James E. Dicks Jr.

United States Marine Corps veteran · Emmy Award-winning producer · Author of eleven books

Using Facebook Video Marketing in Your Business

For more than seven years I have dabbled in using Facebook for my business via early tools available and the mere social aspect of sharing what I did with others. But it was the last three years that I really delved into how to maximize all Facebook has to offer and that has changed my financial future forever.

I will admit that Facebook is so expansive and offers so much that I simply don't know it all and will probably never know it all. Facebook understands how important the functionally it offers is to business'. Because of that Facebook has really spent a lot of manpower and resources building the next generation of these business services available today. Their innovation will never stop in my opinion.

As I mentioned I might not know all of what Facebook has to offer, but I can assure you because of how much money I spent and spend advertising each month I have had the privilege of inside access to some of their programmer's and special business service's reserved for only the largest advertiser's. This access has allowed me to gain inside information that I enjoying sharing and know will help you create more successful marketing campaigns using Facebook. Over the months to come in the Thought Leader® magazine, I will be sharing these strategies with you, be sure not to miss an issue.

For this issue I want to talk about using Video on and with Facebook. I personally use this strategy to create more organic engagement between my Facebook business page and my audience: Video. Why video? Video displays motion, which tends to catch the attention of your audience and helps bring a marketing message to life.

Facebook wanted to become the leader in video views on Facebook, since before 2015; YouTube was still the leader of video views on Facebook with about a 5 billion views a day measured in 30 seconds vs. Facebook measurement of 3 seconds. Facebook set out to become the leader in that space. In an attempt to become a bigger player in this market, Facebook in early 2015 bought QuickFire Networks, a video transcoding service. They wanted to not only surpass YouTube, but they wanted to deliver high quality and high definition video without the hassle and frustration of buffering. It worked.

April 2016, Facebook had 4 billion daily views. In October, it had 8 billion daily views. Now Facebook is using a new metric and reporting that people watch 100 million hours of video a day, WOW! YouTube is still leading this category with more than 650 million hours of video watched daily.

The reason I like using video on my Facebook Business page is very simple and compelling for any businessperson using this marketing medium Facebook will automatically deliver your video content to more people that like my page! Whereas written posted content may only be delivered organically in this way to less than 1% of the people who like my page, Facebook will deliver my video content to upwards of 30% of the people that like my page. That creates far greater follower engagement with my posts and will ultimately foster more business sales and growth.

What type of things do I show in my videos and those I recommend for my clients? Pretty much anything really, but do remember that people buy from people. So that should give you the first clue to video marketing success, which is that either you want to be in the video or you want to have another company representative star in it instead. Make sure the videos are less than 30 seconds long, so a length of 20-25 seconds would be ideal. Also avoid putting text in the first three seconds of the video, but after that, you can include your website's address or a call to action written in text. Make sure that the first three seconds of the video are especially engaging to your intended audience.

The majority of Facebook video views receive are without sound. Videos on Facebook autoplay without sound, and the majority of users will not change the setting to hear sound automatically when the video plays. Facebook reports that captioning a video increases average video view time by 12%.

You may also want to consider using the closed caption feature for Facebook videos, which works quite well.

Adding captions to a video

To add captions to your video:

To remove captions from a video you've uploaded:

Some of my clients use a newer smart phone to take their videos in landscape with the camera pointing sideways for easy posting to Facebook. With respect to content, they might have customers talk about their experiences with the company, its products or services. You could also show off your business inside and out or talk with employees.

With today's smart phones, Samsung, iPhone 7 etc video quality has skyrocketed. I have an iPhone so let me simply cover what I do with my iPhone and the videos that I shoot. Facebook prefers that you directly upload your video to them so keep that in mind. Your iPhone has a great camera and pretty good mic. The native app that allows you to take videos is not necessarily the best out there. It will not maximize the functionality of your camera. I use a app that I have downloaded that really makes a tremendous difference in the video and audio quality of my videos. The settings are endless and nearly as good as shooting with a high-end digital camera.

No reason to go thru the many settings you better off just going online and then testing the settings that work for you. You will also want a tripod to help with the stability and in some cases you may want to go online for a higher end sound quality option. There are many ad on for your smart phone that can increase the sound quality including lavaliere mic's.

The most important thing you can do for your video quality is having good lighting. Find a place in your home or office that you can carve out and ad some lights to the setting. Lots of great options for LED lighting online you can find. There are some add-ons you can get for your smartphone as well.

Now that you have the equipment you just need to turn it on. For me it's all about short video content. 15-30 seconds. I always tell my clients just be your self. Shoot some video content that is relevant to your customers or prospect's. It's even okay to just shoot a selfie video on the spot. I find that those videos actually work better than some of the re planned produced videos.

Here is a perfect example; we recently worked on a local county government election campaign. The candidate was a late in announcing their run for office so we had to get out to the community uniquely and quickly. We focused in on micro targeting the voters that we know turn out and then we launched a relentless video content campaign. Posting several videos a day for 3 months. These videos were short, some as short as 15 seconds and some as long as 3-4 minutes. But all of them were off the cuff and not scripted. The candidate would literally just pull over and shoot a selfie video wherever he was or felt that his constituents would have an interest in.

When we started the campaign, none of the other 4 candidates were using video; with in 4 weeks all of the candidates had started using the strategy. The best thing to note from this is that all the videos were uploaded directly to Facebook and the engagement between content and video from an organic standpoint was ten fold. More than ten times the amount of people engaged in a video vs. the written content. That was no accident. Facebook wants to be a leader in video and they will push out your video content to far more people that follow you than they will for the written content for free.

Basically, the sky's the limit, and so is the engagement with potential customers, especially if you hit a home run and score a video post that "goes viral". This means that your video has become especially popular online and quickly spreads across the Internet, thereby providing your business with a huge amount of wonderful free publicity.

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