to the point, and help tell the story and move it along.
- We talked about optimizing for mobile. 80% of the Facebook users are using Facebook on their mobile, and 65% of all Facebook users are watching video on mobile, so make sure that you’re thinking about mobile when you’re creating your video content.
- This is a really important one. As you saw when I created a video with Kapwing, I put the closed captions in there. 85% of people are watching videos on Facebook without sound. In fact, the number one complaint that people have about Facebook ads is how loud they are when they get started, so you really have to make sure to create every single video, and it needs to have text on it whether you are doing the closed captioning like we do with Kapwing, or you’re creating a text animated video where it’s like you have a whole montage and the text comes in and out of the video, which I have a whole video about as well, which you can watch in the cards right now. Either way, you need to make sure that you have text because so many people are watching videos without sound. You have to think, how are you spending time on Facebook? Are you in the bathroom? Are you in there with your spouse? Are you watching something with your kids? Are you in line at Starbucks? Like, you’re trying to watch things and engage with things, but if people can’t do it without hearing you, it’s gonna be really hard. And that’s, I think, with something that’s super unique to Facebook is that watching without hearing, so always do it, always.
- Go use Kapwing, ’cause it’s free and it’ll do it for you.
- Now, my top tip for you, and anything that you do on Facebook is, your most important content needs to be in the first three seconds. “Stop! Watch this! This is the most important thing you’re going to see all day on Facebook. Did you know that turtles can breathe through their butts?!” As my kids would like to say. Your most important piece needs to be at the beginning because that’s going to hook them to watch. There’s so many other video platforms, and different story techniques that say you gotta give the good stuff at the end, or you gotta give them a reason to keep watching, or give that bonus piece at the end, which is kind of what I’m doing here, if I’m going to be honest. Either way, you have to get people hooked on your video by giving them the good stuff there. This is just standard across the board. Give value right up front so people know what they’re getting into, so they stop scrolling and start watching.
The biggest thing, I think, about Facebook when it comes to creating your content is you need content specifically for the platform. And it really needs to be something that’s trending and popular right now. So, right now at the time of me writing this, a lot of things that are going on are related to Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, murder hornets, social unrest, all kinds of things like that, so the best performing content are things that are connecting with people through those things. So, a lot of people are choosing to create Black Lives Matter content in support of it, and sharing, and helping people get through these times, and how they can have a voice within it. When coronavirus came out, I did a whole thing about how you can create video and a business no matter where you’re at, and I even put together a whole summit for it. It’s staying trendy and topical because that is what works best on Facebook. Unlike YouTube where it’s evergreen and lasts forever, Facebook videos have a pretty short shelf life, and sometimes they revive depending on what’s going on, but it’s really important that you create content specifically for Facebook that is also trendy. Everyone’s biggest complaint about Facebook is that organic reach is gone, and it’s so hard to connect and get seen in that cluttered newsfeed. And I hear you, and that’s why I hope this blog will help you. And until next time, I’ll see you soon.
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