Facebook Offers Tips to Improve Audience Reach Through Video

Shannon Vezina
Sep 2, 2018 · 2 min read

Video is the most popular content format on social media, and it’s the best way to reach audiences on Facebook. Businesses can benefit from tips in a recent Facebook report that outlines best practices to engage audiences through video ads.

As Andrew Hutchinson of Social Media Today discussed, businesses should consider where paid video ads are placed on Facebook. Facebook News Feeds and Stories offer discovery content with frequent, unplanned, and short sessions oriented around family and friends. Videos should reflect audience expectations, so these areas are better for short, :15 second in-stream video ads.

Intent-based viewing on TV and video platforms, such as Netflix or Facebook Watch, involve longer sessions when people are watching shows and other entertainment. Audiences “stay to watch videos for 5x longer than in News Feed,” so video ads incorporated into shows should be longer and purposefully engaging (Smith, n.d.).

Three tips highlighted in Hutchinson’s article on the Facebook report include: matching your message to audience expectation, creating ads that reflect audience behavior, and measuring performance based on where your ad is shown.

I think the Facebook report can be a valuable tool for content creators by giving them suggestions to create more engaging and effective ads. It offers great insights, such as “people ages 18–24, attention on an ad is about 75% of that of people 65+” and “people have low tolerance for long ads, with much higher abandon rates for ads longer than 15 seconds” (Smith, n.d.).

The research informs specific tips offered by Facebook, such as, if your business wants to reach millennial women, six-second video ads are best; whereas if you want to reach older audiences, it’s better to use longer, 15-second video ads. By taking the Facebook recommendations into consideration, communicators can create videos that their target audiences will enjoy and maximize the effectiveness of their overal social media campaign.

Social Media Today article: Facebook Publishes New Report on How to Maximize Video Ad Performance

Sources:

Hutchinson, A. (2018, August 31). Facebook Publishes New Report on How to Maximize Video Ad Performance. Retrieved from https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/facebook-publishes-new-report-on-how-to-maximize-video-ad-performance/531349/

Smith, M. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/business/news/how-people-are-watching-video-and-what-this-means-for-advertisers

Shannon Vezina

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PR professional always looking to be a more effective communicator, fascinated by the art of conversation to change minds.