Podcast Episode #14: Video on Facebook

On today’s podcast, we’re focusing on social media video on Facebook. Whether you love or loathe Facebook, there’s a likelihood that almost everyone you know is on it, so it is practically unavoidable.

With this in mind, it makes sense to access Facebook’s massive audience to market your business.

In my opinion, there are plenty of businesses out there that aren’t using Facebook to market their business, and who can benefit by utilising video on Facebook. Facebook is a fantastic place to communicate what a business is offering, and help that business grow their market.

I’ve invited Jen Sheahan on to the show to give her first-hand experience of Facebook. Jen is a Facebook guru, and runs a company named FBAdsLab.com, as well as speaking at a number of high-profile internet marketing events.  I first heard Jen speaking at the Fast Web Formula 3 conference, and was blown away her extensive knowledge about Facebook, as well as her ability to make it engaging and understandable. She’s the perfect person to talk to when it comes to Facebook marketing and video on Facebook.

 “Marketing is transforming right before our eyes. It’s more important than ever before that we engage with our audience, engage with our customers, engage with the people who are most likely to sell our message. And the best way to do that is with video.” Jen Sheahan.

This episode of The Web Video Marketing Show answers:

• What are people looking for in videos on Facebook?
• How can you use video to create a human connection with your audience through Facebook?
• When is it worth employing a video professional to create a video on Facebook?
• What is more effective – uploading a video directly to Facebook, or linking to a video on YouTube or on your website?

Episode Transcription

Ryan:  Hi. You’re on the web video marketing show with Ryan and this is episode 14.

Today, we’re going to talk about “How to Promote your Business More Effectively by using video on Facebook”, because my sense is, that there’s a lot of businesses out there who aren’t really using Facebook that much to promote their business, and can use video on Facebook a lot more effectively to grow their audience, and to communicate their offering far more effectively.

Jen, thank you very much for joining me on the Web Video Marketing Show. We’re going to be talking about video for Facebook. This is actually an area that I’m really excited to talk to you about because there’s actually not a lot of information out there on video for Facebook.

Jen: Yes. That’s right. Not a lot of people are talking about it, and things have changed so much in the last couple of months really, and now it’s important to know what the strategies are that are most effective.

Ryan:  I think there’s a huge opportunity for businesses. I mean my impression is that in general, a lot of businesses particularly offline businesses are not really making the most of the possibilities of Facebook, and in particular video for Facebook.

Jen: Exactly. You’re spot on with that. There’s a huge gap in the market. There are some people who are doing it very, very well, and then there are other people who don’t have enough video. One of the things that seems to stop people like when we’re talking with our clients, a lot of people just feel like their videos just have to be amazing every video they post. That’s just not true, so it’s good to have a good blend of professional and more casual videos. We can talk a little bit more about that if you like.

Ryan:  Definitely. I definitely want to speak more about approaches to video professional versus user generated and types of videos. Just by way of an introduction, if you look at say over the last few years compared to now, intuitively to me, it seems that video is becoming more and more important on the web in general, but also on Facebook. Would you agree with that?

Jen: Absolutely. It’s all about … Marketing is transforming right before our eyes, and it’s more important than ever before that we engage with our audience, engage with our customers, engage with people who are most likely to share our message. The best way to do that is with video.

You can’t only do it with video, there’s got to be a blend of posts and pictures and delivery of results and all that sort of stuff. Video is just so easy to connect, and when you do it right, it’s very, very effective.

Ryan:  There’s a lot of different types of videos that businesses can use to promote themselves, but there’s something particular about the culture and style of Facebook, its own particular place and it’s got its own feel and it’s own rules. Are there particular types of videos that seem to get more traction than others on Facebook?

Jen: Yes, but I don’t want to get stuck on a traction or a viral video sort of discussion because that’s kind of just one little slice of the pie of effective videos. In my opinion, like viral videos are just one little thing, but in order to have an effective impact on your audience, I think you need to have a good introduction video, like the very short one minute or two minutes of who we are and what we do, and that you can put on a custom landing tab of custom page inside the Facebook, so that when people are brand new to your brand, or brand new to your business, it’s like, “Who are we and what do we do?”

