If you’re looking for a way to increase engagement from social media, video is the answer. But creating video can be difficult, requiring a combination of time and technical expertise that is often hard for busy social media teams to accommodate.
To remedy this situation, we’ve created Instant Video. A new feature that will be a game-changer for many publishers.
Instant Videos take your articles and transform them into engaging, social-ready, vertical videos (9:16) with just one click. Instant Video creates beautifully-optimized videos for all major social networks, meaning in mere seconds, you can transform your video output on social media, exponentially increasing the volume of short videos you post as well as increasing the number of pages to which they’re posted.
Why post videos?
We all know how important video is on social media platforms today. And not just on (relatively) newer platforms like TikTok. Since 2022, leadership at Meta have been pushing its platforms, Facebook and Instagram, towards video to increase on-platform engagement as well as arrest declining user numbers.
Video on both platforms has been a huge success. Reels are played over 2 billion times per month on both Facebook and Instagram, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg projecting the format to grow regardless of the fate of TikTok in Meta’s Q4 earnings report.
With our Social Media Index showing Facebook as the source of around 5%-6% of all referral traffic for publishers this year, many are diversifying the uses to which they put social media — that means traffic and engagement.
So, given that social networks are now increasingly oriented around promoting video content, and that audiences on every platform are now becoming more amenable to video than ever before, should publishers be investing more in video? Sure. But things are rarely so easy. There are lots of publishers who either don’t have the resources to put into video, or do but find their ambitions for the format thwarted by lack of bandwidth.
That’s where Instant Video comes in.
How does Instant Video work?
Simple. Go to the compose box, and under the “Share as” dropdown, select “Video”. We’ll then take that article and convert it into a video, combining animation, text from your article and music.
Instant Video is also deeply customizable. For those familiar with the image-link workflow, things will already be familiar. You can choose from an array of different styles for the videos, allowing you to align them with your brand and audience. Alongside this, you can also edit the thumbnail, cropping the default or replacing it all together.
What problems does Instant Video solve?
Instant Video is perfect for publishers of all sizes with all kinds of workflows. Video creation is an incredibly time- and labour-intensive process. For smaller publishers without dedicated video teams, Instant Video means dramatically expanding the scope of video posts, allowing you to increase the number of videos shared as well as the pages on which they’re shared.
For larger publishers who may have greater video resources, Instant Video takes some of the workload off and allows teams to focus their time on more ambitious productions.
So, if you want to drive more engagement from your social networks why not give Instant Video a go? It’s completely free for all Echobox customers, and its impact could be extraordinary.
