Know the popular saying, there’s more than one way to skin a cat? We want to update this ugly adage to something more palatable, like – there’s more than one way to market your company with video on social media. There, isn’t that better?!
While creating videos for social media, we’ve mentioned before how you should create shorter content to get more out of every shoot day. We’re going to update that advice with one big caveat: not every video posted on social needs to be short.
For example, plenty of 60-second videos perform great on Instagram. Think about how many times you’ve clicked through a carousel to watch a longer video that’s cut up into multiple 60-second clips (60 seconds is Instagram’s in-feed maximum length).
Or think about how many videos you’ve watched on Facebook that are two or three minutes or longer, after getting hooked emotionally while scrolling through your newsfeed.
Having two videos, one longer and one shorter, doesn’t mean you need to go out and shoot two separate times. Having different versions of the same video can actually be helpful when gathering data about what your audience wants and what brings in more sales.
Take these videos we created for Pure Clean Carpet Cleaning. We worked with the Seattle-based carpet cleaners to create a series of videos advertising their services. Here’s the first one:
Using a simple introduction to the service and a call to action makes this an engaging 15-second video perfect for attracting new viewers and nurturing current followers on social media.
Here’s a second version of the video:
Another 15-second snippet, this video provides more context on what separates Pure Clean Carpet Cleaning from their competitors, while adding some social proof (highest rating on Yelp!) to help seal the deal.
Both videos offer different approaches on how to promote Pure Clean – and because they’re short, you can easily swap them out and test them against each other to see how well they convert.
Now, check this one out:
By using almost all of the same footage and voice-over from both videos, we combined them to create this 30-second video to test against the other two.
Does one video’s messaging perform better than the other? Does the longer video that captures both angles perform better than the shorter ones? Even if you end up posting all three and using them at different times in your paid advertising, it’s useful to have options. You might find they all work better at different things, and that’s great information to have!
Now, for fun, check out another video we created for Pure Clean – this time, it’s a two minute-long interview-style brand video meant to engage visitors on their owned channels, like their website:
Doing it another way, you might hire a videographer and editor only to end up with one video, similar to the one above. While that video could perfectly encapsulate your company’s mission and brand, isn’t it better to have multiple options to test? Just look at how many videos we were able to create from one video shoot. You can too, as long as you plan ahead and have a top-notch editing team at the ready to get creative!
Need help with that last part? We’d be happy to work with you to create multiple videos so you can experiment away. Reach out to our team today so we can get started as soon as possible!