It doesn’t matter if you sell bunk beds or you sell high-end marketing services, or you sell luxury travel or whatever it is that you sell, you can have a one minute video that says exactly what you do, who you are, and right away, people can get a vibe from that video and say, “Yes. These are some people I want to know more about,” or they go all the way, “No, no, no, no. This is not for me.” In one minute, you can say a whole lot.

Ryan:  This is actually something that firstly  a lot of businesses don’t have, they’re not actually using Facebook landing pages, and they don’t have introduction videos on their page. This is a great place to start. Do you think there’s a particular type of video? For instance, the owner of the business speaking directly to camera or footage of the business and its services, do you think there’s a particular style that works well, or does it depend on the business?

Jen: It’s completely going to depend on the business. I think it’s important for business owners to not fall into the trap of thinking that there’s just one formula that works for everyone. The whole point of Facebook is engaging with your audience. Now your audience is going to be different from mine, it’s going to be different from the guy who sells bunk beds, the other guy who sells luxury travel. It’s all different, and you know your audience. Hopefully you know your audience or you know the people who are most likely to buy your stuff.

How do they talk? How do you talk to them when you’re on the phone or when you’re out in the showroom floor? How do you interact with people? That’s what you want to get through in your video, a really good snapshot of who you are, what you do, what you stand for, and kind of the tone of your video should clearly match, the style of business and audience that you’re speaking to.

Ryan:  When I’m speaking to clients, we’re discussing the possibilities of Facebook video, I suggest that we consider videos like case studies and testimonials, product reviews, video blogs, news updates are often serialised type of videos that people can start to get to know you over a period of time.

Jen: Yes. Yes. That’s great. The things that get shared … I’m going to talk a little bit about this. The things that get shared on Facebook are things that are useful and interesting and short, and it should be specific.

If your business … Let’s say for example we have a client who owns a nursery business, they’re in the garden industry. There are a million different questions you could answer on a video about your garden or caring for your garden, or now is the time to plant tomatoes and all that kind of stuff. Anything that’s useful like a quick, natural remedy to get rid of bugs on your roses, or those kinds of things are what get shared. If you couldn’t create a series of one to three-minute videos that you share on your Facebook page, one every week, then those are likely to get shared.

If I know that my sister-in-law is so passionate about her roses, and she’s always complaining about these bugs on them, and I see your video, I can easily share it with her and say, “Oh, Sharon. Have you seen this?” That’s what you want. You want people to, when they watch your video to think of someone in particular, “My sister would love this idea,” and then they want to share it. That’s the way that your message gets spread, and the more tips and hints and strategies and useful things you can share with your audience, the more likely it is that they’re going to start sharing them.

Ryan:  Is the idea that you make the content so compelling that people will just naturally want to share it, or would you suggest that to view it to people making videos that they ask people to share them?

Jen: Asking isn’t going to hurt. It certainly isn’t going to hurt. You can say that you think this video is been useful, “Please share it” or something like that. It’s a good call to action if you can do it in a nice way. I caution people from measuring the success or failure of their video series or their helpful hints videos, based on the number of shares right away. A lot of the stuff has to kind of stew for a while, and people come to recognise that every Wednesday, you post a Wild Wednesday tip or something. Then every Wednesday, they see it and they’re like, “I wonder what Ryan is talking about today,” and they might watch your one-minute video, and if you’re constantly saying at the end of it just really a brief sentence that just says, “You think this is useful for somebody? Go ahead and click share and share it with them or hit like or comment below and tell us what you think.” Those kinds of things are likely to generate some engagement.

Ryan:  Definitely. It’s important to build up some momentum and build up a bit of a relationship as well, because I guess in the same way, in the offline world, someone is more likely to introduce you to someone else if they’ve got to know you. It’s the same idea with video that they want to get more of a sense of you and, “Hey, this might be a good one off video, but what else do you have to say?”

Jen: Right. Right. You want to be the source of information on your topic. There are millions, hundreds of millions of people on Facebook, and if you can be the source of natural remedies for roses, then whenever I need a natural remedy for a rose, I’m going to come to you. That’s what you want, and that only happens over a period of time, and there are a lot of our clients who have products and services to sell that are not so immediate, they’re not looking for quick hits or they’re in the business for the long term. It’s an evergreen sort of product, something that they can sell year after year after year. Those are the kinds of audiences that you can cultivate using this sort of style of video marketing.

