What content formats for social networks?
The current context requires an increased presence on social networks, seen as the best way to reach your consumers on an international scale.
Sharing high value-added content is the quickest and most effective method to support your role in the community, make your presence felt and attract the attention of Internet users for engagement or conversion purposes.
There are several ways to do this depending on the types of content you focus on: entertainment, promotion, inspiration, education, conversion and connection.
Motivate and exploit User-Generated Content
User-generated content refers to the content that your subscribers publish about your brand/business. These are visuals, videos or texts, etc. When you share and interact with this type of content, you provide them with more reach and consolidate your relationships with creators.
This generates huge engagement because people like to listen to each other and interact, hence the worrying habit of circulating in comments. Remember that there is a lot of user-generated content on social media that is both positive and negative. You have to be on the lookout to find the ones that work in your favor.
Here’s an overview of how to find and use UGC:
- Monitor your social platforms (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).
- Find content featuring your brand/product (check your tags and hashtags).
- Re-post, re-share, re-tweet (make sure to give credit to the original poster)!
Dare to podcast
Podcasts have gained enormous momentum. Almost everyone, all generations combined – follows their favorite podcast. At the same time, there are fewer podcasts than social media accounts to follow.
That said, consider starting a podcast to get more listeners and, obviously, more brand exposure. Your podcasts generate original content for you to post on your social media accounts.
Some social platforms do not allow direct audio uploads.
So you have 2 options:
- Share the link to the podcast in your caption or post.
- Create a static image, overlay the podcast audio onto the image, and download the final content as a video.
Even better? Cut your podcast into excerpts for social media. This way, your subscribers can enjoy it without getting discouraged or redirected to an external page.
Capturing attention through video
Social videos have been on the rise for a few years now, and for good reason. Without exaggeration, whatever your goals, video can help you achieve them. If your goals are more focused on community engagement, this type of content can be a valuable resource to draw on.
On Instagram, videos get 49% more engagement than photo posts. Tweets with video have 10 times more engagement than those without. People are also twice as likely to share videos with their friends than any other type of content.
The popularity of TikTok and Instagram Reels are concrete proof that successful videos don’t require unlimited time or resources. Creator-style videos can add a touch of authenticity that viewers appreciate. In addition to being able to produce relevant and original videos without major investment, video content can also be reused and spun into other content formats.
Facebook, YouTube and Instagram are the three main social media platforms that consumers use to follow brands. Instagram in particular has a variety of tools for creating long and short videos, making it a great arena for testing different video concepts and styles.
You may be wondering, what about TikTok? Individual creators run the show on the platform and brands haven’t really found the right positioning yet, but there’s a lot to learn from TikTok trends.
1) Instagram
Instagram launched into video in 2013 and quickly found the success it wanted to introduce advertising to the platform in 2015. Since then, video has continued to grow as an engaging social format. Needless to say, Instagram videos are absolutely worth the investment. Here are the most popular types of Instagram videos:
- In-feed video: landscape, square and vertical
- Video Carousel
- Stories
- Reels
- IGTV
Note that the minimum duration of videos on Instagram has increased from 15 seconds to 30 and the maximum from 60 seconds to 10 minutes depending on the upload and the account concerned.
2) Facebook
Facebook video is consumed at higher rates every year, so it’s no wonder so many brands are looking for its correct video specs.
The challenge is that there are simply many types of videos you can share on Facebook and the platform updates its design frequently. Each video format has different dimensions and specifications, which can make it difficult to know whether or not you’re uploading the right format for organic or paid posts.
- Standard video: landscape or portrait
- 360 video
- Video Carousel
- Video Collection: paid publications only
- Video Slideshow: paid publications only
- Stories
- Etc.
3) YouTube
Known as the second largest search engine behind Google, YouTube is an essential network for video content. It’s a great space to promote, educate and share video content around your brand.
As YouTube continues to grow as a destination for video content, it hosts everything from short-form promotional videos to feature-length films. This means that users stream content to all kinds of devices, which may have different levels of zoom or overscan.
In late 2020, YouTube introduced its Shorts video feature. These videos are a new way to watch, create and discover short-form content. Short films can be captured and edited from a smartphone or downloaded from desktop or mobile as standard. Because short videos are taking over the web worldwide, using Shorts is a new way to reach a wider audience to entertain, educate or make them feel good.
4) Twitter
Twitter is a popular space for sharing and interacting with different social media videos. For brands, it’s about keeping a user’s attention with compelling video content worthy of clicks and retweets. In the sports and entertainment industry, Twitter is often the go-to place for sharing video content.
The platform offers two formats of embedded video content to share with your subscribers: landscape and portrait. These specific formats are only available for uploading videos directly to Twitter, rather than sharing YouTube or other links.
5) TikTok
TikTok has quickly captured attention in the social space, but brands risk feeling blindsided by the rush to understand what works and what doesn’t on the platform. Fortunately, TikTok videos rely on ease of creation, editing and sharing, so it makes sense that the specifications are more or less oriented around typical mobile phone dimensions.
A key feature to keep in mind if you’re trying to reuse video content across platforms is that videos downloaded from another file source, rather than saved to the app, can be longer than 60 seconds.
6) LinkedIn
Even though LinkedIn is still in the early stages of adopting video content, the network remains an essential source for sharing.
It is still common for many brands to upload to a video hosting platform such as YouTube or Vimeo and then share the link on LinkedIn. Unlike embedded videos, LinkedIn native video automatically plays in the feed, which is more likely to attract attention.
Harnessing the power of images
This is the most frequently published type of content on social media. Unlike most videos, still images can be absorbed and enjoyed in an instant. Colors, composition, text or lack thereof, and other details give social users an immediate impression of your brand.
Nowadays, mobile devices are equipped with high-definition cameras and editing tools, so everyone can reveal their inner photographer. This means brands can take the reins of creating images for their content strategy without committing a ton of resources.
This also opened the door for consumers to contribute high-quality user-generated content (UGC) to their favorite brands. UGC images add another dimension to a brand’s visual identity, while strengthening community and the relationship between a brand and social users.
Also consider producing memes. They are short, simple and hilarious. In other words, memes are perfect entertainment for the busy and stressed consumer. After all, it all depends on your target.
Varying the formats and content will give new life to your social enclave. Good content = honesty + added value.
Regardless of the format, irrelevant content or content intended solely for marketing your products/services will not work.
