Video has been on the rise in marketing for years. This content marketing medium will forever remain an effective way to engage and retain your audience’s attention.
If you’ve been on LinkedIn lately, the platform is hungry for video content.
The reason for using video on LinkedIn is obvious: LinkedIn’s audience consists of more than 610 million professionals worldwide, including decision-makers, senior-level managers, C-level executives, and thought leaders.
Below are five tips on how to optimize your LinkedIn posts using video.
Table of contents
Upload an SRT File for Captions
An SRT file is what provides captions at the bottom of your video, so people can consume the video content without turning on audio.
Up to 85 percent of social media videos are played without sound. That means most LinkedIn members will be watching your video as if it’s a silent film.
Source: HootSuite
Without video captions, it’s unlikely users will engage and watch with sound.
Listening with audio is optional on LinkedIn, so make sure your video starts with something that grabs attention with the captions.
Unfortunately, creating SRT files can be time-consuming.
Rev.com and Trint.com are great options for outsourcing the creation of your caption files. You can simply upload your video to these services, select the types of files you need, and someone will transcribe the captions for you.
Use Hashtags Wisely, but Sparingly
As you write, LinkedIn will auto-suggest popular hashtags based on the keywords in your post. Hashtags are important because people use them to search for topics throughout LinkedIn.
By using LinkedIn’s hashtag suggestions, you’ll increase your video’s reach and the likelihood of your content being engaged. However, you should use hashtags sparingly and direct relation to the topic of your post.
If you start using irrelevant hashtags to hi-jack a topic, you’re undercutting the likelihood of your video being engaged.
In this case, when your video gets viewed, but not engaged, the LinkedIn algorithm may perceive your content negatively and start to pull it out of the feed.
So stick to relevant hashtags to avoid hindering your efforts.
Optimize Your LinkedIn Videos
On other platforms, you can often do well with lower quality production or even user-generated content.
But LinkedIn is a different story. People expect professionalism and, to some degree, a corporate feel.
Taking a DIY approach could limit the effectiveness of the video and your brand’s reach.
Hiring a video production team for storyboarding, scriptwriting, managing the shoot, and post-editing is worth the investment.
Beyond shooting for the best quality production, optimizing your videos when uploading to LinkedIn is important, as well.
Much like optimizing your blog posts for SEO, be sure to include a clear, keyword-focused title and description when uploading your video. These are two fields LinkedIn allows for customization during the publishing process.
Upload in the Correct Aspect Ratio
LinkedIn videos are cropped to a 1:1 (square) aspect ratio in the feed, so you should get your video as close to 1:1 as possible.
- If you film a landscape video, add black padding so that your video takes up more vertical space in the news feed.
- If you film your video vertically, either crop or add padding on the left and right to avoid your video from being cropped in a strange spot.
Especially on mobile, your video appearing full size and in the correct position can be a critical factor in stopping someone as they’re scrolling down their feed.
Faces!
Just like other social media channels, LinkedIn users move fast. They’re scrolling through their feeds rapidly, looking for people or content that catches their eye.
The attention span isn’t going to be terribly long, so it’s imperative to make an impact immediately.
Include people and faces in your videos from the start. Talking head or interview videos are highly-engaged, simply because most people on LinkedIn are trying to network.
They need and want to see the people they’re connecting with.
By that token, make an effort to emphasize your personal brand any time the opportunity arises in videos. Show your face immediately and jump straight into the topic of interest to grab and keep peoples’ attention.