Ryan:  I would imagine that you would incline to start a video strategy and then they may feel disheartened because they’re not getting an immediate result and it’s important to let them know that it does take time.

Jen: It does take time, and you’ve got to have a variety of different things to talk about so you can then test and see. You can say, “Oh wow. We realise that when we talk about native plants, we don’t get that much of an interaction, but when we talk about growing vegetables, we do.” You can test over time, so I always recommend that people have a posting plan for their page so on your Facebook page, you plan how you’re going to post and what you’re going to talk about, and then after 30 days, you go back and measure. You can see that when you had a video, hundreds of people engage with you. When you put just a text post, only a few did, so then you know what you can expect.

Ryan:  Yes. My clients really like watching video or actually it turns out that they react more to text posts or images you can start to get a sense of the content they’re interested in.

Jen: Exactly. It’s also really cool to have … we’re talking about custom tabs on Facebook earlier, if you have a business that has maybe two or three different aspects to it, like … let’s say you’re a travel agent, and you specialise in – you have family travel and honeymoon travel, and teenager, independent backpacker travel. You specials and offers and deals and things on all three of those different topics, those are three different audiences. You could create a custom landing tab on Facebook, one for each one of those audience, have a quick introductory video and say, “Hi. I’m Louise. I look after all of the backpacker travel here at Smarttravel.com or whatever. Please enter your email below and then I’ll respond right away.” That builds that audience and Louise can update that page, and every time she does, she could create an email, write an email to her audience and use the link to that custom page in the email generating more and more traffic back to the Facebook page.

Ryan:  Yes. That’s great. You’re creating really targeted content for particular niches within your business?

Jen: Yes. It depends on how big your business is if that’s the way you want to go. We come across this a lot, where people don’t want to jam everything all onto their Facebook timeline, and things get lost very quickly when you just post.

If you post three or four times every day, quickly your video is going to go to the bottom. It’s not going to get as much views, as many views. If you have it on a custom tab, then you can refer to it again and again and again.

Ryan:  Yes, that’s a really good point. You touched on something before, this idea of professional video versus user generated content. When you think businesses should use a professional video production company to create their content and when should they actually just create their own Facebook videos?

Jen: I think it’s going to depend on access and budget and all those sort of things. If you’re brand new and starting out, you can definitely do your one-minute introduction video yourself. If you have the capability and the budget to hire somebody to do it for you, I think it’s  going to be far more effective. I recommend businesses have a professional one to three minute introduction video that captures in that time exactly who they are and what they do, who their services are best for, and how to get in touch with them or how to take the next step. That you can put on your custom tab, your welcome tab, or that’s where you can send all new traffic to your Facebook page to that tab and put the video there. You might want to also put it on YouTube, you might want to put it on your blog and promote it however else you would promote any other video.

There’s also a place for very casual, very amateur, obviously not professional videos, because those are like the outtakes. We all love the outtakes at the end of a DVD, or we love it, the backstage … like the movie ‘Spinal Tap’ where you go backstage, mockumentary type thing where this is actually what happens behind the scenes at our business … People love that.

Occasionally, it’s great to show, “Today, here’s all of us singing happy birthday to Bob or this is our secretary, Marie. She’s been with us for ten years and she’s amazing, and every time you call, she’s the one who answers your phones. Here she is, and Marie gets to say hi. It’s her moment in the sun.” That kind of stuff. Really casual, really fun.

Ryan:  Yes. Absolutely. I mean I’ve talked about that on this show before that I completely agree that there should be a mix of both strategies, because there’s something about the user generated content, even if it’s done on an iPhone spontaneously and the camera is a little bit shaky. That stuff can really work because it’s more authentic and natural, and less contrived and it seems less like a marketing or sales type of video, it’s more of like the backstage insights or something like that. That’s where your passion and excitement about a product can really show through, and also more of your personality .. more spontaneity can come through as well.

Jen:    Yes. People want to see that your whole company just participated in a fun run, and you guys getting nervous or excited, or that kind of stuff. Anything that is not so salesy. Those things are what are going to build connections, human connections with your audience. That’s what Facebook is so great for, building those human connections and making me want to buy from you. That’s what’s going to drive the sales over the long term. You’re not going to be able to track that video and say, “Oh that video we did of the fun run, that generated $5,000 in sales.” What it does is builds customer loyalty and interest and passion for your company and your brand.

