Facebook Movie Tips: seventeen Ideas for Getting More Views and Engagement
17 Ways to Get More Views, Engagement, and Shares for Your Facebook Movies
Jun 1, two thousand seventeen Last updated: Aug 17, two thousand seventeen 12 minutes to read
This post was originally written and published in two thousand fifteen by Sandrine Sahakians and has been updated with the latest Facebook movie tips and information.
Over eight billion movies or one hundred million hours of movies are observed on Facebook every day.
These stats were reported early last year so imagine how much larger the numbers are today as Facebook continued to grow and dual down on movies.
Now seems to be the flawless time to take a closer look at Facebook movie and how to use movies to engage more fans on the platform.
With Facebook movie being the top priority of marketers in 2017, we’d love to help you get ahead of this rising trend. In this post, you’ll learn seventeen actionable tips to increase the views, engagement, shares of your Facebook movies.
17 Top Facebook Movie Tips for More Views, Shares, and Engagement
With Facebook permanently evolving and introducing fresh features, your movie marketing strategy has to evolve, too. Check out the below movie and latest tips to help you create movies that captivate your audience:
Let’s take a look at each peak in detail.
1. Create square movies
Earlier this year, we spent $1,500 to find out what makes movies successful on social media.
We found that square movies outperformed landscape movies in terms of average engagement, views, and reach, especially on mobile. And we aren’t the only one to see these results.
Here’re a duo possible reasons:
- More than 92% of Facebook users use Facebook on their mobile every day.
- Movie consumption on mobile has enlargened 233% since 2013, and more than half of movie views take place on mobile.
- Square movies take up 78% more real estate in the News Feed on mobile than on desktop.
With more and more people viewing movies on mobile, it’ll be excellent to experiment with square movies to see if they improve your movie spectacle. You might even want to consider creating vertical movies since Facebook is now showcasing larger previews for vertical movies in News Feed on mobile.
We have been using Animoto to create plain, brief movies and Adobe Premiere and After Effects for more professionally produced movies.
Two. Catch people’s attention within the very first three seconds
Facebook movies auto-play in order to captivate users’ attention and persuade them to see more.
As such, your Facebook movie should have a powerful very first few seconds that captivate your audience even without sound.
- Superb thumbnails – BuzzFeed uploads custom-made thumbnails that do a fine job at capturing people’s attention while they scroll through their feed.
- Taunt the movie with a brief post update: Sometimes it’s the title of the movie itself (if that is compelling enough). Other times they taunt what the movie is about.
- Instantaneous commence: BuzzFeed doesn’t waste time in capturing people’s attention. In general, the very first framework is already geared towards piquing someone’s interest.
Here’s a latest example which has garnered more than 8.7 million views at the time of writing:
How to uploading a custom-made thumbnail
When you upload a movie, you can select a thumbnail or add a custom-made thumbnail for your movie.
If you didn’t upload a custom-made thumbnail for your existing Facebook movies, you can select “Edit Post” from the menu and a similar pop-up will emerge.
Three. Add captions to your movies
Even tho’ Facebook now auto-plays movies on the mobile News Feed with sound, it’s unclear how many people see movies with the sound on. Facebook users can disable the auto-play-with-sound feature, and movies will auto-play without sound if the mobile phone is on silent mode.
My hunch is that most Facebook users still observe movies without sound.
If a viewer can’t understand your movie without the sound, you would likely lose that viewer and the chance to convey your message to her.
To prevent that, you can add captions to your movies through Facebook. When you are uploading your movie onto Facebook, there’s an option to upload a SRT file of your captions. You can also add captions to existing Facebook movies by editing the movie.
(It seems that Facebook has been rolling out an auto-captioning feature so you might not have to do this by hand soon.)
Alternatively, you can add text overlay to your movies using a movie editing implement like Animoto. Colorful and to-the-point text overlays can make the movie more appealing and engaging.
Here’s a excellent example by HubSpot:
Four. Suggest viewers tap for sound
Another neat way to work around the silent auto-played Facebook movies is to suggest viewers tap for sound with a pop-up.
Pop-ups can sometimes be annoying so it has to be designed and timed appropriately to create a non-disruptive effect. 20th Century Fox (which I learned this peak from) demonstrated a fine example with their Kingsman trailer movie:
The style of the pop-up is in line with the Kingsman theme (and similar to the style of the captions). It’s also well-timed as it doesn’t prevent you from eyeing any crucial bits of the movie (and it doesn’t take up too much space on the screen).
Five. Concentrate on one key point
If you want to make a shareable movie, concentrate on one easy-to-understand point.
Can we summarize what this movie is all about in one sentence that is lightly understood and also compelling in a way that people will want to share?
The point is if you can’t summarize it in one sentence, then it’s going to take someone longer to explain it when they’re attempting to share it.
If your movie is effortless to understand, viewers would be more likely to share it as it is effortless for them to explain what’s excellent about the movie when sharing it.
Rhett and Link attempt to think from their audience’s point-of-view on why they might share a movie even before writing a script for the movie. Why might your audience share your movies?
According to Jonathan Perelman, former GM of Movie & VP of Agency Strategy at BuzzFeed, there are five main reasons why people share movies:
- To be social
- To express how they are feeling about a particular topic
- To showcase off, or humble-brag
- To prove they were the very first ones to find something
- To make friends and colleagues laugh
Do your movies help your audience achieve any of these?
