4 Easy Tips to Make Social Media Videos More Engaging

Are you trying to make social media videos that are more engaging? Do you know what you need to do to draw in more viewers, hold their interest, and encourage them to react to your videos?

Although making social media videos engaging may sound like a tall order, there are actually several easy tips that can help:

• Add a hook to the start of the video

Right at the start of every video, you should add a strong hook. The majority of viewers take just about 8 seconds to decide whether to watch a video or not, and a good hook could help sway them into continuing to watch yours.

The hook that you add should quickly let viewers know what the video is about, and how it will benefit them to watch it. In short, it should provide a compelling reason that will make viewers want to watch the video.

• Trigger an emotional reaction

The most engaging videos on social media share one thing in common: They trigger an emotional reaction in viewers. That is something that you should try to emulate with your videos – by trying to create videos that tickle viewers and get them to laugh, make them feel inspired, or even surprise and shock them.

While triggering emotional reactions can be tricky, a good place to start is by structuring it as a story so that viewers feel more emotionally-invested in it. On top of that, you should use the right music to help forge a more powerful emotional connection, and for example you could use Movavi Screen Recorder to rip audio from SoundCloud if necessary.

The more intense an emotional reaction you trigger, the more likely it is that viewers will feel driven to react to your video and share, comment, or perform other actions.

• Keep it short

Overall the videos that you create for social media should be short. The attention span of the audience on social media tends to be low, and short videos have a far better chance of being watched to completion.

The optimal length for social media videos does vary from platform to platform, but try to keep your videos about a minute-long at most. If you feel the video topic is too broad to be covered in that duration, try narrowing it down and maybe even breaking it up into several shorter videos.

• Use visuals to deliver the message

Videos are more visually stimulating than other types of content, and that is one of the reasons they are generally more engaging. The more you are able to capitalize on the unique ability of videos to deliver information visually, the more engaging your videos will be.

The best way to do that is to always try to find ways to ‘show’ the message rather than telling viewers about it using a voiceover, or spelling it out with text. If you can find creative ways to deliver your videos’ message visually, odds are you’ll be able to hook viewers and keep them interested for much longer.

Now that you know how to make your social media videos more engaging, the next step is to put it into practice. Start applying the tips listed above, and be sure to track the performance of your videos so that you can see how they affect engagement levels.

As you publish more and more videos, you should analyze their performance and try to pinpoint what your audience seems to respond to. In time that can help you to improve your videos further and make them even more engaging.