Ryan:  Definitely. Definitely. Now we’ve mentioned tracking videos a bit. I know on something like YouTube, it gives you a lot of analytics information like demographics and location and length of time the people watch the video. Does Facebook provide any of the sort of video analytics information?

Jen: Yes. Analytics information is going to be very valuable for marketing campaigns over the long haul. We just love Wistia, and we just recommend it to all of our clients because the power of understanding who watches your videos, how many times they watch it, and where they drop off … eventually, people stop watching the video and if they drop off after a minute, that would go to show you that maybe your video should be shorter, or you can learn so much if you … Again, when we’re talking about what kind of content to create, why waste ten hours and thousands of dollars and effort creating videos related to content and topics that people are not interested in. You only know what they’re interested in if you’re tracking what they watch.

Ryan:  Okay. You mentioned Wistia which is a video hosting service which provides really great analytics. There’s different ways of inserting a video on Facebook. You can upload a video directly to Facebook, or you can upload it to Wistia or YouTube and then embed it on Facebook, or I guess you can also just link to your own website where you can host a video. Which approach do you think is most effective on Facebook?

Jen: There’s a number of different ways of looking at this. I recommend the blanket approach, trying a little bit of everything. I think YouTube is incredibly powerful, and there are ways to create a YouTube tab for your page where you have all of your YouTube videos accessible from Facebook which is quite good.

There are some cases where I think it’s good to have YouTube, and then other times where it’s better to upload it directly. Now, one thing that is working very, very well is to upload …

Sorry, if you have a very short video, upload it directly into Facebook, it’s just really quick like let’s say you’re singing happy birthday to Marie, the receptionist and you want to upload that, and just to upload it and get a lot of comments and it’s really casual. If it’s a little bit more important, we recommend that you upload it to YouTube … This is a bit of a little funnel for you so you might want to write it down. Upload it to YouTube, and then embed it into your blog. Include the transcript or a brief overview of what it is that you’ve talked about so the text is there for Google Love, and then take a screenshot, an action screenshot of you talking in your video, not the logo or anything like that, or not a blank page or blackness or anything like that, but you talking with the play button.

Ryan:  Yes. Great.

Jen: You take a screenshot of that, and then you go over to Facebook and you upload a photo onto your page, and the photo is the screenshot of your video.

Ryan;  With the play button on it?

Jen: With the play button on it. Then you say one line of what the video is about or you ask a question like, “Should I upload my video directly to Facebook or is YouTube better?” Then people – automatically, they see the post with the play button on it, and your instinct is to click the play button. What they do is they click the play button and that just opens the photo viewer in Facebook so it gets bigger, and then, that also shows the comments below.

Notice I haven’t said anything about putting a link to the video or the blog post yet. You do that in the first comment so you write your own comment below. Once you’ve posted it, and it’s live, then you go in and comment on your own post. That’s where you say, “Watch the video here” with a little arrow or a dot, dot, dot, and then you put the link to your blog post.

Ryan;  Okay. This is very interesting. This is when you want to drive traffic to your site. That’s your main aim when you’re using the strategy?

Jen: That’s right. Yes. We’ve been doing this for a while and the reason is that … There’s a couple of different reasons. One is that you get the traffic to your website which means you can track … you’re getting people to your website which is the ultimate goal. We don’t want … Your website is your home and that’s where you want people to visit. They’re far more likely to opt in and buy something from you if they’re on your website.

You get them to your website, and then you have your blog post there. They are likely to read another blog post or engage with you even further because they’re in your home, in your living room basically.

The other thing is by posting a picture there instead of the full video in Facebook. You are creating more engagement on Facebook. Facebook sees your post and sees that automatically you’ve posted it, and then right away, somebody comment it. That triggers the Facebook and rank algorithm even though it was you who did the post or did the comment that, “This must be really popular because within a minute, somebody commented on it.”

Ryan:  That’s really smart. You’re increasing engagement on Facebook and helping to drive traffic to your site.

Jen: Yes. That’s right.

Ryan:  That sounds like a really smart strategy.

Jen: Yes. Then you can also promote that post and you can use Facebook ads to increase the exposure of that post which means that more of your fans will see it. Just using little things like this may seem a little bit strange or a little bit fiddly at first, but these are the kinds of things that have a massive impact on the engagement strategy and the engagement or your page and how visible your stuff becomes on Facebook.