6. Upload your movies natively (via Buffer!)
Movies uploaded onto Facebook natively perform way better than links to YouTube or similar movie platforms.
(“Natively” refers to movies that have been uploaded to a network directly and played straight in a feed, versus those that are uploaded elsewhere and collective as links, e.g. YouTube movies.)
Quintly analyzed over six million Facebook posts in the period of July to December two thousand sixteen and found the following:
The interaction rate for Facebook native movies were on average 109.67% higher than for YouTube movies.
Facebook native movies had on average a 477.76% higher share rate compared to Youtube movies.
With Buffer, you can upload movies directly to your queue and post them natively on Facebook while still being able to take advantage of your optimal Buffer schedule.
7. Craft a descriptive title
Facebook recommends choosing a descriptive title that will make the movie lightly searchable.
With Facebook eyeing more than two billion searches every day, it’ll be worth to optimize your movies for search.
You can add the title when you upload your movie onto Facebook.
8. Create a Facebook-specific copy
If you have a presence on numerous social media platforms, you might sometimes want to share a movie to several platforms. A best practice is to tailor your copy for each social media platform as what works best on each platform differs.
Here’re two key characteristics of Facebook and how you can make good use of them
High character limit for posts: You can type up to 63,206 characters for a Facebook post (tho’ Facebook will truncate your post at about four hundred characters). This gives you the plasticity to experiment with both long and brief copy. We noticed that brief copy is better for driving clicks while long copy is better for generating engagement.
High character limit for comments: It seems that you can type up for 8,000 characters for a Facebook comment. This makes it superb for inviting your audience to share longer-form thoughts about your movie.
For example, Airbnb encouraged its audience to share their beloved vacation mom story on their Mother’s Day movie. As the character limit for comments is high, Airbnb’s audience could share much more about their stories than, say, on Twitter.
- Experiment with post length
- Ask a question
- Use a list
- Add a quote from your content
- Include an emoji or two ?
If you want to learn more about each peak, feel free to check out the total post on crafting the ideal post for each platform here.
9. Give a preview of the movie in your copy
Here’s another way to write your Facebook movie copy: Shortly describe your movie using your copy.
Taking the time to see a movie can be a time commitment. Sometimes, it can help to provide a little information about your movie in your copy so that people can quickly determine if it’d be worth their time to see your movie.
Facebook recommends “pulling out a key quote or moment from the movie as the text component of your post” in order to set up the expectations of what will be seen in the movie.
An informative copy about the movie, coupled with a relevant thumbnail, can be a good formula for attracting people’s attention as they scroll through their News Feed.
Here’re a duo examples:
Ten. Add a call-to-action
Having a call-to-action (CTA) on your movie is a superb way to encourage engagement, drive traffic to your website, and even convert viewers into customers.
It might be common to think of CTAs as buttons to a signup form or website. But CTAs can be as plain as a sentence calling for an act, such as “Read the total blog post here: Link“.
While Facebook has liquidated the call-to-action functionality for movies, there are still several free ways to add a CTA to your Facebook movie.
- In your post copy, you could include a link to your blog post or website and invite viewers to find out more information by clicking on the link. You could also simply ask your audience to share their thoughts as comments.
- During the movie, you could mention a CTA if you are talking in the movie or use a text overlay (e.g. Learn more social media tips at blog.buffer.com). Wistia found that such mid-roll CTAs have the highest conversion rates.
- At the end of the movie, you could have a text overlay or a static picture with a CTA and let the movie play for a few seconds after the actual content finishes.
For example, Gary Vaynerchuk likes to include his share bear in the middle or at the end of his movies.
You could also add a CTA on your Facebook post itself if you boost the movie. More on this below.
11. Tag other pages
Another feature you can use to attempt and spread your Facebook movie is tagging other Pages that either contributed to the movie or that you would like to make aware of the movie.
It is significant to keep the tagging relevant.
Here’re a few examples of “who to tag”:
- People who contributed to the movie directly – “Featuring Taylor Swift “
- People that are mentioned in the movie – “We love Harry Potter and here’s why.”
- People who inspired you to make the movie – “HT to Leo Widrich for the inspiration.”
- People who are related to the movie or that you would like to make aware of the movie – “We would like to tag Buffer to take on the challenge next.”
To tag someone on Facebook, simply type the “@” symbol before the title of the Page or person you would like to tag and a few options should emerge for you to pick.
12. Choose preferred audience for your movies
According to TechCrunch who studied the Facebook News Feed, relevance is a key factor that Facebook’s algorithm considers when ranking posts on users’ News Feed.
[Facebook’s algorithm] assigns each story a personalized relevancy score that’s different for each person that sees it, and puts the most relevant stories very first.
Here’s the good news: Facebook has a feature to help you share your movie to the most relevant audience!
Once you have uploaded your movie onto Facebook (before you publish it), there’s an option in the lower-left corner to set your preferred audience for this movie.
When you click on it, a pop-up will show up where you can set the following:
- Preferred audience: This permits you to set the people you’d like to reach based on their interests and the Pages they’ve liked.For example, a sports retailer could choose interests such as “running” and “long distance running” for a movie on a fresh long distance running boots.
