Updated March 2019
Now we all agree that posting text only on our Facebook Page is a total no-no, right?
Photo posts work much better, gaining greater reach and, critically, more engagement. However, you might be missing out on an even more powerful way to engage your audience. Video on Facebook Pages is, in fact, the way to go.
I decided to do some basic research into this and found, unsurprisingly, that the figures do indeed back up this notion. It really is ever more about video.
So what I did was check back over the last eight months of posting on six Facebook Pages to which I have access. These Pages are all from different, but consumer-oriented (B2C) sectors. Each Page is marketing to consumers, rather than business-to-business (B2B).
Now, knowing that organic reach on Facebook has been declining over the past year or two, I looked for a post on each Page that had a reach of approximately 1-in-6 (the oft-quoted figure for organic reach) of its fan base.
I allocated this random post a reach of 1.0 and proceeded to compare all the following posts’ reach to that figure. In other words, if a subsequent post reached twice as many people, it scored 2.0 and so on. Note that all boosted posts were ignored – I was only interested in the performance of organic posts. Then, I averaged out the performances of the 6 Pages, as if they were, in fact, just one single Page. Still with me on this?
Here’s how it panned out.
Baseline photo-only post : score of 1.0
Average photo-only posts : score of 1.3
Average post with video : score of 3.6
Essentially, having taken some 500 posts into consideration, video posts can be seen to have reached almost 3 times as many people as photo-only posts. Shouldn’t you be posting more videos?
Video on Facebook Pages – How To
With your smartphone, simply shoot video on it and upload it directly, without recourse to a laptop.
Indeed, these days you can even cut off the start and finish within your Gallery function, without needing an app. In this way, you can place the phone on a stand, hit the record button, walk to your desired location, do your thing, then walk back, turn the camera off and simply chop out all the tooing and froing afterwards.
However, if you’d like to brand the video, through a title, captions and credits, add music and backgrounds, cut and splice, etc, then upload your video to your laptop and create a proper end product, I’d recommend Wondershare Filmora*. It will absolutely satisfy the needs of most micro-enterprises.
And YouTube is full of video tutorials on how to use this wonderful tool.
By the way, one last thing.
Your audiences want to see you on screen, so bite your cheek and get used to being in front of the camera. Yes, you heard me!
*Last time I checked, a once-off lifetime license cost US$60.