Ryan:  Absolutely, because my understanding is that if you’ve put a video on Facebook, only about 15% of your friends will follow as they’re actually going to see that in their feed. Is that right?

Jen: That’s right. That’s actually a high number. I think it’s closer to seven or less than ten percent. It’s very low, because there’s so much on Facebook. Every time I log in, I can’t see everything from every friend and every page I like. They only show you the things that are the most popular, that other people have commented on or liked, or shared.

Ryan:  When you’re deciding about whether you should turn a video into promoted post, would you test it out and see what sort of engagement you’re getting, and then based on that, if you can see that it’s getting a log of engagement, you decide, “Okay. Let’s turn this into a promoted post now.”

Jen: Exactly. Also, it’s good to promote the things that a very key to your brand so very … If you’re having a lot of event, this strategy is perfect for filling a live event. You probably see that Victoria Gibson and James Schramko and James Reynolds, and these people are using this exact strategy for their live events coming up. What you want to do is, you want to amplify your important content.

If you are posting the picture of Marie getting her flowers or the video of that, you probably don’t need to pay and make sure that people see that. If you are promoting a free offer or a webinar or something that’s related to the core values of what you do, I would be promoting that.

Ryan:  Okay. That makes a lot of sense. It’s being presented as information and conversation but it’s essentially a type of advertising that it’s coming across as being useful and interesting and fun.

Jen: Yes. Yes, that’s right.

Ryan:  Okay. We’ve talked about embedding YouTube or Wistia videos. What about actually just uploading video directly to Facebook? One thing I’ve noticed is that the video compression isn’t really quite as nice as something like Wistia or even YouTube, but are there times when you’d recommend just uploading video directly to Facebook?

Jen: I do. I think it’s good for casual videos. It’s easier for people to … When you’re on the go or you’re busy and you can just really very easily do it. I think that’s important. It’s more important to post it than for it to be perfect.

Ryan:  Yes. A feature which I see a lot of people don’t use is that you can actually record video directly into Facebook just by using the web cam on your computer.

Jen: You can, yes. Yes, that’s right.

Ryan:  Is that something you ever recommend to your clients to do?

Jen: Yes. Whatever makes it easier for you. I think the fact that we need to be posting regularly on Facebook. If it makes it easier for you to go direct and just turn on your web cam and just record it, go for it. It really is a matter of whatever works, go for it.

Ryan:  Let’s talk about some ideas for videos on Facebook. I listen to an episode of the podcast “I love Marketing” a while back, and one of the host, Dean Jackson gave a great example of a smart way of using Facebook video to promote a car dealership. I don’t know if you heard this episode.

Jen: Yes. He’s great.

Ryan:  Yes. The idea is that you film someone as they drive their brand new car off the lot at a car dealership, upload that video onto Facebook and tag them, and their friends will then see the video on their news feed, and indirectly then the car dealership gets a promotion which I thought was really clever.

Jen: Yes. That’s exactly right. By tagging them, they get to share it with their friends, and it’s kind of a memory.  A lot of people might even say that if they have saved up for their car or they love it or their dream car or all of those sort of things, that’s a great idea.

Other businesses can use this too. It’s not just for car dealerships. One of our clients is a property developer, and they develop apartments and they sell the apartments. When a new couple comes in and buys a new apartment, when they do the handover, they have them with their keys, standing in their in new living room or in front of the sold sign of their house. That’s really effective.

Another way to do it is with, another client is a dog trainer. They upload cute little videos of puppies at puppy school and learning how to sit for the first time. Tagging the owners of the dog in the video helps the owners then want to share it with their family and friends.

Ryan:  I think this is the most powerful thing about Facebook video is the ability to share video and have it turn up on your friends’ news feeds because of course you can share videos through YouTube and through Twitter, but it’s not nearly as powerful as Facebook by simply liking a video, then that’s going to be seen and that video can be shared again, and it’s going to be seen again. None of those other platforms have the reach that Facebook does.

