Are you a content creator? Have you tried your hand at creating content for social media, but you just aren’t getting any views? The good news is that you are not alone, and it can be challenging for your videos to gain viewership or for your account to accumulate new followers. However, the good news is that you can take various actionable steps to change this. This article will look at some of the best strategies you could use to gain more views for your social media videos, so read on to discover the methods.
Use Subtitles
You should first try to get more views on your social media videos by including subtitles. It is advised to use professional subtitling services, such as Voquent, to make the most out of this. You might think this can’t possibly influence the number of views a video gets. However, studies have shown quite a few interesting statistics. For example, did you know that if your video uses subtitles, views can increase by 40%? More importantly, on average, you increase the chances that viewers will watch your entire video by 80% if you use subtitles.
This makes sense since many people watch social media videos while on public transport, with friends, and more, which means they don’t listen with volume. Specifically, this is 85% of video views on Facebook. With this in mind, it’s understandable why using subtitles is essential to increase the number of views your video gets. You then need to consider the number of potential viewers who do not speak the language of your initial video. If your video is in English, Spanish subtitles will allow around 380 million new people to enjoy your content. Simply put, if more people have access to your video in their own language, then more people will watch it.
Target a Specific Niche
The next thing you should do to increase the number of views your videos get on social media would be to target a specific niche. What is a niche? A niche would be a particular topical focus for a smaller group of viewers who have an expressed interest in this content. For example, parenting is a niche. Food, sports, lifestyle, gaming, and more, are all niches. Why should you target a specific niche?
Because the algorithms of social media platforms try to decide what type of content you are creating so they can recommend it to the relevant audiences. By targeting a niche, you are making this process easier for the platform and receiving more engagement from dedicated audiences. Although it might sound wise to target everyone to get the most views, your content will then be less likely to be promoted to individuals by the platform because they don’t know who your content is for.
Create Platform-Specific Content
One of the most critical considerations to increase your social media video content views is to create them (or versions of them) for specific platforms. If you are new to social media, you might not be aware that different social media platforms have different audiences. More importantly, the content uploaded to these platforms should be different.
For example, Instagram focuses mainly on aesthetics and photos, even though they have moved more towards video content with the introduction of Reels. TikTok focuses more on short-form videos for a younger demographic, whereas Twitter is slightly more formal for the most part. If you upload the wrong type of content to the wrong platform, you won’t gain many views, so it would be worth your while to do a bit of research first.
Be Engaging with Viewers
Being as engaging as you can be with your viewers is one of the most important things you will need to do if you want to gain more views on your social media videos. The social media landscape has changed quite a bit in the last few years, and content creators are no longer talking to their viewers but talking with them. If people have left a comment on your video, you should respond (within reason).
If people send you user-generated content, stitch those videos together with yours as a response. The more welcome you make your audience feel, the more likely they will watch your future videos, follow or subscribe, and engage with the content, resulting in your videos being recommended to more people.
Have a Hook
A mistake that many content creators make when creating videos for social media platforms is that they fail to add a hook to the videos. You have about 3 seconds to grab the attention of a viewer before they move on to the following video, so adding a hook will help to gain the attention of the viewer and increase the watch-through rate. Your hook should have some sort of appeal that will convince the viewer to keep watching.
Many YouTube content creators have started placing an entertaining snippet from the middle of their video in the beginning, so the viewer will continue watching to see what leads up to that moment or to discover what happens after that clip.
Use the Suggested Video Specs
Another technical consideration is to always use the proper video specifications for the social media network you’re posting your video on. If not, the video may appear weird and be incompatible with the platform, alienating your audience even before they see the excellent material you produced.
You must utilize the following specifications:
- Facebook – 16:9, 9:16
- Instagram – 16:9, 1:1, 4:5
- Twitter – 16:9, 1:1
- TikTok – 9:16
- YouTube – 16:9
- LinkedIn – 16:9, 1:1, 9:16
And if it sounds tiresome to repeatedly resize your movie to accommodate various platforms, we’ve got you covered. Utilizing the appropriate social media platform is as simple as clicking on Promo’s online movie maker thanks to its resizing feature.
Video content generally surpasses text or image-based content since it’s more eye-catching. Because it stands out, audiences are more likely to notice, consume, and hopefully engage with it.
All of the main social media platforms realise that video material is more likely to be consumed than photographs or long text, so they design algorithms to promote video content to the top of people’s feeds, prioritising it and increasing the likelihood that the audience will view it.
Because of this, we advocate video content for digital and social media strategies. Creating a video, publishing it, then leaving it alone won’t work. As our experiment shows, sharing a video can have amazing benefits.
Have Great Titles
Like creating online content such as articles or blogs, your social media videos should also use great titles. As mentioned above, you have about 3 seconds to grab the viewer’s attention, and most viewers will read the title of the video as it appears on their screen. If the titles you use are lackluster, people won’t wait long before skipping your video.
An excellent title example would be something like “I was walking my dog, and then this happened. . .” People will watch the video to find out what happened, and the lack of information is actually what makes a title like this work so well. The purpose of your title is to pique their interest. However, if you have a generic title like “Another walk with my dog.”, there is nothing to excite the viewer or make them ask themselves a question.