- Audience limitations: This permits you to limit who can see your movie. Only people in audience group you’ve chosen can see your movie (anywhere on Facebook).For example, a style retailer in Singapore could set the limitations such that only female aged 25-35 in Singapore can see the movie.
By setting your preferred audience and restricting who can see your movie, your movie will be shown to the most relevant audience, who will most likely observe your movie and interact with your post (if you have set the right targeting).
13. Use insights to understand movie spectacle
Facebook provides metrics like minutes viewed, movie views, and average see time, which can provide superb insights into which movies generated the most engagement with your viewers.
You can see these metrics by clicking on any movies in the “Movies” tab of your Facebook Page Insights.
Some of the metrics I like to look at include:
- Movie Average See Time: The graph will display you the point at which the audience dropped off. Looking at that point to understand what made people stop watching might help you in creating better content.
- 10-Second Views: This is the number of people who have observed your movie for ten seconds (or to completion if your movie is less than ten seconds).
- Post Engagement: This section will tell you the reach of your movie and the engagement it has received.
14. Go live
If you want more people to see your movies and see your Facebook posts, consider going live on Facebook.
When Facebook launched Facebook Live, it tweaked its algorithm to rank live movies more favorably as live movies kept people engaged.
As a very first step, we are making a puny update to News Feed so that Facebook Live movies are more likely to show up higher in News Feed when those movies are actually live, compared to after they are no longer live. People spend more than 3x more time watching a Facebook Live movie on average compared to a movie that’s no longer live.
Social Media Examiner also found that the more they went live on Facebook, the more their non-live content received exposure. Michael Stelzner, CEO and founder of Social Media Examiner, hypothesized that as their brand is in front of their fans more often, the fans would go to their Page to see their content more — even if the fans don’t observe the live movie.
Here’s another bonus: Facebook would automatically record your live movie and publish it on your Facebook Page or profile after the broadcast completes.
When we previously live-streamed our marketing strategy team meeting, the movie generated more than Ten,000 views on the very first day. (We were astonished by it!)
15. Feature a movie on your Page
Facebook permits you to feature a movie in the “Movies” tab of your Page, which would auto-play. This can be a excellent way to showcase your best movie to those who are interested in watching your movies.
Here’s how it looks like on our Page:
If you have not selected a featured movie, Facebook would prompt you to choose.
If you want to switch your featured movie, click on the pen icon in the upper-right corner and select “Switch Featured Movie”.
16. Boost with Facebook ads
Facebook’s in-depth data on its users makes it a fine platform for running ads to reach a larger audience with your movie.
You can use Facebook ads to promote your movies to a specified target audience. Let’s say for example that you made a movie about tables in Paris, France. Facebook will permit you to target people who have shown an interest in furniture and who live in Paris.
I’d love to showcase you the highlights of creating a movie ad through the Facebook Ads Manager:
Step 1: Select “Movie views” as your marketing objective.
Step Two: Set your audience, ad placements, and budget.
Step Trio: Upload a movie or select one from your Page’s movie library.
A benefit of using movie ads is that you can add a call-to-action (CTA) button on the movie post. To do that, you have to tick the “Add a website URL” box and pack up the fields. The preview on the right is how the movie ad will look like.
Alternatively, you can boost any existing movie by clicking on the “Boost Post” button on your movie post.
17. Embed Facebook movies on blog posts
You can also embed your Facebook movies on your blog posts to reach more people.
To get the embed code, go to the movie you would like to embed, click on the drop-down menu in the upper-right corner of the post and select “Embed”.
Copy and paste the code where you would like the movie to emerge on your website. You can select whether you want to include the copy of the post (i.e. Include total post).
Here’s an example:
More resources on movie marketing
Over to you
What has been your practice with Facebook movies?
Do you have any extra tips and tricks that may help other readers with their Facebook movie strategy?
I’d love it if you share them with me in the comments! ��
Looking for a better way to share on social media?
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Written by Alfred Lua
Content Crafter at Buffer. I swim, cycle, and run a lot. When I’m not doing all those, I love to read and attempt fresh things.
Awesome, actionable post—thanks, Sandrine! It’s arousing to see the bump in engagement Facebook movies can inflame. I’ve been getting a kick out of experimenting with them the past few months.
(And then Buffer announced movie scheduling—for the win! ?)
One thing I haven’t been able to find much advice/research on is the use of background music in Facebook movies. Do you have any thoughts on this?
I just launched a site that offers CC0 music specifically for small-budget projects like social media movies, so I’d love to hear any insight you might have on the topic.
Many thanks again for these tips!
Hi Logan!! Thanks for your comment! Facebook movie is something we’re truly excited to keep experimenting with.
Good question about music. I personally either purchase royalty-free music (one of the websites I use is Pond5 – http://www.pond5.com/) or use the YouTube music library which has amazing music that you can use for free.
Would love to hear more about your site, it sounds like something truly arousing especially for creators ��
Hey, Sandrine. Thanks for your thoughts ?
Pond5 has a good library—lots of options. I truly like their entire “artist marketplace created by artists” positioning, too.
Since you asked (and thank you for asking!), Music for Makers—the project I just launched—offers a free alternative to sites like Pond5. Essentially, we send one original, CC0/Public Domain song each week by email at no cost.