Jen: That’s right. I think a lot of people don’t understand how easily the things get shared, simply when you click like. I have 400 friends, and whenever I click like on something, my 400 friends see that I liked that, and just says, “Jennifer Sheehan liked this video.” That will then cause that video to be seen or available to all of my 400 friends. For every single like you get, every single comment you get, it makes it far more public, and then a share even goes more viral than that. When I click share, then that video then moves over to my page, not only do my 400 friends see it, but then every one of them who likes or comments on that video on my page, it also goes to all of their friends. It’s very easily …

All you need are 10 people to like it for 4,000 people to see it.

Ryan:  Absolutely. It’s amazing the power of sharing. I contacted someone recently about doing some work for me. It was a camera person and so we have a few of the same friends, and he was recommended to me. After I spoke to him, I thought, “Gee, I’m pretty sure I know this guy. I think we might be friends on Facebook.” I had a look and we weren’t actually friends on Facebook but, I had actually just seen some of his posts because people had either liked them or shared them, and it had actually sort of generated a sense of me knowing him without us being friends directly on Facebook which is pretty powerful.

Jen: That’s right. The way to translate this into business is that when I need to buy a new Webber barbecue, where am I going to buy it from? If there’s somebody who keeps posting really cool barbecue recipes and tips and hints and videos, and about Webber barbecues, well then I’m more likely to check them out first, because whenever I think of a Webber barbecue, automatically I’m thinking of this guy.

Ryan:  Do you think there’s I guess a sort of etiquette that goes along with it, particularly if you’re tagging people in a business contacts, who might not necessarily be your closest friends. What’s the etiquette around tagging, Jen?

Jen: I think it’s really important to be very careful and cautious when you’re tagging other people. Tagging a business page is one thing that’s fine, as long as you are saying things like, “I just had a great lunch with Ryan” or if the two of you already understand that it’s going to be public. You can easily ask people if it’s okay if we upload it to Facebook, if you’re getting a video release or a photo release signed, you can say you’re agreeing that we are going to share this on Facebook, that sort of stuff.

I think you should error on the side of caution when you’re tagging people. Understand that people have the ability to untag themselves, but very quickly you could generate some negative feelings which is not what we’re here for. I think it’s good to ask.

Ryan:  Yes. That’s often what I’ll do when I’m taking photos for our business Facebook page, even if I’m not tagging, I might just mention at the start like if we go on a shoot for instance to the client, we normally take a few videos just to document the process and share that on Facebook. Is that something that you’re comfortable with and people are generally quite happy with that?

Jen: Yes, they are. Usually, people are just fine with that. In the case of like our dog trainer client, many talk about it when they’re there at the puppy school session and they say, “Is it okay if we use spot on our Facebook page?” People are like, “Oh yes please. That would be great.” It’s like spots moment of fame. It’s 15 minutes of fame on the Facebook page, but that’s a good point. People love their 15 minutes of fame, and if that means … Imagine if you were featured on the most ideal website, like I have no idea what that might be for the people who are listening, but if Oprah Winfrey were to feature you on her Facebook page, would you share that with people like you probably would if you like Oprah.

Ryan:  I think even if I didn’t like Oprah I probably would to be honest.

Jen: That’s right. It’s important for us to understand that we are the Oprah for some people. I’m not talking about like on the huge scale, but it’s kind of cool. If you’re involved in the local group or a community and you’ve done something notable, how nice is it that you’re recognised for that?

Ryan;  It is.

Jen: Look for opportunities to recognise your clients. If they bought something from you, a big major purchase or you renovated their home or they bought a car, or they bought a house, or you redid their garden or you taught their puppy how to sit and come when called, all those things are perfect examples of when you can take happy photos of these people and upload them to your Facebook page.

Ryan:  Definitely. Another example of a business or businesses that I’ve seen doing this really well are wedding video companies or wedding photography companies where they might tag the couple in a photo on their business page and of course the couple looking fantastic, or they might add the highlights of their video. That’s something that the couple can then share with friends and they’re very happy to do it, but of course it reflects well on the company as well, showing their work.

Jen: Yes. Exactly. Other ways of making that interesting and useful are to find an angle for that, so that as the wedding videographer, you could then say, “Are you thinking, planning a beach wedding?” and then have some great … “Here’s some ideas that might inspire you,” and have two or three different pictures or a quick video, a video reel of all the different beach weddings that you’ve been the photographer of or the videographer for and have a highlights reel of beach weddings.

That way when I see it, I go, “Oh wow. My sister is planning a beach wedding. I’ll send this to her.”

