Repurposing Content for Social Video Marketing

Video is so much more than a one-and-done investment. It is an asset that can be dressed up, trimmed down, and modified to find new life in an omni-channel video marketing strategy.

Here are a few important questions to ask yourself as you embark on creating a social video strategy:

• What are my audience demographics across various platforms?
• How can I best showcase and amplify my video assets through social media?
• What tools should I use to streamline these processes?

We’ll take a look at each of these questions in more detail and offer best practices for getting the most out of your library of content with a sound social media video strategy.

Know who you’re speaking to, and where

According to global research leader GWI’s Biggest Social Media Trends For 2022 report, user engagement on social media has stabilized, yet we’re making more purchases over social media than ever before.

Understanding the demographics of your various audiences and what their social media habits are is central to creating a social video strategy that delivers the right message in the right format suited to its platform.

What flies on LinkedIn may not appeal on TikTok. However, you can still use the same video assets on each of these platforms. Just be prepared to tweak caption copy, clip length, and other creative elements so your video drives engagement on each platform.

Optimize your video library

Your video library holds a lot more content than you might realize.

A single video is never a “single video.” It has the potential to be turned into unique video content across all platforms where your brand has a presence.

Optimizing a single video across multiple platforms and touchpoints increases the ROI of the original content. This social video strategy also amplifies the message of the video, casting a wider net and drawing more potential customers to your brand.

The key to optimizing existing content is being intentional about the way you use these valuable video assets. Given the size, makeup, and mindset of their audiences, social media channels should rank near the top of any priority list.

But remember, you’re competing for the attention of people who are used to certain behaviors on each platform. In this kind of attention economy, you have to earn their time.

Here are some ways to earn your audience’s attention and repurpose existing content for your social video strategy.

Create snippets

Sometimes you have a great video asset that runs longer than the brief attention span most people have while scrolling social media.

This is where snippets can help.

Much like a movie trailer, snippets entice audiences and make them want to see more. What you’re offering with video content is an experience – social media is a perfect place to tease it.

Snippets should be visually captivating to entice the user to stop the scroll. Some simple yet proven ways to capture attention include starting on an emotional close-up or using big text instead of relying on a voiceover.

Including a call to action to like, share, or comment will also draw attention and create additional engagement. But be sure to bookend the snippet with that CTA, or you might miss the viewers who don’t watch to the end.

Depending on the size of your marketing team and the resources available to you, snippets can be as simple as a single cut of a highlight or as complex as a trailer-like mash-up of peak moments. Both are effective ways to optimize video into smaller segments, so it’s really up to your discretion which you use.

By creating a number of snippets that highlight different parts of your video, you can reach different audiences on different platforms by offering them tailored content.

Match the platform

The trend of TikTok videos being shared to Twitter, Twitter posts being shared to Instagram, and Instagram videos being published on YouTube illustrates that the value of your content isn’t limited to one platform.

However, people do generally go to specific social platforms for specific reasons.

• Facebook. Commonly used by people wishing to stay in touch with family, friends, and community.
• Twitter. Attracts the more media-savvy and politically vocal folks who enjoy being witty in small doses.
• Instagram. The gathering place of artists and people who communicate more effectively through visual mediums.
• LinkedIn. The platform where business professionals network and grow.
• TikTok. Home to Gen Z content creators and burgeoning young thought leaders.

With this variety of targets to reach, it makes sense to post content that matches the platform.

By creating intentional design and messaging features to make the most of what each platform has to offer, you can create more seamless experiences.

Anything you can do to optimize your content for the platform you’re publishing on will make it more appealing to the audience there. Think about this both in terms of substance (tone, talking points, etc.) but also in terms of specifications. Most major social platforms offer video spec guidance to help ensure your content fits the feed or advertising format:

• Facebook Video Ad Specs
• Twitter Video Specs (scroll to “What are the limitations on video resolutions and aspect ratios that can be uploaded on the web?”)
• Instagram Video Specs
• LinkedIn Video Ad Specs
• TikTok Video Ad Specs

Change the tone

The same video set to Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” plays differently when set to Boots Randolph’s “Yakety Sax.” You can easily adjust the tone of your video for a more serious or more casual audience by changing up something as simple as background music or which brand logo set you use.

This is also a great way to test your message. If you find one version of your video is doing incredible numbers while another has barely made a blip, see what you can replicate from the success.

Livestream to multiple channels

Livestreams have become popular and familiar events in business, entertainment, and even within our own social circles.

Most platforms have native livestreaming features, but that limits your streaming efforts to a single platform audience. While you can cross-promote on other platforms, that isn’t nearly as effective as appearing to each audience in their native setting.

Livestreaming to all your social platforms will give you the greatest reach. With the right video marketing tools, you can also monitor engagement and performance across platforms in real-time.

This brings us to the next point: the right tools to make this all possible and practical.

Put the right social media video tools to work for you

By employing a video marketing platform that integrates with your social media management tools, deploying your optimized social video strategy should be a snap.

Centralize content management

Disseminating your video content from a centralized platform gives you a way to both manage your video library and track performance metrics over all stages of the process.

To get the most out of your video on each platform, you’ll want to publish the content directly to the native player. Linking to video that is hosted elsewhere is a common – and costly – mistake. Algorithms favor native video, and platforms deliver more in-depth analytics for video hosted internally.

A centralized content management platform makes publishing to multiple channels easy.

Stay on top of performance

An enterprise video communications platform empowers you to streamline distribution, easily manage and access your full video library, and stay on top of performance metrics that will help you streamline your campaigns, even beyond social platforms.

This omni-channel performance tracking gives you insight into opportunities to promote content on other channels. For example, if you have a case study that's blowing up on a page with heavy organic traffic, that case study is a prime candidate to try out on social.

While each social media platform does offer its own sets of analytics, those metrics exist in isolation – within the walled garden of that platform. To complicate things further, not every platform tracks the same metrics, and you will find that certain platforms will change the metrics they track with frustrating frequency.

The only real way to arrive at a reliable side-by-side comparison of performance metrics is to have the data tracked and analyzed in one platform. This coherent view across platforms gives you a fuller picture of how content is performing from platform to platform, audience to audience, apples to apples.

Get strategizing with social media video

These tips and tools are a great way to get started on a social video strategy that will see results. Gaining buy-in for additional video production budget is always easier when you have success stories to share with the C-suite.

By getting more mileage out of your existing video library and demonstrating the value of investing in the right tools, you can calculate a more accurate—and more impressive—ROI.