I recently spotted a duo people describe us as the music equivalent of Unsplash/Death to the Stock Photo (which made me geek out a little).
The entire thing was truly prompted by the titillating explosion of movie on Facebook (as you wrote about above) and other social platforms. Creating—and now distributing—videos has never been lighter. But I think background music for movies is still a agony point, especially for petite/no-budget projects like brief social media movie posts.
So I embarked Music for Makers in attempts to address that problem.
If you want to check things out for yourself, you can find us at http://musicformakers.com. And if you have any other questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
P.S. I indeed value what you guys do here on the Buffer blog. The content you churn out on a regular basis is always top notch and amazingly helpful. I don’t comment often, so since I am, I just wished to let you know.
Oh wow that’s amazing! I signed up for Music for Makers �� This is such an incredible service!! Thank you for sharing!
Ah, very cool! Thank you, Sandrine ?
Thanks for sharing these superb tips Sandrine. Good stuff for getting commenced.
A big item those using movie should know is that you need to be able to get your message across with just the movie. Don’t expect to be able to get people to click a link after watching. It’s simply too much to ask of your viewers. The call-to-actions are provided but don’t do a entire lot (as far as getting people to act after viewing). In the vast majority of cases people will simply stir on after watching. It’s far far more effective to do a link post if you’re looking to drive someone someplace and the call to deeds with link posts resonate far better. This insight comes from lots of testing across a large number of campaigns including a good sized (around $100k on a smaller current campaign which included native movie as an asset) spend on paid promotion. While people are certainly down to see, getting them to act after taking the time to see is very difficult. I’d certainly recommend considering different options other than movie if your intention is such.
On “Three. Create Content Exclusively for Facebook”, I can see arguments both for and against this. Your audiences are likely different across each of your social channels. Some people choose to go after you on just Twitter, others only on Facebook, while some may choose to go after you on all channels (likely the smallest of the group). Creating special content for just one channel means many may miss out on it on other channels. Some see it as an chance to encourage people to go after you elsewhere but I’ve found it far better to let people go after you where they choose to and consume what you have to suggest in the way best suited to them. Encouraging people to go after you on another network uncommonly works either (this type of promotion generally sees dismal response even with paid promotion behind it). People on Facebook don’t want to go over to Twitter to see what you have to say, they want to see it on Facebook where they already are.
If you have the capability (time, money, etc) to provide unique content on each network that’s awesome. But why limit your awesome stuff to only one network when it can be collective across all of them?
Thanks again for sharing this Sandrine. Movie is certainly getting big and more are hopping onboard. Looking forward to your continued sharing of skill around building it into the marketing mix. ��
Hi Ben! Thank you so much for such a thorough comment!
You make a fine point about Calls To Activity. I think that while it might be hard to get people to act after watching a movie, it might still be valuable to have them for the few cases where viewers are ready to take act. They are certainly not a must for every case. ��
For special content, that is very true. I think it depends on your objective with your content and Facebook. While it might not necessarily bring more followers, it does prize the followers you already have. It might be something worth exploring.
Thank you again for sharing your thoughts, there is undoubtedly lots to think about and explore when it comes to movie ��
Sandrine, I’ve noticed this in a big way. Sweaty movie after a walk, discussing deep topics I’ve been musing on, have gotten around Two,000 views… who would have thought? But your tips here will help me refine, so thank you!
This is excellent insight to have! Thank you for sharing ��
This post is right on Sandrine! Facebook native movies have had a much higher views and engagement that YouTube movies on my Pages. I think a superb way to get the most out of a movie is to upload to Facebook specifically for your Facebook audience AND YouTube/Vimeo to be collective on other social sites. This is something I think Buffer should test too. I’d love to hear how it turns out on a larger scale. Thanks for the excellent post, sharing, and have a Grateful Thursday! ��
Thank you so much for your comment Steve and superb insight! Have a lovely Thursday too ��
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The power of Facebook movie indeed can’t be denied at this point, particularly in the mobile space. I think it’s effortless to get caught thinking “Facebook will never surpass YouTube as a movie hub, so why bother?” when they’re actually two different animals and both can be utterly useful to any business.
Here’s a duo superb follow-up posts from Social Media Examiner with some unique ideas on how to utilize FB movie and Digital Marketer on how to create awesome FB movie ads (still VERY under utilized). http://bit.ly/1MlWLxf
Thanks Christopher! Undoubtedly agreed that Facebook is a platform to explore when it comes to movie. ��
Mark Zuckerberg stated that she thought “going forward, use many promotional movie company of the written content that folks write about will likely be online movie media. It’s just amazingly compelling. ” The prediction has become a reality.
I understand you can’t tag pages/people in Buffer. At least not for FB….any chance you guys are working on that feature?
facebook dont permit big thumb for youtube movie so you can use http://createyoutube.com/ For creating big thumb for youtube movies which you can use it to share youtube movies without uploding it to facebook.
This is brilliant stuff .i found a nice website where you can get timelime covers which can generate your name also Thanks .
Effortless way to download facebook movie online Facebook Movie Downloader http://www.downfbvideo.com
Is there any recommendation for the amount of text surrounding the movie post? Should it be a transcript of the movie or just a brief blub and links?
What software or app do you suggest to create the movies with?
