Low-hanging fruit content
If your content marketing strategy is anything like 99% of others out there, you’re relying on consistently uploading your recordings of long videos on social media.
Oh dear.
For many enthusiastic but naïve podcasters and digital marketers, getting a recording of their video chat and then posting it to their favourite social media platform – such as Linkedin or Twitter – has become almost second nature in the aftermath of the pandemic.
It takes next to no thought.
Sadly, it’s also extremely counter-productive and is the quickest route to next-to-no-content-engagement.
And although that’s a comment that’s sure to ruffle feathers in the content space, it’s one that I, as founder of Oxfordshire’s-most highly-reputed audio-first podcast agency ‘Podknows Podcasting’, am firmly standing behind.
Create a strategy
On behalf of Podknows Podcasting, I’m suggesting that your time is probably better spent marketing your content in a more effective and efficient way.
This means, develop a strategy.
Know your audience, identify where they hang out, and go there.
People everywhere are just arranging Zoom calls, recording them, popping them through some cheap or free video creation software, and uploading them to Linkedin.
But they’re literally wasting their time.
Their followers just aren’t interested in longer form video content on these apps.
The case against using long video content on social media
And I’m not just saying this to post an attention grabbing article.
I did my research.
I posted this poll (pictured below).
As you’ll see, more than half of respondents never watched videos on LinkedIn at all.
Even when asked if they’d watched a shorter form video in-app, only 15% answered affirmatively.
Conclusion - use shorter video clips
So I’m here to suggest that video content works best as short ‘snippets’.
I’ve been doing this for quite a while now, having started in content marketing when it wasn’t yet a thing!
I was posting video promos on social media pages during my radio career.
I’ve also handled marketing on quite a few podcasts as you can probably imagine.
And I can tell you that what works best in my experience is a short sixty to ninety second except of the recording,
Highlight one key takeaway.
If you’re lucky, the viewer might go against the majority and actually bother clicking a link to the full version of the content from having been enticed by your ‘snippet’.
But if you’re absolutely adamant that you want to share a longer piece of video content then I’d say you’ve got to be smarter with how you’re going to find those viewers.
If you want people to sit through your video for a long period of time, you’ve got to go where that audience is hanging out.
In all honesty, it’s probably YouTube or maybe even Instagram.
But you still need to suck them in with a really good hook, and reason to watch.
If you want the best engagement on your content, you’re probably going to want to bite the bullet and go down the audio route.
It’s well known in content circles that video has terrible retention rates if you’re not really good at what you’re doing.
So you’re probably best just using the audio for a podcast.
Podcast listeners are by their nature more willing to engage with content over a far longer period of time.
And this is exactly what my clients have come to understand and why they’re so happy with using podcasts as their chosen marketing tool.