How to attract your audience on social media with a video teaser

Summary

Video is the king of digital content and it’s the medium that guarantees the highest circulation and the best engagement rate on social networks, from Facebook to

TikTok. The great challenge for brands is to learn how to use this tool effectively and in new ways.

How valuable and how effective is video in the world of digital marketing?

We answered these questions extensively in a previous post, in which we dissected the data related to the effectiveness, attention-grabbing ability, engagement rate, and ROI of video marketing.

In the same post, we identified the five types of videos that we think are most interesting and decisive in developing a winning content strategy. Among them, we included teaser videos on social media. Now, however, we want to delve into this topic and give it the attention it deserves.

First, we’ll provide you with some data related to the world of social media, again with the focus on the video tool.

The power of video in the social media ecosystem

Let’s start with a broad, but necessary overview. Social media is something fairly recent, after all. Yet, today we find it virtually impossible to think of the internet without social media.

The numbers, in this regard, are very clear; let’s start with the more general ones:

• There are 2.9 billion monthly active users on Facebook worldwide, according to the most up-to-date estimates (statista.com). The largest age group is those 25 to 34, accounting for 25.7 percent of total users (statista.com)
• There are just over one billion monthly active users on Instagram (statista.com). Again, the age group most represented is the 25-34 year olds, with a 33.1% share of the total (statista.com)
• TikTok, a social network born in China in 2016 that has achieved a huge success in a very short time frame, especially among younger people. According to official data, the number of monthly active users has already reached one billion and the most represented age group is from 18 to 24 years old (cnbc.com).

It is very interesting to note that this new social network, which is spreading so rapidly and is so overwhelming, is all about producing short videos.

So, let’s narrow the focus on video in the ecosystem of social networks, starting with some data:

• More than 4 billion videos are viewed every day on Facebook alone (99firms.com).
• In 2020, 15% of all content uploaded to Facebook was video (sproutsocial.com).
• On Instagram, video content has an engagement rate that is, on average, twice as high as for all other content (searchenginejournal.com).
• Videos on social receive 48% more views than all other types of content (themarketinghelpline.com)

In short, we could go on and on, but the data is all pointing in this direction. And marketers have been noticing this for some time. Here are some statistics to support it:

• 93% of marketers say they have acquired new customers through social media video (lemonlight.com).
• 87% of video marketers say they are satisfied with the ROI of their social media video campaigns (hubspot.com).

Let’s close now with a statistic that takes us to the central theme of this post: social media teaser video.

• 73% of people want to see entertainment videos on social media (hubspot.com).

What are teaser videos? Why are they perfect for social media?

A teaser video, as the word itself implies, is content made to tease attention, to create curiosity, anticipation, even a certain sense of mystery. You can quickly see how valuable this type of tool can be on social media, where fighting for attention is one of the most complex and fundamental challenges.

So, this is an operation that precedes the actual promotion of a product or service.

There should be no overly specific information, no long explanations, and no immediate call-to-action to purchase. Often, even the name and logo of the brand do not appear immediately, but only in the final phase of the video, when the viewer is already completely involved and intrigued.

The whole thing, moreover, can only last 30 seconds…or even less.

In short: what’s important is to “throw a hook.” Make the social user stop when they stumble upon the video, and ask themselves “what’s going on?” The next thing you know, you’re thinking, “this is interesting!” This is the gimmick of tension and suspense, which is at least as old as literature and storytelling.

In addition, using teaser videos on social media has a number of other benefits for brands.

First of all, it is a type of content that very easily generates a high rate of engagement and that has the potential to go viral, quickly and spontaneously, even without exorbitant economic investments.

This is because it is not a message directly aimed at sales. It is anything but invasive. It is perceived as more disinterested, more aimed at entertainment than at business in the strict sense.

Social media teaser videos are excellent for showing the public the essence of a company, its imagery. And this is fundamental: the customer increasingly wants to feel part of a community, of a system of values and positioning that revolves around a brand… and not just a consumer who chooses a specific product or service.

Moreover, a brand that uses social media teaser videos is immediately perceived as innovative, not stuck in old logic, in step with the times.

All of this has a final, but decisive, consequence: the teaser video is a perfect tool for establishing a sense of complicity and trust between a company and its customers.

It is one of the most interesting weapons to improve one’s brand reputation (it is not by chance that it is often used in the rebranding phases), also and above all the loyalty and advocacy of the people who follow that brand.

Be careful, though: it’s certainly not enough to make quality, engaging, well-researched social media teaser videos. Nor is it enough to choose the right social platforms, with the right campaign launched at the right times and in the right ways, and with the right investments in terms of sponsorship.

All of these efforts become useless if you don’t pay close attention to the follow-up stages. And to do that, there are two key words: data and personalization.

On this key point we will close this post.

The importance of a personalized follow-up

Imagine you launched your campaign with a teaser video on social media (or even a small series of videos). Good. Now your goal is to start reaping the benefits of this action. To continue with the metaphor introduced above: you’ve cast hooks; now you need to move on to actual fishing.

To put it another way, even more concretely: it’s about understanding who has viewed your video, knowing their characteristics and their potential desires. Starting with this kind of knowledge, you can turn a viewer into a customer… and, eventually, into a satisfied and loyal customer.

But how to do this, when we’re talking about vast and non-homogeneous audiences like those on social networks?

The answer lies in the analysis and interpretation of Big Data.

This is not the place to go into technicalities that are too specific, but what is important is that – on social networks as well as throughout the web – we all continually leave digital traces of our passage, our behavior, our preferences, and our characteristics.

For brands, collecting this data means having both a snapshot of the audience and, more specifically, an overview of people’s reactions when faced with a certain operation to put on track (in our case, the release of the teaser video). It is, therefore, a matter of collecting this data. Cross-referencing and interpreting it with automated systems.

And at this point comes a decisive step: divide your audience into many segments of users who share similar characteristics and behaviors, homogeneous.

With segmentation, therefore, we no longer speak of a single, generic target, but of many micro-targets to which we can address follow-up actions as much as possible. And all this translates into a surge in the effectiveness of these actions.

But can we go even further? Yes.

And here we come to the second keyword we’ve already mentioned: personalization. A keyword that is focused on by companies specializing in personalized video marketing such as Babelee.

What’s personalization all about?

In short: it’s about going beyond segmentation to learn how to collect – always in a smart and automated way – the data of individuals in order to subsequently design follow-up actions, but also, more generally, marketing and customer service actions that are truly individual.

It’s about going from the one-size-fits-all point of view, and finally moving on to the one-to-one point of view, which is the most effective, since the beginning of commerce.

And so the circle closes; a cutting-edge tool like video teasers on social media is combined with an ancient wisdom: that of treating one’s own clients as individuals and not as numbers among many.