Ryan:  Absolutely.

Jen: It becomes useful and I didn’t even think to have a big canopy or I didn’t think to have a strategy, whatever. People love that sort of stuff. You could use that in almost any market. Painting the inside of your house, “Here is some great ideas. What’s trending now?”, stuff like that.

Ryan:  You’re talking about finding an angle which is really important and one way is as you’re talking about creating texts that makes the post or the video sound enticing. Are there any other things that you can do to I guess increase the chance of your video being watched through, I guess maybe things like optimising the thumbnail or description or any other tips that will increase the chance of your video being watched?

Jen: Yes. You want it to be short and social. You want to keep … Keep in mind the mindset that people are in when they’re on Facebook. They’re being bombarded with, “What happened last night in the Biggest Loser, and what’s their ex boyfriend doing and pictures of their friends, trip to Bali,” and all these other things and you’re competing with a whole lot of very appealing topics.

If you go on there and you’re an accountant and your ad is really important that you do your accounting right and blah, blah, blah, and it’s not boring or interesting or fun or catchy, you’re not going to get people to watch your video. Instead, what you can do is be short and social, and have fun music or a fun – or an important topic or, “Did you know that this has changed?” It’s just short and interesting and useful. Those are the three words that I would use to plan my video strategy.

Ryan:  Absolutely, short, interesting, and useful. Okay. Excellent. Are there any things that I haven’t asked you about that you think listeners need to be remind when thinking about video in Facebook?

Jen: We’ve covered a lot, haven’t we?

Ryan:  We have. We have and I just want to make sure that before we come to the end, that we’ve basically covered everything. Then I want to give listeners some ideas for strategies that they can go out and implement now.

Jen: Yes. You know how we were thinking about, there’s one thing that we kind of didn’t talk about, that is we were talking about having one to three minute introduction video, who you are and what you do. It would be great if that was like professionally produced and really captures your business very quickly.

There’s another strategy you can do on your Facebook page, and that is to pin a post. That means you can select an option when you make a page post, and that will pin it to the top of your page for seven days.

Now, most people don’t use this feature and it’s really good feature, because it means when I land on your page for the very first time, if I find you in Google or a friend likes your page and I go there, that’s the post that I’ll see first.

Ryan:  Okay. I get it. This isn’t to do with the news feed at all. It’s just when people come directly to your page that you see priority news or posts right up the top. Yes. Great.

Jen: Right. There’s a very effective strategy for making the most of that post, and you can change it. Every seven days, you’re going to need to create a new post and pin that one to the top, or you could pin a past post, like if there was a very important discussion that happened, and you didn’t think it was going to be that important but it ended up generating 200 comments, you could pin that if you wanted to as well.

If you have a strategy, like if you’ve planned it out, you could have that post be the one thing that generates a lot of traffic to your website and to your opt in page. I recommend that you create a series of two or three videos that you can rotate, and those videos talk about a hot topic in your market or a key problem that people have, and you provide the solution. Whatever it is, and you guys know better than I do what the key problems are for your audience.

Create three, short video answers that help give people actionable, useable content, useable solutions, and then post that on your Facebook page and pin it to the top. Then seven days later, post the next one and pin that to the top, and then just rotate through those useful videos making sure that you use the strategy we talked about earlier about taking the screenshot of the video and making sure it’s a blog post on your site so that you can track the effectiveness of these posts.

Ryan:  Okay. Can you actually set that within Facebook that that post will be a priority for a week and then will drop down?

Jen: Yes. You have to manually select “Pin this post”.

Ryan:  Okay. Manually select “Pin this post”. Then I guess each time someone goes to your Facebook page, they’re going to see something different at the top?

Jen: No. Each every seven days.

Ryan:  Every seven days but it’s going to be like a pillar post essentially.

Jen: That’s right. It’s one thing. If you could tell a new customer one thing about your business, what would you want it to be? Chances are, you don’t want it to be that you gave Mary flowers for her … she’s the receptionist, right? What you want is you’re useful, you answer questions, you solve people’s problems and it’s worth doing business with you. The best way to get that across is by, with a short video pin to the top of your post.

Ryan:  Okay. That’s a really good idea, and I’m going to start doing that exact thing with my business’ Facebook page. A couple of other things that you mentioned I’m going to do as well, so I’m going to create a …

What do you call when you create custom pages in Facebook?