Facebook Movie Tips: seventeen Ideas for Getting More Views and Engagement
17 Ways to Get More Views, Engagement, and Shares for Your Facebook Movies
Jun 1, two thousand seventeen Last updated: Aug 17, two thousand seventeen 12 minutes to read
This post was originally written and published in two thousand fifteen by Sandrine Sahakians and has been updated with the latest Facebook movie tips and information.
Over eight billion movies or one hundred million hours of movies are observed on Facebook every day.
These stats were reported early last year so imagine how much larger the numbers are today as Facebook continued to grow and dual down on movies.
Now seems to be the ideal time to take a closer look at Facebook movie and how to use movies to engage more fans on the platform.
With Facebook movie being the top priority of marketers in 2017, we’d love to help you get ahead of this rising trend. In this post, you’ll learn seventeen actionable tips to increase the views, engagement, shares of your Facebook movies.
17 Top Facebook Movie Tips for More Views, Shares, and Engagement
With Facebook permanently evolving and introducing fresh features, your movie marketing strategy has to evolve, too. Check out the below movie and latest tips to help you create movies that captivate your audience:
Let’s take a look at each peak in detail.
1. Create square movies
Earlier this year, we spent $1,500 to find out what makes movies successful on social media.
We found that square movies outperformed landscape movies in terms of average engagement, views, and reach, especially on mobile. And we aren’t the only one to see these results.
Here’re a duo possible reasons:
- More than 92% of Facebook users use Facebook on their mobile every day.
- Movie consumption on mobile has enhanced 233% since 2013, and more than half of movie views take place on mobile.
- Square movies take up 78% more real estate in the News Feed on mobile than on desktop.
With more and more people viewing movies on mobile, it’ll be excellent to experiment with square movies to see if they improve your movie spectacle. You might even want to consider creating vertical movies since Facebook is now displaying larger previews for vertical movies in News Feed on mobile.
We have been using Animoto to create ordinary, brief movies and Adobe Premiere and After Effects for more professionally produced movies.
Two. Catch people’s attention within the very first three seconds
Facebook movies auto-play in order to captivate users’ attention and persuade them to observe more.
As such, your Facebook movie should have a powerful very first few seconds that captivate your audience even without sound.
- Fine thumbnails – BuzzFeed uploads custom-built thumbnails that do a fine job at capturing people’s attention while they scroll through their feed.
- Taunt the movie with a brief post update: Sometimes it’s the title of the movie itself (if that is compelling enough). Other times they taunt what the movie is about.
- Instantaneous commence: BuzzFeed doesn’t waste time in capturing people’s attention. In general, the very first framework is already geared towards piquing someone’s interest.
Here’s a latest example which has garnered more than 8.7 million views at the time of writing:
How to uploading a custom-made thumbnail
When you upload a movie, you can select a thumbnail or add a custom-built thumbnail for your movie.
If you didn’t upload a custom-built thumbnail for your existing Facebook movies, you can select “Edit Post” from the menu and a similar pop-up will show up.
Three. Add captions to your movies
Even tho’ Facebook now auto-plays movies on the mobile News Feed with sound, it’s unclear how many people see movies with the sound on. Facebook users can disable the auto-play-with-sound feature, and movies will auto-play without sound if the mobile phone is on silent mode.
My hunch is that most Facebook users still see movies without sound.
If a viewer can’t understand your movie without the sound, you would likely lose that viewer and the chance to convey your message to her.
To prevent that, you can add captions to your movies through Facebook. When you are uploading your movie onto Facebook, there’s an option to upload a SRT file of your captions. You can also add captions to existing Facebook movies by editing the movie.
(It seems that Facebook has been rolling out an auto-captioning feature so you might not have to do this by hand soon.)
Alternatively, you can add text overlay to your movies using a movie editing contraption like Animoto. Colorful and to-the-point text overlays can make the movie more appealing and engaging.
Here’s a good example by HubSpot:
Four. Suggest viewers tap for sound
Another neat way to work around the silent auto-played Facebook movies is to suggest viewers tap for sound with a pop-up.
Pop-ups can sometimes be annoying so it has to be designed and timed appropriately to create a non-disruptive effect. 20th Century Fox (which I learned this peak from) displayed a good example with their Kingsman trailer movie:
The style of the pop-up is in line with the Kingsman theme (and similar to the style of the captions). It’s also well-timed as it doesn’t prevent you from watching any crucial bits of the movie (and it doesn’t take up too much space on the screen).
Five. Concentrate on one key point
If you want to make a shareable movie, concentrate on one easy-to-understand point.
Can we summarize what this movie is all about in one sentence that is lightly understood and also compelling in a way that people will want to share?
The point is if you can’t summarize it in one sentence, then it’s going to take someone longer to explain it when they’re attempting to share it.
If your movie is effortless to understand, viewers would be more likely to share it as it is effortless for them to explain what’s good about the movie when sharing it.
Rhett and Link attempt to think from their audience’s point-of-view on why they might share a movie even before writing a script for the movie. Why might your audience share your movies?
According to Jonathan Perelman, former GM of Movie & VP of Agency Strategy at BuzzFeed, there are five main reasons why people share movies:
- To be social
- To express how they are feeling about a particular topic
- To demonstrate off, or humble-brag
- To prove they were the very first ones to find something
- To make friends and colleagues laugh
Do your movies help your audience achieve any of these?
