3 Tips for Effective Silent Video on Social Media
In a post earlier this year, we explained why you should post silent video. Now we want to explore how to make silent social videos work for you. The most popular social media platforms today contain a lot of video content. Since sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are set up for users to quickly scroll, it makes sense that more videos are watched without sound. While some platforms are experimenting with changes in autoplay, more than 85% of videos are currently viewed with the sound off. Recognizing that silent social videos are here to stay is one thing, taking advantage of the silence is another.
1. Make the Story Compelling
If your video content doesn’t have sound, you need another way to hook viewers and ensure that your message gets across. There is a large amount of video content now available online and your goal is to keep viewers engaged rather than send them scrolling past your content. Without words, viewers are forced to pay more attention to what is happening in the video. Focus on what’s most important. If an element doesn’t contribute to the story, consider changing it or leaving it out altogether. This can help streamline your content.
Videos that have captivating messages can hook the viewer more than a voiceover. While viewers can and will choose to listen to the sound on videos that interest them, reaching the viewer with only the visual story can be incredibly successful.
2. Add Text Overlay or Captions
While some videos can be easily understood through the visual story alone, you may want to use captions or text overlay to highlight key points. Captions are a great way to ensure that the overall message of your video is understood, especially if the video is longer and has specific information that is helpful to the viewer. This is the case for a product demo video or review or for something like a recipe video where the instructions are important. Video has a 135% higher organic reach than a photo post, but it can be difficult to keep an audience’s attention. 65% of people who watch the first three seconds of a video will keep watching up to ten seconds and only 45% continue watching to the thirty second mark. Captions are an effective way to keep the viewers’ attention well past the three second mark.
One thing to consider when using captions or text overlay is the language or languages of your target audience. If you are trying to reach a particular segment of people, you want to be sure they can easily understand the content. Of course, you can always produce identical videos with captions in different languages, making silent video incredibly versatile. Viewers can choose to watch silently or with audio and the captions help drive engagement because they keep viewers reading and watching until the end.
3. Affirm Your Brand
Video, like any other content, provides a way to reinforce your brand and boost brand awareness. It can be easy to forget to do this in a video, but in videos without sound, it’s particularly important that viewers connect the content with your brand. An easy way to do this is by featuring your logo at the start and close of the video. This provides a visual branding moment and brackets the content. Using captions and text overlay is another straightforward way to emphasize your brand throughout the video.
As with any other social content, your videos should reflect your overall brand guidelines and style. Making your videos easily recognizable is a way to ensure that your fans tune in. Buzzfeed’s Tasty recipe videos are a great example of this. The content is compelling, and the branding is very recognizable. They are all stylistically similar and have very clear branding that is familiar to many Buzzfeed fans. Text overlay is an unobtrusive way to feature your brand name or logo that doesn’t interfere with the overall content.
As more video goes silent, it’s important that brands know how to gain viewers attention and keep them engaged. As with any advertising content, the story needs to be compelling and relevant. Production value is key—especially in silent videos when the viewer will be hyper-focused on the image. Effective silent video comes down to an emotive story with a clear message.
Leveraging text overlay or closed captioning is one option for reaffirming the story and keeping viewers invested in the video. With the popularity and high engagement rates of video, reinforcing your brand throughout your video content will help connect the viewer back to your brand. Silent video is here to stay and with these tips, marketers can ensure that their content is viewed from beginning to end.
Comment below and let us know if you prefer videos with or without sound on social media?
