Long-Lived Videos Extend Social Media Reach

TO HELP YOU understand the process of making and spreading content, I thought it would be a good idea to dissect a recent series of videos we made for this magazine.

I hope our example proves you can plan your reach and get the views your promotions deserve instead of hoping the algorithm picks you today.

Thanks again to Screen Printing for inviting us to participate in #SPTakeoverTuesday, which gave us the opportunity to act as 24-hour guest hosts of the magazine’s Instagram account (@screenprintmag) on March 28. Initially, our stories received about 100 views each, but we weren’t done there. We posted the same videos to our own Squeegee & Ink channel, where they received about 400 views each. We also turned the series of short videos into a single, long Instagram post that received 2643 views, while 15 shorter TikTok videos attracted more than 2 million views. On YouTube, 15 shorts garnered 3136-plus sets of eyeballs, while a long-form video received more than 600.

If we had stopped using the videos after posting them as Instagram Stories – posts meant to be “in the moment” that disappear after 24 hours – they would now be completely forgotten. That is unfortunately what is happening with a lot of your carefully filmed footage. It’s made with good intentions and then, like a piece of junk mail, it’s thrown in the recycling and forgotten. 

So how can you really squeeze more value from your marketing? Plan to re-package content as many as seven times after its initial release. With that in mind, we simply documented an entire working day with a high-quality camera and camera-mounted microphone. In addition to the video stories, this tactic enabled us to pull photos for use in blog posts that help with SEO for our website and digital products. Filming all the shots in portrait orientation ensured videos were ready to go on social media platforms without cropping.

I don’t mean to make this sound easy. You’ll need to think hard about which shots to take at which angles to tell the full story. We took six shots, one photo and one “talking to camera” shot, for each hour segment of the day. We made a video template for ourselves with an area to write some text and repeated the process over the eight hours of filming. Having the same audio (taken from a stock site) running throughout also was important to tie the smaller segments together and maintain the attention of the audience (people understood the video wasn’t over because the song wasn’t over).

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Filming and posting Instagram Stories is easy enough. However, engaging your audience with a curated story takes a bit more thought. Watching content from other people with a critical eye helped us find a style we liked. Perhaps you accidentally watched a minute-long video of someone baking a cake that you don’t find interesting. Go back and rewatch it. You might find they used lots of angles, built up the footage to be exciting, and have a story flowing through. You might notice they spoke over the footage and used stock videos to illustrate their point and keep your attention. Such tactics could help you harness attention for your own business. 

Keeping up with the different platforms is also important. TikTok is trying to become a search platform. It encourages content to be longer than one minute. If that is news to you, it might be why your posts have stopped working. Our business account on TikTok hit a wall a few months ago and stopped dead with our following even though we were posting consistently. We then bombarded the app with 20 videos and it kickstarted again. This shows that massive action works, but a lot of individual smaller efforts leave you in the dark. 

What’s the point in all these views anyway? The point is to be seen. You can sell your services off the back of the views, and these hundreds of mini adverts will build your brand’s identity. More views mean more followers. The apps will test your content on this group before allowing new people to view it in the future. 

After you post the content, you now need to stay on top of any comments you might get. There are two ways people go about answering comments. The first is to quickly answer them as they come up. The second is to answer all of them at once just before you release a new video. When commentors get a notification to read your reply, they might see your newly posted video,. 

Keep in mind that all platforms like to think they are the best. So, re-posting the same video across platforms will not be seen favorably. Instagram won’t promote TikTok videos with the TikTok logo on it. Therefore, you need a clean version to upload onto Instagram. This is why we edited the footage in Final Cut Pro and used individual apps to upload the footage. For example, Instagram won’t promote TikTok videos with the TikTok logo on it. Therefore you need a clean version to upload onto Instagram. Uploading to each app individually also enables you to quickly use whatever audio you prefer.

This is all about tactics, timing, and a bit of smart thinking. If you don’t know how to get started or think you have hit the ceiling with your online marketing efforts, feel free to contact me and see if I can point you in the right direction. 

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I hope my example proves that you can plan your reach and get the views your promotions deserve instead of hoping the algorithm picks you today!