6. Upload your movies natively (via Buffer!)
Movies uploaded onto Facebook natively perform way better than links to YouTube or similar movie platforms.
(“Natively” refers to movies that have been uploaded to a network directly and played straight in a feed, versus those that are uploaded elsewhere and collective as links, e.g. YouTube movies.)
Quintly analyzed over six million Facebook posts in the period of July to December two thousand sixteen and found the following:
The interaction rate for Facebook native movies were on average 109.67% higher than for YouTube movies.
Facebook native movies had on average a 477.76% higher share rate compared to Youtube movies.
With Buffer, you can upload movies directly to your queue and post them natively on Facebook while still being able to take advantage of your optimal Buffer schedule.
7. Craft a descriptive title
Facebook recommends choosing a descriptive title that will make the movie lightly searchable.
With Facebook eyeing more than two billion searches every day, it’ll be worth to optimize your movies for search.
You can add the title when you upload your movie onto Facebook.
8. Create a Facebook-specific copy
If you have a presence on numerous social media platforms, you might sometimes want to share a movie to several platforms. A best practice is to tailor your copy for each social media platform as what works best on each platform differs.
Here’re two key characteristics of Facebook and how you can make good use of them
High character limit for posts: You can type up to 63,206 characters for a Facebook post (however Facebook will truncate your post at about four hundred characters). This gives you the plasticity to experiment with both long and brief copy. We noticed that brief copy is better for driving clicks while long copy is better for generating engagement.
High character limit for comments: It seems that you can type up for 8,000 characters for a Facebook comment. This makes it fine for inviting your audience to share longer-form thoughts about your movie.
For example, Airbnb encouraged its audience to share their beloved vacation mom story on their Mother’s Day movie. As the character limit for comments is high, Airbnb’s audience could share much more about their stories than, say, on Twitter.
- Experiment with post length
- Ask a question
- Use a list
- Add a quote from your content
- Include an emoji or two ?
If you want to learn more about each peak, feel free to check out the utter post on crafting the ideal post for each platform here.
9. Give a preview of the movie in your copy
Here’s another way to write your Facebook movie copy: Shortly describe your movie using your copy.
Taking the time to witness a movie can be a time commitment. Sometimes, it can help to provide a little information about your movie in your copy so that people can quickly determine if it’d be worth their time to witness your movie.
Facebook recommends “pulling out a key quote or moment from the movie as the text component of your post” in order to set up the expectations of what will be seen in the movie.
An informative copy about the movie, coupled with a relevant thumbnail, can be a fine formula for attracting people’s attention as they scroll through their News Feed.
Here’re a duo examples:
Ten. Add a call-to-action
Having a call-to-action (CTA) on your movie is a excellent way to encourage engagement, drive traffic to your website, and even convert viewers into customers.
It might be common to think of CTAs as buttons to a signup form or website. But CTAs can be as ordinary as a sentence calling for an act, such as “Read the utter blog post here: Link“.
While Facebook has liquidated the call-to-action functionality for movies, there are still several free ways to add a CTA to your Facebook movie.
- In your post copy, you could include a link to your blog post or website and invite viewers to find out more information by clicking on the link. You could also simply ask your audience to share their thoughts as comments.
- During the movie, you could mention a CTA if you are talking in the movie or use a text overlay (e.g. Learn more social media tips at blog.buffer.com). Wistia found that such mid-roll CTAs have the highest conversion rates.
- At the end of the movie, you could have a text overlay or a static picture with a CTA and let the movie play for a few seconds after the actual content completes.
For example, Gary Vaynerchuk likes to include his share bear in the middle or at the end of his movies.
You could also add a CTA on your Facebook post itself if you boost the movie. More on this below.
11. Tag other pages
Another feature you can use to attempt and spread your Facebook movie is tagging other Pages that either contributed to the movie or that you would like to make aware of the movie.
It is significant to keep the tagging relevant.
Here’re a few examples of “who to tag”:
- People who contributed to the movie directly – “Featuring Taylor Swift “
- People that are mentioned in the movie – “We love Harry Potter and here’s why.”
- People who inspired you to make the movie – “HT to Leo Widrich for the inspiration.”
- People who are related to the movie or that you would like to make aware of the movie – “We would like to tag Buffer to take on the challenge next.”
To tag someone on Facebook, simply type the “@” symbol before the title of the Page or person you would like to tag and a few options should emerge for you to pick.
12. Choose preferred audience for your movies
According to TechCrunch who studied the Facebook News Feed, relevance is a key factor that Facebook’s algorithm considers when ranking posts on users’ News Feed.
[Facebook’s algorithm] assigns each story a personalized relevancy score that’s different for each person that sees it, and puts the most relevant stories very first.
Here’s the good news: Facebook has a feature to help you share your movie to the most relevant audience!
Once you have uploaded your movie onto Facebook (before you publish it), there’s an option in the lower-left corner to set your preferred audience for this movie.
When you click on it, a pop-up will emerge where you can set the following:
- Preferred audience: This permits you to set the people you’d like to reach based on their interests and the Pages they’ve liked.For example, a sports retailer could choose interests such as “running” and “long distance running” for a movie on a fresh long distance running footwear.
