Tips to Create Engaging Short Videos for Social Media

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There was a time when it was enough to have a blog to share your content with your target audience. However, with the advent of social media, the content scene has changed unrecognizably.

It is now essential to have engaging video content on social media apart from other types of content.

Videos are the most engaging form of creating and sharing content. They are also highly popular on social media platforms, making them the preferred content formats. Creating short videos that are engaging on social media can be difficult without any guidance.

To solve this, we have listed the top tips for you here.

Know the Shortcuts to Find the Best Content to Shoot

It may be tempting to whip out your phone and shoot a video when inspiration hits you. However, creating videos to maximize engagement takes a lot more thought and planning.

First, you have to write down all the ideas you can think of for creating high-quality content. Having a clear idea of the expected outcome of the video makes it easy to build ideas.

Another avenue to get inspiration is to analyze popular posts on social media. For a general video, pick a popular topic. Identify popular posts from your social media and business pages for a video specific to your product.

Create a Well Thought Through Script to Make Production Work Easy

Popular videos typically have great scripts behind them. These are like the screenplay before making a movie. The script takes a video from a concept stage to a stage where it is ready to be executed. 

The storyline of the video is decided during this stage. You will also make critical decisions about camera angles, musical effects you want to give, what you want the presenter to say, etc.

A well-defined script makes it very easy to create the video with few iterations.

There is a Tool for Everything – Find Yours

There are tools for everything these days. Video production is a well-commoditized space.

Right from elaborating on the idea to building a production strategy, some tools make the life of a content creator easy. Do some research and find the right online video maker that suits your needs.

Use online tools to cut downtime on finding royalty-free music and build layouts. Free tools have decent templates and asset libraries. Even if you want to create a highly customized video, starting from a simple template is quite a good idea.

Pre-Shoot Preparation Saves Time

Plan ahead for your shoot. Shooting for a video needs a bit of planning. Short videos for social media can be purely made with graphics or can have people featured in the video. Both formats of video are popular on social media and are widely used.

Edited content from already published content is another way of creating videos that can be highly engaging. A simple example to pay attention to is the edited videos of the legal battle between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. This kind of content has garnered millions of views even when created by amateurs.

If you have a routine like dance and music, rehearse thoroughly. The more prepared people featured in the video are, the quicker you can create the video. This leaves you ample time to focus on improving engagement.

Making videos engaging is always an iterative process. People can get lucky and create a highly engaging video in the first go. But most of the time, you have to spend considerable time and effort in getting it right. It needs commitment and practice.

Pick Shooting Spots Wisely

There are some very simple guidelines available for shooting a video.

The first step is to choose a location that is free of distractions. While you can shoot your video wherever you want, filming in a crowded cafe will add to your work. You will have to spend time editing out people walking around. There is the issue of background noise as well.

Shooting in places with poor lighting will increase your editing work, and you will have to spend more time. You will have to adjust the lighting, and that takes time. Especially for social media videos, you can point and shoot, which usually does the job as long as you are in the right place.

Find Your Music for Free

Music is a big part of what gets your video engagement on social media. There is a reason why there are as many viral songs on social media as there are videos.

There are a few ways you can get your hands on the trendiest music for your social media video. The easiest and most effective source of music is the social media platform’s royalty-free music. Since many people use these free music clips, they are already very popular.

Another route is to use music clips from your editing software library. While the former gives you free music, it does not make you stand out.

Music from an editing software library will give you a better choice but does not guarantee engagement.

The Secret Sauce is the Editing Work

No matter how great your shooting skills, how pretty the models, and how catchy the music, success depends on editing. Editing trims the fat from your video and makes it sharp. Many editing tools simplify the complex editing process.

Watch well-edited videos to get inspiration to know how to edit effectively. Editing is not just about shortening the video by keeping the best bits. It is also about the right placement of music, adding catchy graphics where needed, and so on.

Measure and Iterate

Engagement can be tracked and measured. It only takes a little time from when the video is published to know if it is engaging the audience. If you track the performance of your videos, you will realize that the most successful ones show a pattern. 

The pace of successful engagement is usually predictable. However, this also greatly depends on the time and day when you post. You will notice that publishing at a certain time loses early engagement while the video becomes instantly popular at other times. 

Conclusion

Creating engaging short videos is a well-established process. First, you need to know which topics have the highest possibility of driving engagement. The next step is to record the video in a way that follows popular trends but still stands out. This, combined with good editing, increases the chances of high engagement for your video.

But engagement cannot be achieved solely through making good videos on popular topics. You must also master the art of posting a video at the right time and on the right day. If you follow the analytics of your posts, you will know how much further engagement activities like reposting generates.Use all these tips to begin making your social media marketing videos engaging.

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