Jen: Most people call it a “Custom landing tab”.

Ryan:  Custom landing tab.

Jen: It’s actually a page, a landing page inside of Facebook. Then you can create a thumbnail image which sits right below your timeline picture. There’s usually three or four unique thumbnails there. One is photos and then the other three you can customise.

Ryan:  Okay. The idea that you mentioned about having a custom page that just has your videos on I think is a great idea because someone might just be in the mood to watch video and they can find them all straight away.

Now that we’re getting close to the end of the podcast, let’s list a few steps that business owners can take and implement into their Facebook page, ideas like that to start improving the way that they are using video on Facebook.

Jen: Yup. You need a Facebook page. That’s number one. A lot of people don’t have it, so you need a Facebook page. Two, it’s a very simple name for your page and make sure that you fill out the information and About Us company information sections of that page, because that will help you be found in Google. You want to use a lot of good keywords and links to your website in that area.

You also want to include a full clickable link in the About section of your page so that people can go to your website. When I view your page, it should say right there in the top, right below your profile image, it should say, “HTTP …” and I should be able to click it and go to your website. That tells people that you are an official business, you’re not just a fan of the topic.

Ryan:  That’s a good point because often people just have a description, they’re on another link.

Jen: Right. Right. You get a lot of traffic from it. It’s very useful. You have the page, you fill it up properly, you complete it properly, and you have the clickable link there. Then I recommend you set up the custom landing tab at least a welcome one with a brief overview of who you are, and then opt in for your email list on that page.

Ryan:  Okay.

Jen: Then, you want to … Creating a few extra videos would be great because you’re going to want to post at least one video every week of whether it’s a casual one or a formal one or a training one or that sort of stuff, but again, keeping it short and useful and interesting.

Choose your most important posts or videos or comments to promote, which means that you’re amplifying that content.

Ryan:  Okay. Absolutely. This is Facebook promoted post you’re talking about here?

Jen: That’s right. That’s right. You can pay Facebook five, ten, $15 to show your post to more of your fans. We’re talking about earlier that seven, 10, 15% of people see your posts. If you pay Facebook five or 10 or $15, they can show it to closer to a hundred percent of your fans.

Ryan:  Okay. It sounds like a pretty good value.

Jen: It depends on the numbers. It’s very … The Facebook is in it to make money, so it changes a lot. Those are the key things that I … in addition to everything we discussed, that people should really implement right away.

Ryan:  Okay. Cool. There’s some real low hanging fruit there for a lot of businesses in terms of video.

Jen; Yes, that’s the foundations.

Ryan:  Okay. That’s the foundations. That’s a great place to start, and for people who would like to learn more and go into a little bit more detail, I know that your business has some resources and some services around Facebook, so where would be a good place to start for people to learn about that?

Jen: Yes. You can go to our website which is “Fbadslab.com”. There’s a whole range of services so you can either learn how to do it yourself, you can have us do an audit which means that we’ll dive in to what you’ve got your website, in your Facebook page, and have a really good look at where you’re at and we’ll make some recommendations for you and where we recommend you go, and then you can either do it yourself or we can do it for you and it depends on how much time and effort you want to invest in that. There’s a lot of resources there and a lot of blog posts we’ve written and a lot of helpful hints and tips all about Facebook.

If you get stuck, you can always send me an email. All our contact details are there on the website.

Ryan:  Okay. Excellent. Now, I’m going to put that link in the show notes of Webvideomarketing.com so head over to webvideomarketing.com and click on the link to find out lots more about resources and services that Jen offers.

Jen, thank you so much for coming on the show. You’ve given me a bunch of good ideas that I can implement onto our business Facebook page that can start improving things straight away. There’s some really simple, easy wins that we can get started with right now, so it’s been really helpful for me and I’m sure it has been for the listeners as well.

Jen: Yes. Fantastic. Thank you so much for having me. I’m glad it was helpful.

Ryan:  We’ve come to the end of the show. I hope you’ve enjoyed it and learned more about how to promote your business by using video on Facebook. If you have questions, head over to webvideomarketing.com and put your questions in there, and Jen will be dropping by the blog to answer any questions that you might have. Love to know what you think of the show and would love to get your feedback.