- Audience limitations: This permits you to limit who can see your movie. Only people in audience group you’ve chosen can see your movie (anywhere on Facebook).For example, a style retailer in Singapore could set the confinements such that only female aged 25-35 in Singapore can see the movie.
By setting your preferred audience and restricting who can see your movie, your movie will be shown to the most relevant audience, who will most likely observe your movie and interact with your post (if you have set the right targeting).
13. Use insights to understand movie spectacle
Facebook provides metrics like minutes viewed, movie views, and average witness time, which can provide good insights into which movies generated the most engagement with your viewers.
You can see these metrics by clicking on any movies in the “Movies” tab of your Facebook Page Insights.
Some of the metrics I like to look at include:
- Movie Average Witness Time: The graph will showcase you the point at which the audience dropped off. Looking at that point to understand what made people stop watching might help you in creating better content.
- 10-Second Views: This is the number of people who have observed your movie for ten seconds (or to completion if your movie is less than ten seconds).
- Post Engagement: This section will tell you the reach of your movie and the engagement it has received.
14. Go live
If you want more people to observe your movies and see your Facebook posts, consider going live on Facebook.
When Facebook launched Facebook Live, it tweaked its algorithm to rank live movies more favorably as live movies kept people engaged.
As a very first step, we are making a puny update to News Feed so that Facebook Live movies are more likely to emerge higher in News Feed when those movies are actually live, compared to after they are no longer live. People spend more than 3x more time watching a Facebook Live movie on average compared to a movie that’s no longer live.
Social Media Examiner also found that the more they went live on Facebook, the more their non-live content received exposure. Michael Stelzner, CEO and founder of Social Media Examiner, hypothesized that as their brand is in front of their fans more often, the fans would go to their Page to see their content more — even if the fans don’t see the live movie.
Here’s another bonus: Facebook would automatically record your live movie and publish it on your Facebook Page or profile after the broadcast finishes.
When we previously live-streamed our marketing strategy team meeting, the movie generated more than Ten,000 views on the very first day. (We were astonished by it!)
15. Feature a movie on your Page
Facebook permits you to feature a movie in the “Movies” tab of your Page, which would auto-play. This can be a superb way to showcase your best movie to those who are interested in watching your movies.
Here’s how it looks like on our Page:
If you have not selected a featured movie, Facebook would prompt you to choose.
If you want to switch your featured movie, click on the pen icon in the upper-right corner and select “Switch Featured Movie”.
16. Boost with Facebook ads
Facebook’s in-depth data on its users makes it a fine platform for running ads to reach a larger audience with your movie.
You can use Facebook ads to promote your movies to a specified target audience. Let’s say for example that you made a movie about tables in Paris, France. Facebook will permit you to target people who have shown an interest in furniture and who live in Paris.
I’d love to demonstrate you the highlights of creating a movie ad through the Facebook Ads Manager:
Step 1: Select “Movie views” as your marketing objective.
Step Two: Set your audience, ad placements, and budget.
Step Three: Upload a movie or select one from your Page’s movie library.
A benefit of using movie ads is that you can add a call-to-action (CTA) button on the movie post. To do that, you have to tick the “Add a website URL” box and pack up the fields. The preview on the right is how the movie ad will look like.
Alternatively, you can boost any existing movie by clicking on the “Boost Post” button on your movie post.
17. Embed Facebook movies on blog posts
You can also embed your Facebook movies on your blog posts to reach more people.
To get the embed code, go to the movie you would like to embed, click on the drop-down menu in the upper-right corner of the post and select “Embed”.
Copy and paste the code where you would like the movie to show up on your website. You can select whether you want to include the copy of the post (i.e. Include total post).
Here’s an example:
More resources on movie marketing
Over to you
What has been your practice with Facebook movies?
Do you have any extra tips and tricks that may help other readers with their Facebook movie strategy?
I’d love it if you share them with me in the comments! ��
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Written by Alfred Lua
Content Crafter at Buffer. I swim, cycle, and run a lot. When I’m not doing all those, I love to read and attempt fresh things.
Awesome, actionable post—thanks, Sandrine! It’s arousing to see the bump in engagement Facebook movies can kindle. I’ve been getting a kick out of experimenting with them the past few months.
(And then Buffer announced movie scheduling—for the win! ?)
One thing I haven’t been able to find much advice/research on is the use of background music in Facebook movies. Do you have any thoughts on this?
I just launched a site that offers CC0 music specifically for small-budget projects like social media movies, so I’d love to hear any insight you might have on the topic.
Many thanks again for these tips!
Hi Logan!! Thanks for your comment! Facebook movie is something we’re indeed excited to keep experimenting with.
Good question about music. I personally either purchase royalty-free music (one of the websites I use is Pond5 – http://www.pond5.com/) or use the YouTube music library which has amazing music that you can use for free.
Would love to hear more about your site, it sounds like something indeed arousing especially for creators ��
Hey, Sandrine. Thanks for your thoughts ?
Pond5 has a superb library—lots of options. I truly like their entire “artist marketplace created by artists” positioning, too.
Since you asked (and thank you for asking!), Music for Makers—the project I just launched—offers a free alternative to sites like Pond5. Essentially, we send one original, CC0/Public Domain song each week by email at no cost.
I recently spotted a duo people describe us as the music equivalent of Unsplash/Death to the Stock Photo (which made me geek out a little).
The entire thing was truly prompted by the arousing explosion of movie on Facebook (as you wrote about above) and other social platforms. Creating—and now distributing—videos has never been lighter. But I think background music for movies is still a ache point, especially for petite/no-budget projects like brief social media movie posts.
So I commenced Music for Makers in attempts to address that problem.
If you want to check things out for yourself, you can find us at http://musicformakers.com. And if you have any other questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
P.S. I truly value what you guys do here on the Buffer blog. The content you churn out on a regular basis is always top notch and amazingly helpful. I don’t comment often, so since I am, I just dreamed to let you know.
Oh wow that’s amazing! I signed up for Music for Makers �� This is such an incredible service!! Thank you for sharing!
Ah, very cool! Thank you, Sandrine ?
Thanks for sharing these good tips Sandrine. Excellent stuff for getting began.
A big item those using movie should know is that you need to be able to get your message across with just the movie. Don’t expect to be able to get people to click a link after watching. It’s simply too much to ask of your viewers. The call-to-actions are provided but don’t do a entire lot (as far as getting people to act after viewing). In the vast majority of cases people will simply budge on after watching. It’s far far more effective to do a link post if you’re looking to drive someone someplace and the call to deeds with link posts resonate far better. This insight comes from lots of testing across a large number of campaigns including a good sized (around $100k on a smaller current campaign which included native movie as an asset) spend on paid promotion. While people are certainly down to see, getting them to act after taking the time to observe is very difficult. I’d certainly recommend considering different options other than movie if your intention is such.
On “Three. Create Content Exclusively for Facebook”, I can see arguments both for and against this. Your audiences are likely different across each of your social channels. Some people choose to go after you on just Twitter, others only on Facebook, while some may choose to go after you on all channels (likely the smallest of the group). Creating special content for just one channel means many may miss out on it on other channels. Some see it as an chance to encourage people to go after you elsewhere but I’ve found it far better to let people go after you where they choose to and consume what you have to suggest in the way best suited to them. Encouraging people to go after you on another network infrequently works either (this type of promotion generally sees dismal response even with paid promotion behind it). People on Facebook don’t want to go over to Twitter to see what you have to say, they want to see it on Facebook where they already are.
If you have the capability (time, money, etc) to provide unique content on each network that’s awesome. But why limit your awesome stuff to only one network when it can be collective across all of them?
Thanks again for sharing this Sandrine. Movie is certainly getting big and more are leaping onboard. Looking forward to your continued sharing of skill around building it into the marketing mix. ��
Hi Ben! Thank you so much for such a thorough comment!
You make a superb point about Calls To Activity. I think that while it might be hard to get people to act after watching a movie, it might still be valuable to have them for the few cases where viewers are ready to take activity. They are certainly not a must for every case. ��
For sensational content, that is very true. I think it depends on your purpose with your content and Facebook. While it might not necessarily bring more followers, it does prize the followers you already have. It might be something worth exploring.
Thank you again for sharing your thoughts, there is undoubtedly lots to think about and explore when it comes to movie ��
Sandrine, I’ve noticed this in a big way. Sweaty movie after a walk, discussing deep topics I’ve been musing on, have gotten around Two,000 views… who would have thought? But your tips here will help me refine, so thank you!
This is superb insight to have! Thank you for sharing ��
This post is right on Sandrine! Facebook native movies have had a much higher views and engagement that YouTube movies on my Pages. I think a superb way to get the most out of a movie is to upload to Facebook specifically for your Facebook audience AND YouTube/Vimeo to be collective on other social sites. This is something I think Buffer should test too. I’d love to hear how it turns out on a larger scale. Thanks for the excellent post, sharing, and have a Appreciative Thursday! ��
Thank you so much for your comment Steve and excellent insight! Have a lovely Thursday too ��
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The power of Facebook movie indeed can’t be denied at this point, particularly in the mobile space. I think it’s effortless to get caught thinking “Facebook will never surpass YouTube as a movie hub, so why bother?” when they’re actually two different animals and both can be utterly useful to any business.
Here’s a duo superb follow-up posts from Social Media Examiner with some unique ideas on how to utilize FB movie and Digital Marketer on how to create awesome FB movie ads (still VERY under utilized). http://bit.ly/1MlWLxf
Thanks Christopher! Certainly agreed that Facebook is a platform to explore when it comes to movie. ��
Mark Zuckerberg stated that she thought “going forward, use many promotional movie company of the written content that folks write about will likely be online movie media. It’s just amazingly compelling. ” The prediction has become a reality.
I understand you can’t tag pages/people in Buffer. At least not for FB….any chance you guys are working on that feature?
facebook dont permit big thumb for youtube movie so you can use http://createyoutube.com/ For creating big thumb for youtube movies which you can use it to share youtube movies without uploding it to facebook.
This is brilliant stuff .i found a nice website where you can get timelime covers which can generate your name also Thanks .
Effortless way to download facebook movie online Facebook Movie Downloader http://www.downfbvideo.com
Is there any recommendation for the amount of text surrounding the movie post? Should it be a transcript of the movie or just a brief blub and links?
What software or app do you suggest to create the movies with?